Season ONE: Dazai Osamu, Daffodil

Day 21

May 11, 2025

Long day out and about for Mother’s Day today. Wasn’t feeling in the mood to write, nor type as much as yesterday, so I took Reiko’s general advice overnight which was to revisit the first paragraph and apply what I have been learning through my Anki practice and the radical/kanji work proposed by Sir Andy.

To add to the mix, I had an NHK Jazz show playing in the background… when the jock came on for breaks I’d listen to what she was saying. Biggest takeaway? Jazz-talk covers a lot of western vocabulary… loan words… so a great way to acquaint oneself with the sound and feel of katakana. The jazz is a bonus. Plus, radio is always best for good, clear pronunciation.

My aim in going through the first paragraph of Dazai’s was to get granular. So you’ll see in my screenshots some of the vocab I added to Midori. This is the story we use to teach our foundational program, and the first paragraph has two sentences in it; several of the kanji components and similar words are N1 words. So, this ain’t to spring party, folks. Sometimes people think the idea of reading literature lacks importance. How many of these words are new to you? Can you read this two sentence paragraph aloud? Fast? With natural intonation? In front of a crowd? Could you make sentences using these words and conjugations to talk about work? To talk about life? You bet your little booty you could. Read along. Have fun. Make a deck of your own.

See you on Monday.

Doc

Time spent: @ 1 hour
Completed Anki deck: Yep.
Start time: 9:57pm
End time: 11:12pm