chocosalt's guestbook

#3

Lunachy September 13, 2026 at 8:10:35 AM

Hope your learning goes well too, also sorry for crowding your guestbook (maybe we should switch to like discord or email if you want to continue this convo). Yeah, i think a lot of folks are picking their own little spaces to be at ease now that 90% of stuff online is just fake/AI. information overload is such an addicting drug and you constantly get bombarded with discussions you have no knowledge about yet, people sometimes pressure you to reply. i was on Twitter for like a few months tryna stay within a fandom but i still get shoved political posts every time i open my feed so i gave up on that. I 100% get the 'shut up disease'. never had a diary before but i wanted to start sharing my thoughts and have a repository for it. which is why i made a Neocities. i never realized how much my brain just wont stfu until i started writing more. I love stumbling across really obscure sites like yours. takes me back to early 2010s, coming across a translation or analysis on like Wordpress or smth about Vocaloids.

#2

Lunachy September 12, 2026 at 10:41:25 PM

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. i never actually thought about that until you pointed it out. even back when learning English, everyone around me is always taught to translate to their native language so i'm so used that kinda mindset. Granted, i never actually got faster translating from English to my own language, its more like i can fully think and absorb things through an English lens. That's probly what people strive towards if they're trying to become fluent in smth. rather than filtering through translation which takes a ton of time, it's better to speak and act like a native so you can understand the nuances of it. I'll probly stick to Anki, shadowing and reading for now to get into a jp mindset first. Also, unrelated but how did you come across bearblog? i've been seeing it on the indie web for a while and seen a few Neocities sites using it. its seems super obscure so i wonder what prompted you to make one.

Replied on: September 12, 2026 at 11:05:18 PM

Glad to help! Hope your studying goes well and that you're having fun with it. I've been on Tumblr for over a decade at this point, and I got kind of sick of social media, especially the way people read things in the worst mindset. I felt like it was encouraging a lot of unhealthy behaviors in myself, and I've done/said things I don't stand by in my past on whatever Tumblr blogs I had before. I was looking for something different, so I originally had a private Cohost, which was a social media that was Tumblr-ish but seemed like it might encourage better conversations, but then that went down. I had a friend at the time that told me about Bearblog after that. One of the main personality traits I have is "Can't shut up disease," so I really need somewhere to just word vomit. Previously it was Tumblr, but searching for things on that website can truly be a mess. So I tried Bearblog out as it looked really simple (I don't want to mess around with HTML, Neocities seems like too much work), and then I realized that markdown is far better than rich text and I don't have to spend five billion years fixing formatting that refuses to be fixed. So I'm happy with Bearblog,though I keep a few Tumblr blogs also to just put the thoughts about my interests that I don't actually think are worth saving in the long run. It also helps to just post in different places for me because sometimes I just feel like I'm super annoying lol

#1

Lunachy September 12, 2026 at 2:40:14 PM

Tysm for the translations on Seihantai. Im mulling over how they’re gonna end season 2 ahhh~ Hope you’ll translate Kuromajo as well and maybe some other stuff that interest you Has translating been helping much with your jp? Ive been studying jp for over 2 years now and i kinda wanna take a crack at translating some novels

Replied on: September 12, 2026 at 6:15:38 PM

Glad it was useful! And yeah, I'm also curious what they're doing about episode 13 as 12 is enough to end the main story. As for translating, I've actually been thinking that I should be doing less of it. Most of learning a language is actually about "input," or engaging with native materials of the target language (preferably at or just slightly above your skill level so things don't just go whooshing by). I think I might've made a mistake in turning a bunch of things into projects that requires a lot of English. (I translated other things before this blog.) Ultimately, you should do whatever interests you and keeps you engaged, but if you're translating, you're going to be reading wayyyy slower than if you had just read it and then moved on. It's probably like at least 4 times slower depending on your skill level (might even be an underestimate). That said, translation is its own unique skill that you can only get better at by continuing to do it. If you can also get some people to proofread your English, you'll also learn over time how to use structures for translation that sound less obviously like "JP terms looked up in the dictionary." So it depends what you mean by "helping" with your JP. If your goal is to just become fluent in JP, it's probably better to read 4 more novels than it is to translate 1. And just join a JP learning discord to ask questions about grammar. (Or you can do what everyone's always talking about, which is making those Anki "mining" decks.) If you really love making materials available in English for other people or find translating fun, go ahead and translate. Just remember to also engage with other JP materials that you aren't translating to expand your vocabulary and grammar. Personally, I might just wait until I've read many more Kuromajo novels before I go back to making translation summaries myself. Most of my time has been spent in the translating area, and I think I need to switch that up a bit. I've also just been reading some manga in JP that I don't comment on for this kind of input as well.