Gomenasai!

Gomenasai! Gomenasai!

Catherine's in real trouble with the land lady now, but I'm guessing her fans will help her clear that up. But what'll she do about that little pup? Stay tuned to find out.

You may have noticed I left her blanket texture out of this drawing, but I thought it would make it too busy and I wanted to focus on the other elements. Also, I was lazy and didn't want to try and texture the bed. It's a lot of work, and... yeah, I think it would make things look too busy when there's already so much going on.

This is the last panel of the "Call me Catherine" chapter. I meant it to be some kind of bonus panel I wanted to release mid-week, but honestly, it's also fine for this week's entry. I'm quickly hitting the end of my new content.

Learning Japanese

I'm using Duolingo to learn a little bit of Japanese, and I wanted to use a little bit in this panel. Not much. Not like full on sentences, LOL. Yes, I can read some full sentences, but nothing I'm learning would actually work for dialogue -- not yet.

Is Duolingo the best tool to learn from? I don't know. But it's the one that's easily accessible from my phone, so I use it primarily. I know folks will tell you not to do that. You should use grammar books, follow podcasters, watch youtubers, take classes.

I get it.

My Duolingo streak is 80 days. So for 80 days now I've been doing some of their little lessons. Some days more, others maybe just a lesson to quickly review something and keep my streak. It keeps me off social media. I've learned more Japanese in 80 days than I did in the last decade.

How well am I learning?

Probably not as effectively as if I were taking a class.

The way I'm treating Duolingo is as if I were learning like a child. A child doesn't know how to speak a language off the bat. They learn from their surroundings. They learn from hearing their parents talk, other people, and media. They learn and use it to communicate back in simple ways. Wrong or right, they're communicating, and that's how I'm approaching it.

By reading and somewhat analyzing the sentence structures. I'm learning a bit about the grammar this way. Definitely not enough to talk about Japanese grammar in a codified and technical way, but enough to navigate sentences and pick out the simple meaning in Duolingo's lessons.

I don't think there's a chance in hell I could write any of the kanji out right now either, but when I see it, I have a vague recognition of it and what it should sound like.

That's more than I knew 80 days ago. It's more than I knew years ago when I tried to memorize hiragana and katakana characters, and for what reason if you can't actually read with them?

At some point, I assume I'll hit critical mass and want to do more. I actually do have some books like Genki at my disposal, but my goal isn't to rush this. I'll take it as it comes and eventually arrive there.

The Status of the Comic

I'm working on an anthology entry for the Webcomic Underdogs group I'm in. That's slowed my work down on in some regards as I'm doing double duty -- panels for the current story and a one-shot for the anthology.

The entry I'm doing for the anthology is also Magical Girl Kamiko.

So, what does that mean?

I am still working on new pages, but in the meantime, I might throw up some pinups of Catherine now that she's joined the party. You may have seen them as apart of blog posts before but now they'll be official entries into the Magical Girl Kamiko story.

That's where things stand.

I'm also getting my second vaccination shot tomorrow and in two weeks from then I'll be vaccinated, which will be nice. I don't know how that will change things once we move towards the light at the end of this pandemic tunnel (if that is actually the case), but my goal is to try and update every Saturday of this year.

That's all for this week. I hope you have a great weekend, and I'll see you next Saturday!