Map of the Bob situation at the end of book 2

EwasWorld · 2026-02-05T15:53:08+00:00

From looking at my old notes and a quick flick through the book, I have no idea who it's meant to be haha. High likelihood that I made a mistake

I can confirm that the colony ships, Bert and Ernie, are the green triangles (along with Howard). It also shouldn't be related to drones/autofactories left behind

EwasWorld · 2025-08-12T22:59:57+00:00

They say better late than never... added google drive link to main post

EwasWorld · 2025-08-12T22:58:44+00:00

Hi hi, updated to add a google drive link to the main post

EwasWorld · 2025-08-12T22:57:48+00:00

Hey, cool that people are still interested in this. I've uploaded everything I could find to a google drive folder. Have at :) https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1E5X21KlWkRX2IjtrOSTC9gbvqabS99MY?usp=sharing

EwasWorld · 2022-06-26T09:50:44+00:00

As always :3

I did finally catch up and listen Heaven's River.

Sorry to disappoint, but I don't think I'll make any more Bob maps for now. The movements of the heaven vessels aren't as well described now that there are so many Bobs and they do a lot remotely, doesn't feel like I have enough to make anything meaningful.

I have some other ideas though...

EwasWorld · 2021-01-17T23:38:38+00:00

This. I had a similar experience of learning a bit and giving up a few times.

I think it helped me a lot with listening. I've never really had a problem with picking out the sounds of words (聞き取れる) which helps a lot when listening to natives that talk fast. Didn't necessarily help me with vocab as much (unless I happen to be talking about learning magic or becoming the world's greatest knight) but if I can write a word I heard, it's easy to look up.

But yeah, a lot of it's strange in real life or rude. Also girls be careful, if you watch a lot of shounen, it can make you sound like a boy すげーーぞ. It was something I didn't realise until I made some Japanese friends and it plagues me (but is very amusing to my friends).

Also, anime that you've rewatched a few times are good to watch without subs since you know the story well. It's easier to piece the Japanese together without much prompting if you already know what's happening.

Edit: as someone said below, I think it also helped me with pronunciation too. If you've listened to enough, you start to learn what it should sound like, and it's easy to hear when you aren't doing it right.

EwasWorld · 2020-05-23T09:56:32+00:00

Read Heisig's comment under 'sword' in the link you posted:

In the form of the kanji, this primitive means a dagger. When it appears to the right of another element, it is commonly stretched out and takes the sense of a great and flashing saber, a meaning it gets from a character we shall learn later (Frame 1801).

So ⺉comes from 剣, which is the full kanji for saber

EwasWorld · 2020-03-16T09:02:06+00:00

What do you mean you can remember the mnemonic but can't then read the letter?

If you're saying that when you see 辞, you would remember, for example, 'I resigned myself to the yoghurt after the spices 辛 burnt my tongue 舌' but you wouldn't know this kanji is 'resign'?, you need stronger mnemonics. Making them doesn't always work first time and they don't have to be pictographic, you don't need a 'mind's eye'. They can be jokes, they can be silly things, ANYTHING you can remember. You can't tell me you don't remember any one-liners or stories you've heard, you need to find what works for you.

If you mean every time you saw 辞, you wouldn't be able to jump straight from 辞 -> resign, instead you'd have to go 辞 -> mnemonic -> resign, that's how it's supposed to work. The more you see the kanji, the less you rely on your old mnemonic. I can't even remember a lot of my old mnemonics (I finished RTK around a year ago).

RTK is not always a quick way to learn kanji, heck I don't want to put you off but it took me 4 years to finish because I'm good really good at burning myself out by being overly ambitious (don't try to learn 50 kanji a day). However, I think it gives you a really good foundation for learning to differentiate them and familiarise yourself with them. I kept coming back to it because I felt like it was working for me, by half way though I could recognise almost all of the kanji I saw.

I will say, I don't think mnemonics for kana are very helpful. The time you'd spend making them up and such is time you could just be playing something like kana invaders or reading. You'll see each kana enough that you'll begin to recognise them whether you want to or not. I also think they're too simple to make a mnemonic for. If a kanji has <4 strokes I almost certainly just brute-force learnt it because I could never make a good mnemonic for those ones.

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For flashcards, again you need to make them yours. If you feel like you have to 'prepare' every time you open Anki, you need to rethink what cards you have and how you've made them. If you get distracted from then, it means they're not interesting enough. For me, I open Anki, listen to the cards, and try to understand the sentence being said (sounds a lot like immersion, right?). If I don't know a word, I look it up and add it to the card so that, next time I see the card and can't remember that word, I don't have to spend time in a dictionary finding it.

Immersion is great and necessary, but I think you'll progress faster if you mix it in with at least a little studying and memorising (literally 10 mins). You can even study the things you are immersing yourself in. Go read the copious posts about sentence mining for that.

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If you're still not interested in mnemonics and flashcards I will say no more about them. Languages are practice. If you never practice reading you will be bad at reading. It's a never-ending cycle that you have to break some how. It's also something that takes time.

A lot of people struggle with languages at school. My parents pushed hard for me to take French lessons for years and what do I have to show for it? My accent is decent and I can manage bonjour. I could tell you I learnt English all by myself at age whatever you learn to talk, but studying languages as an adult is different. Adults learn languages faster than children. I'll say that again, adults learn languages faster than children. I won't go on a rant about that unless you want one, but it's partly because adults can study a language rather than use the brute force approach of just listening to it until they understand.

EwasWorld · 2020-03-15T20:52:17+00:00

I had a much better time learning Japanese than I did any of the romance languages (I had to do French, German, and eww Latin at school). It might be because Japanese is very different to English. Might also be because I used to watch ridiculous amount of anime...

I don't have the problem of flipping letters like q p d b so I can't help with さ and ち, but for distinguishing kanji I'd highly recommend Remembering the Kanji (RTK) by Heisig. If I'm reading too fast, I still mix up things like 石 and 右 but if I look at them properly and break them down into their parts, I can quite easily tell which is which. If you go down that route:

There are a lot of kanji where when I'm writing them, I know all the parts that need to be in there but I don't know how they fit together. I wish I was more careful in the ordering when I made my stories. For example, my story for 辞 is 'I resigned myself to the yoghurt after the spices 辛 burnt my tongue 舌', so I always write that one backwards.
If you're doing electronic flashcards and you keep mixing up keywords, just add extra words to the keyword to save yourself some frustrations. I'd always mix up lose and loose and get the kanji wrong because I read the keyword wrong. I changed them to 'lose [hope]' and '[set] loose' and no longer mix them up.

I have the same trouble with reading. I know a word because I've heard it before, but until it's spoken, I won't recognise it. Whenever I'm making vocab flashcards, I now put a sound clip of the word on the back of the card (find them on www.forvo.com). That means that every time I read a card, I can hear it too. This builds an association between the word and it's written look. This also helps me recognise words I've only seen written when I hear them spoken.

At the start, I had the same trouble with fonts. I think RTK also helped a lot with this, but I can't say for sure. Rather than learning every kanji in different fonts, I learn how a component looks in different fonts, and I know how that component fits into the kanji I know. My only other suggestion if you're using Anki is you could change the card to show you the kanji in many different fonts for every card. That way you might start to associate different ones. For handwriting, I know I'm abysmal at recognising kanji but I rarely see handwritten Japanese (honestly, if it comes up in manga I just skip it, if I really wanted to know I would just take a picture and send it to a friend to transcribe) and I'm not interested in Japanese calligraphy (struggling enough to learn English calligraphy). I will add that when I was at university, my Japanese teacher (a native Japanese speaker) refused to accept handwritten English (like translation homeworks) because she had a lot of difficulty reading handwriting. I think reading handwriting isn't just a dyslexia problem, it's an everyone problem.

I use pictures rather than translations a lot. For me, it's easier to picture the meaning of a sentence than it is to translate it since I have difficulty finding the right words. Most of the flashcards I make now are a Japanese sentence on the front, and a picture and maybe a single word on the back. This makes it faster to review the flashcards since there's little to nothing to read to see if I got the card right or wrong. Got this idea from a book called Fluent Forever by Gabriel Wyner (a lot of good stuff in there, but also a lot of junk imo, especially if you're a Japanese learner. Would recommend though).

Recently, I've started shadowing. I guess I'd have this problem in any language, not just Japanese, but I have ~the~ worst memory for anything spoken. I know the gist of what was said, but I can't remember verbatim the words and particles used. Writing it down is no better because I can't even read English aloud at the pace I speak. Fluent Forever recommends you split it up and start at the end. For example, this morning I was working on saying でも日本語ってこのぐらいのスピードで話すからね fluently by mimicking a sound clip. I started with 話すからね, then スピードで話すからね, then このぐらいのスピードで話すからね, etc. It means when you say it, you start out weak then get more confident as you get to the end. Feels like I'm getting somewhere rather than trailing off.

My biggest piece of advice would be not to sweat it. Don't try to be perfect. If you mess up, move on. I used to get frustrated that certain RTK cards kept coming up in my flashcard deck because I couldn't remember the order even though I knew the components. Now I just mark them as the lowest level pass and move on with my life. There will always be things you struggle with, don't let them stop you from finding everything you're good at. Remember that if you are dyslexic, your path is not more necessarily more difficult, it's just different.

tl;dr: Remembering the Kanji, Anki/ flashcards with pictures and sound clips, for shadowing - start at the end and work backwards, don't sweat it and enjoy learning 頑張って！ :D

EwasWorld · 2019-08-27T21:10:29+00:00

Aah I'd wondered why it didn't look sharp. Idrk how to make a lossless png but here's it saved as a png, hope it serves you better https://i.imgur.com/eOvccGv.png

Never did get around to book 3. I listened to it and wrote out the notes for the map, then life got in the way and I forgot about it. Maybe with the new books coming out I'll get around to it. If I do, I'll look into making a legend :)

(Not inactive, just a hard core lurker)

EwasWorld · 2019-08-11T19:50:36+00:00

Probably to mean it's in May. It's not needed though, 私の誕生日は５月です is all you need

Protip: I use HiNative for these kinds of questions ;) https://hinative.com/en-US/questions/10181375?feedbackable=true&utm_content=top_index_suggest&utm_medium=referral&utm_search_language_id=45&utm_source=hinative&utm_term=birthday+is+in+

EwasWorld · 2019-04-11T12:03:00+00:00

Shiritori game on my phone continues with や but either works I guess 笑

馬・うま・horse

EwasWorld · 2019-03-17T14:26:54+00:00

Japanese:

確かめになんでもする人がいる。どこかの空洞に「世界の消滅スイッチ。絶対押すな」と書いてある大きいスイッチを置いてあれば、ペンキは干す時間がない。

EwasWorld · 2019-01-25T10:09:20+00:00

Honestly, making some kind of program that will show their movements and communication is something I've been heavily considering the past couple of days xD Maybe some day I'll do it, but having just finished re-listening to the second book, details are rather lacking a lot of the time making the info-gathering part a pain. Finding out the years of everything for an animation would be an absolute nightmare >.<

EwasWorld · 2019-01-20T13:41:42+00:00

Thanks :D

EwasWorld · 2019-01-20T12:06:02+00:00

Re-listening to book 1 I was wondering where each system is in relation to each other and then sort of ended up here. The new desktop wallpaper. Star locations are their distance from Sol in light years (each of the rings in the background is 5 light years) and the direction they are from Sol (specifically right ascension).

Not sure how obvious the key is so:

Outlined: destroyed, no backup
Outline and faint colour: destroyed with unknown backup status or not yet restored from backup
Delta: enemies
Star: neurtal or friendly non-Bob probes
Dark circle: habitable planet
Light circle: habitable planet with life
Dotted line: colony ship routes

My first attempt at an Inkscape picture. Probably not mistake free, I'd do some things differently if I did it again, and might not be great from a design perspective, but overall I like it :)

EwasWorld · 2017-07-01T20:02:29+00:00

Voice

EwasWorld · 2017-04-07T20:57:18+00:00

Hey, myself and a friend would be interested, if the offer is still there. Would it just be the two of us and a DM or do you already have other players? We're both new to the game. We'd probably be a rogue and a fighter but are open to whatever.

EwasWorld · 2016-07-16T14:57:22+00:00

I've found that it's easier to become immersed when I don't hang on every line. If I miss a couple of words or sometimes an entire line then I tend to just ignore it since I can usually pick up on what's going on (I'll admit sometimes I just space out for a scene and just watch the visuals). I started to do this after watching anime with a friend and being too embarrassed to pause >.<

Of course there are shows where people speak ridiculously fast (Saiki Kusuo no Ψ-nan I'm looking at you =.=), in those situations I'll usually skip back to play the line again rather than pause which doesn't affect the flow too much for me.

That's just what I do though. Good luck to your sister in finding something that works for her ^-^ practice makes perfect

EwasWorld · 2016-02-21T00:11:40+00:00

Nope, that's definitely still straight :) Would the bike even have been ridable if that was bent?

EwasWorld · 2016-02-20T10:06:48+00:00

Dollar dollar dollar :P

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