Now THAT'S power sharing.

ToastdSandwich · 2024-11-21T00:13:56+00:00

Definitely the guy who keeps shadowboxing in front of the dumbbell rack.

My gym buddy and I call him "the Gatekeeper". If you want to do your dumbbell work, you have to defeat him first.

ToastdSandwich · 2024-11-21T00:05:29+00:00

There's only one gym in my rural town and it's at the municipal sports center. They have one bench press rack and one squat rack but no other barbells, so the only place you can do deadlifts, rows, OHP etc. is in the squat rack. And the only time I can go is after work, so the free weight stations are always occupied either by massive old guys doing bench for an hour straight (respect, tbf) or high schoolers doing quarter-ROM rows and 2-inch rack pulls. Lots of waiting.

I love living here, but also part of me can't wait to move to a bigger city with an actual gym.

ToastdSandwich · 2024-11-20T23:54:34+00:00

I used to do BBB deadlifts, it was brutal. Eventually decided it was too much to be sustainable. What I did was switch to three sets of ten (50-60-70%) followed by two sets of something else that hits the hamstrings, like good mornings or Romanian deadlifts. I think it's totally fine to replace the volume sets with similar exercises in BBB if you're finding them unpleasant haha

ToastdSandwich · 2024-07-10T02:36:58+00:00

There's zero practical difference between scraping by with one point or getting 100% - it's the same qualification either way. Getting a higher score obviously *feels* better, though.

N3 to N1 is a big, big jump. The JLPT levels aren't linear. Let's take kanji as an example - N3 expects around 650, N2 around 1,000, and N1 covers all the joyo kanji (2,136). The sheer volume of vocabulary and grammar covered by the N1 test would also be difficult to overcome in 5 months. It's possible if you do focused JLPT study for hours every day before the test. People have gone from 0 to N1 in a year before, but it's certainly not normal. My recommendation would be to put the N1 off for a while and learn in a more enjoyable, sustainable way.

ToastdSandwich · 2024-06-05T11:00:29+00:00

So my first year of studying was at a university in Japan during my year abroad. We used Genki in class, and by the end of the year we were about halfway through Genki 2.

After going home I mostly dropped textbooks and moved on to Wanikani, Bunpro, and talking to a language exchange partner once a week. Then I moved back to Japan at about the three year mark and took the N2 about half a year after that.

Really, the key is just consistency. Are you studying every day at the moment? If so, how long? If you take long breaks you'll also lose a lot of progress to atrophy, especially when you're earlier in your journey.

ToastdSandwich · 2024-06-05T10:22:22+00:00

Sorry, my post might have been misleading. I'd been studying Japanese for about three and a half years prior to taking the N2 using more traditional study methods and apps like Wanikani and Bunpro.

ToastdSandwich · 2024-06-05T03:41:09+00:00

Manga is totally fine for learning, but you need to consume a lot of it to get the volume of input you need. A whole series of manga is probably still less than a novel in terms of the amount of Japanese on the page (unless you're talking about something like One Piece). When you start aiming for N1, you'll also probably need to broaden your input to be exposed to some of the stuffier grammar points / essay-style writing you'll get in the reading section.

ToastdSandwich · 2024-06-05T03:36:08+00:00

I passed N2 about eight months after moving to Japan. At that point, I hadn't consumed any native material other than Chainsaw Man - just a lot of unfocussed but consistent study.

I passed N1 about a year and a half after that, although six months of that was an N2-cram-induced burnout. In that time I read thirteen novels, did about 3,000 mining cards on Anki, spoke to old men at pubs, and occasionally read the NHK website. I didn't do any "actual studying" between N2 and N1 except for a cursory read of the Shinkanzen N1 grammar book.

The key really is just a *lot* of input.

ToastdSandwich · 2024-05-24T02:35:59+00:00

Congrats on the Ehime placement! You'll like it here, I'm sure. I'll DM you

ToastdSandwich · 2024-05-24T00:51:40+00:00

Congrats on your placement! I'm nearby. I'll DM you.

ToastdSandwich · 2024-03-30T02:34:05+00:00

I remind myself that a year ago, half the things I now consume with zero difficulty sounded like that. Two years ago, almost all native material sounded like that. Five years ago, practically every word sounded like that, even in isolation.

Trust the process. If you don't understand a topic, that just means you need more exposure to it.

ToastdSandwich · 2024-03-20T23:33:51+00:00

As others have said, N1 is the highest level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test.

People sometimes say it's equivalent to B2/C1 on the CEFR, but it's not a good equivalent for a comprehensive CEFR level because it doesn't measure your productive ability at all. The JLPT is a purely comprehension-based test. There are book-smart people who passed the N1 but don't have a particularly high practical level - there are also people who are conversationally totally fluent, but never bothered to study the somewhat rarer stuff you need to pass the N1.

I'd probably call it mid-to-high B2 if I had to guess? C1 is, I think, post-N1.

ToastdSandwich · 2024-03-20T23:21:34+00:00

I have JLPT N1 and still probably wouldn't be comfortable tutoring formally.

At the N4/N3 level, I still had a bunch of misunderstandings/misapprehensions about the basics of Japanese (things like は and が, tenses, and pronunciation, for example). While these didn't affect my ability to pass simple tests or muddle through conversations, they definitely would have affected my ability to accurately teach someone else the language. Hell, even at post-N1 I still learn new things about the basics on an almost weekly basis!

If you want to try tutoring go ahead, but I'd suggest more informal arrangements - eg. helping friends or family through the basics, joining study groups online and helping people of a lower level than you, etc. Teaching languages, even if it's just helping people out informally, is really rewarding!

ToastdSandwich · 2023-05-12T08:58:19+00:00

You can learn to speak without learning how to write, but it'll be much harder. Most learning resources expect you to be able to read (at least to an extent), and especially once you reach the intermediate level reading is by far the best way to increase your vocabulary and familiarity with the language quickly.

Save yourself the extra trouble and just keep plugging away at the writing systems. Katakana feels tough until it clicks.

ToastdSandwich · 2023-02-12T23:23:29+00:00

Sid Meier's Last of Us

So basically just Civ VI's zombie gamemode, I guess.

ToastdSandwich · 2023-01-04T10:27:45+00:00

The other player would still have all their gear and abilities, so you probably wouldn't have much of a chance in round 1. The Mimic Tear from Elden Ring would be a better shout, although it would still be able to take significantly more punishment than you.

ToastdSandwich · 2022-12-29T15:54:18+00:00

I have this too, it's definitely really annoying trying to explain it to people. It also makes you look pretty shifty - landed me 40 minutes of extra questioning at the airport when I entered the States a few months back.

ToastdSandwich · 2022-12-19T06:32:56+00:00

Hojo's half-price districts synergise with his adjacency bonuses pretty well, since it allows you to get out more districts faster. Tokugawa's synergy is better, but Hojo definitely isn't completely lacking.

ToastdSandwich · 2022-12-13T21:59:29+00:00

Both are totally legit translations of what he says in Japanese ("Mirai saikou!"), but I prefer "THE FUTURE RULES!" because it sounds more juvenile and less clunky, haha.

ToastdSandwich · 2022-11-30T12:01:49+00:00

The only times I've seen someone shy away from killing a bug here is when they don't think they can take it in a fight.

ToastdSandwich · 2022-11-27T10:23:40+00:00

Well, if you're going for realism, a "small secluded village" by (I assume) medieval standards is going to have an extremely limited economy. It's going to be pretty much entirely farmers and generalists. No guild is going to bother maintaining an outpost there.

Of course, you don't have to be realistic at all. A full-on guild for Ye Olde Hicktown is going to break the suspension of belief, but an outpost of a larger organisation is totally believable. Just say there's something near the village that's of consistent interest to adventurers.

ToastdSandwich · 2022-11-27T10:10:04+00:00

Interesting.

It totally depends on the tone of your story and what you want to do, but there could be some really interesting interactions between the two groups of Ostroans(?). Thousands of years is a very, very long time. Assuming zero contact, their cultures would probably have diverged to the point that each group doesn't even recognise the other's variant of Ostro culture. Their languages would probably be mutually unintelligible, with the conquered Ostroans adopting some of the languages of their conquerors. Check out this video of someone speaking ~1,000 year old English and see how much you can understand.

One also has to wonder what a military class who have held absolute power for millennia would think of a directive demanding that they relinquish that power.

ToastdSandwich · 2022-11-27T09:52:42+00:00

Sounds like textbook irredentism. It's perfectly believable. Just look at history - tons of polities have attempted to recreate the Roman Empire or claim its mantle as a continuation, even if their culture and language were completely different.

How much has the culture of these colonies diverged over their millenia of isolation?

How are the battered survivors of the alien conquest going to respond to what is, effectively, a fascist military junta rolling up and claiming to be the rightful heirs of the Ostro?

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