Yuri Hunter

Introduction:
 
When it comes to reading VN's in Japanese, required skills can be grouped into four areas: Vocab, grammar, basic parsing skill, and kanji skill. In this post, for each area I'm going to explain:
-what knowing skills in the area are good for
-how you might study them
-how much you'll need to start reading.
I'll also give some related tips.
 
The requirements mentioned below are a conservative estimate. I've known people who've jumped in to playing VN's with less or much less, but I'm giving a safe estimate. A level which at most people, without any special knack for learning languages through immersion, should be able to gain traction. If you learn this much before starting an easyish VN, the amount you are completely lost should be significantly less than the percentage you are able to pick up and improve from.
 
This is not a comprehensive how-to guide by any means. Just an informative post.
 
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1. Vocab
 
Knowing enough vocab to study your grammar resource without being bogged down by vocab:
-About 30 verbs and 50 other words for Genki 1/ Tae kim Basic.
-By the time you get to Genki 2/Tae Kim Essential you'll want a good set of verbs (about 100), and maybe about 300 total vocabulary.
-~600 words about how much you'll want to be able to study N3 grammar without getting bogged down in vocab.
 
Having enough vocab to start your first VN:
-I recommend over 1000, but anywhere from 800-1300 is good. I remember trying Clannad with only 800, and I felt like ramming my head into a wall. It's also important to pick an easy title. It will still feel hard no matter what, but an easy title will be much more helpful and rewarding to play. You also must just translation aggregator and ITH. They are the reason why Visual Novels are the best medium for learning Japanese out of anime/books/movies/drama/etc.
 
Vocab Lists:
There's a dedicated verb list here: http://nihongoichiban.com/2012/08/13/list-of-all-verbs-for-the-jlpt-n4/
Verbs are helpful to learn, because they are often the most important part of the sentence AND you need to to have stuff to conjugate.
In general JLPT-based vocab list is here: http://www.tanos.co.uk/jlpt/jlpt5/vocab/
 
Regarding English definitions:
Be mentally open and flexible. If the english definition doesn't quite add up, don't try and think about it too hard. Focus instead on associating the word with the situations where you see it.
For example, you might be confused by the word 都合 and it's unhelpful definition J-E definition, but if you seen 都合がいい used in a situation where you know it means "is convenient for me" from context then remember that occurence. There might be (there are, in fact), other usages of the word 都合, but that doesn't hurt you in anyway. The next time you see 都合 you can pair it against this meaning and see if that makes any sense.
 
2. Grammar Skills
 
With N5+N4 grammar you will be barely able to start making your way through a VN. Without N4, you will have quite limited gains in the long term from reading visual novels. (Equivalent to Genki 1+2.)
-Required to be able to play VN's
 
With N3 grammar, everything will feel a lot clearer, the amount of grammar you'll understand will exceed 60%. (Equiv. to Intermediate approach to Integrated Japanese). Highly recommended to study this before or soon after you start your first VN.
 
N2 grammar further cuts the amount of unknown grammar you face in three.
 
N1 is kind of like a bonus that gives you a lot of uncommon or formal expressions. It's NOT comprehensive at all, in terms of covered all Japanese phrases. From my experience, some of the phrases you learn in here show up often in novels (ばかり、んばかり), others quite less. Good to know, though
 
Expressions not covered in JLPT
There are a lot of patterns and phrases not covered in JLPT that you will see in typical native reading material. Examples (社長に議長, phrases like なんだと！？ Xってなんだ？　ですって！？　～てくれないかな。 オレって、なんてバカなんだ ) Not to worry, many of them can be picked up as you go. For the rest, once you get settled into reading, you can start noting down those phrases you don't get and google them or ask other people.
 
Imabi for grammar
You can also try studying from http://www.imabi.net/. It's a phenomenal reference, it's just goes into tons of depth, too much. I think there's 2 or 3 times as much information there is covered by JLPT up to JLPT 1. As such it's going to be overwhelming for a beginner and is much better suited as a reference for intermediate or advanced learners.
 
3. Basic Parsing Skill
 
Knowing the different types of words (Covered by doing a vocab list of about 100 verbs, and then the JLPT 5 list. You also have to have done or be doing Tae Kim's Basic Guide, since he explains what na-adj's, i-adj's, and other word types are, etc.).
-(nouns, suru-verbs/nouns, verbs, na-adj's, i-adj's, adverbs, temporal adverbs)
-Required to be able to play VN's.
 
Knowing the basic sentence structure and how words can modify each other and fit in a sentence.: (adjectives modifying nouns, verbs).
The knowledge is covered by Tae Kim Basic + a mix of Essential Grammar and Genki 1/2. I personally find Tae Kim's explanation good even though the learning curve is steep and his lessons aren't good for review like Genki books are. He tries to convey to you the big picture.
-Required to be able to play VN's.
 
Being able to breakdown sentences and spot the different types of words based on their position.
-you can practice this by reading bits of text in your genki textbook, but more likely, the first time you really gain this skill is going to be the first month in which you read a visual novel with TA. Heavily practiced during your first month or two of reading VN's.
 
4. Kanji Skill:
 
Learning to spots radicals in kanji (could be covered by doing the 214 radicals, about 1 month. You could also do this ongoing basis, learning how to spot the radicals that make up a kanji, for the words you learn.)
-not needed to read VN's with TL aggregator, but extremely helpful for learning new words which have new kanji.
 
Learning to remember kanji, ie. start recognizing when words share the same kanji. (it is a long ongoing gradual process. You can start doing this with the vocab you learn once you are comfortable learning vocab. You can also pick out words you see in vn's and check whether they use the same kanji by typing them out (example 朝（あさ）　and　朝食（ちょうしょく）　use the same kanji.). Oh course, to be able to easily produce the kanji you want to compare you need to remember how to spell a word that contains it (in this case 朝). So, as your vocab expands, you'll be able to compare more kanji. Note that to be able to do this comparing you must be able to spot radicals in kanji (previous level skill).
-moderately helpful for learning vocabs. The same way remembering radicals helps learning with kanji: if you know the kanji clearly, you can remember a word just by the two kanji it uses, which is very precise and doesn't take a lot of mental bandwidth. It also means that you will much more rarely confuse words which have similiar looking kanji.
 
The following two skills are for more advanced, they won't be particularly useful until much later. You might not notice the problems they solve until later as well. I include them mainly for completeness.
Learning on-yomi for many of the Jyouyou kanji (start when you are intermediate-advanced, a medium-long process)
-helpful for exactly what it is, reading kanji words and compounds correctly.
-don't need to worry about this. From learning vocab you might pick up some of the common ones, but there's no need to pursue this actively for a while.
 
Learning kanji meaning: (start when you are advanced, and can use a J-J dictionary)
-suffixes like 府、省、性、症, as well normal kanji whose different meanings apply to clusters of words.
-helpful for kanji compounds which won't directly show up in dictionaries
-helpful for developing a native level understanding of vocabulary (not everything can be learned by exposure). A lot of literary words are fairly influenced by their kanji meanings, though sometimes consulting the word differentiation explanations can be more helpful.
 
 
 
One last topic...
 
On learning enough grammar and jumping into works too difficult for you.
Reading a VN isn't the best way to learn basic sentence structure. However, it's a great way to reinforce grammar points you've learned. It's also a great way to get an understanding of conversational patterns you won't find in textbooks or JLPT. But you won't have the presence of mind to pay attention to that if you are bogged down by not knowing basic grammar.
There are benefits for venturing early into native material or difficult vn's, but you wouldn't give a grade two student Tolkien, or even Harry Potter to improve their English. All the fancy prose and unusual concept would distract you from the more immediately useful things like, say: basic sentence structure.
There are works which are the right level, and there are VN's which you really want to read. For the best experience, it's best to find some combination of the two.
 
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Ok that's all for now. Feel free to ask any questions: I didn't really go into the details of how to study, instead focusing on the, well, skills involved. But it's also hard to remember what it's like for someone just starting out. I remember parts of studying very clearly, but I forget the thousands of things I used to be puzzled through varying stages of understanding but now take for granted.
The process was all I could think about for the longest time. Now I don't give it much thought, it's just a regular part of my life, reading and a bit of studying. It's not bad idea, to just find a type of study that you know is helpful, stop thinking about all the right ways and wrong ways and magic tricks which don't exist, and just do it, for a while. Regularly. For a month or three.

In honour of this being the 25th Moeblog post, I've written a little poem. Ahem...

There once was a man named Moe
He had a lot of moe
So he posted the moe
Something-something the moe
Moe moe moe moe moe moe moe

Project Intruduction

We have decided to start a translation project for this VN because the chances of it getting an official translation are close to zero and we know that many people are interested in it. It has over 80000 lines so it is a bit big for a first project but we are confident that we can do it.

Current situation

We already have the first ~500 lines translated but they still need editing. For a detailed status overview, please visit our website and check this thread.
There are currently 2 translators and 1 editor working on this project, but due to the amount of work to do we could really need a few more.

What we are looking for

Translators:
Preferably people with good Japanese AND English skills to minimize the editing work. But even if none of the languages are your native one you are still welcome to join us, we can use any help that we get.

Editors:
People who speak English as native language and also have experience with Visual Novels. You will need to correct grammar and spelling mistakes and also make the conversation flow better by re-writing too literal translations to sound more natural (without changing the meaning of course).

Translation Checkers:
Responsible for finding and correcting content-related errors in the translation.


If you want to apply for any of these positions, please send me a message.

Moonstone is not an unfamiliar name for visual novel players. Everyone should know about them by now, with all of those successes they got from Imouto Paradise - the heaven for siscon, Princess Evangile - the popular title which English version was just released months ago, and Gi--nah, who cares about that thing. And, at the end of this month, on June 26th, Moonstone Honey - their newest branch company, will release their debut title - Ojousama to Himitsu no Otome. Of course, I'm really interested curious about this title, for an obvious reason that I will talk about later. Now, toward the game we go!





SYNOPSIS

The first game by the new label Moonstone Honey will center around Yuuri Shinohara, a crossdressing yet kind boy who is attending an all-girls school. Since he’s the future heir of a famous fashion brand for women’s clothing he is expected to know a lot about the subject. But he’s actually weak around women and doesn’t really understand them, making it impossible for him to inherit the fashion brand.

And so his family suggested (read: forced) him to attend a high class all-girls school, called Magnolia Academy. But even though he tried to live a quiet school life, for some reason several girls tend to gather around him…

CHARACTER

1. Shinohara Yuuri

Protagonist. A shy boy that was forced into an all-girls school against his will. Same as every trap protagonist ever, he really disliked the idea of cross-dressing at first, but gradually "understand the joy of being a girl".

2. Himekouji Haruka







"Ahaha, arigatou."


Yuuri's next-seated classmate, and his first friend at school. A friendly and energetic girl who seems to be pretty popular among the students.

3. Kamimori Airi







"Don't be so tense like that. We are going to live under the same roof from now on after all."


The friendly and somewhat playful dorm-leader, in charge of 2nd year students. She has never interacted with boys before and really want to know the feeling of talking, kissing and doing ecchi things with them. Yup, that's what she said.

4. Shirayuki Yumina







"Yes...I will try my best...to stop crying..."


Yuuri's 1st year kouhai. An extremely shy girl, with the way-too-soft voice that seem to have a lot of love respect toward Yuuri. She is a crybaby and pretty clumsy. Despite that, she is still very popular at school, although she herself knows nothing about that.

5. Saionji Saya







"It's fine, just do as I say. Got it?"


A genius 3rd year student, who rarely come to class but still manage to stay on top of the school. She is respected by every students and even teachers. When she is in good mood, she loves to drink tea in the courtyard.

STORY

The game started, as Shinohara Yuuri - in a girl's school uniform - after talking with the school guard, stepped his first step into his new school - Magnolia Girl Academy. While walking toward the staff room, he started thinking about what led him into this situation...

10 days ago. A sudden phone call from his mother totally wrecked his life. He was told to transfer to the new school - Magnolia Girl Academy - to cure his shyness toward girl (since he wouldn't be able to inherit his mother's fashion company like this), and also "get a girlfriend" why he was at it. He was hesitated at first, but decided to just yolo, for himself, and for the future of the company.
However, there was one problem remain: how could he get into an all-girls school? Of course, this was when his older sister Akira - a pro in makeup - came in! After a short while, she successfully transformed Yuuri into a super cute girl, making him almost fell for himself!






".....Eeeeeh!?"


...And that's what happened.

Done with the transfer procedure, he headed toward his class. After the awkward introduction, he went to his seat, and the next-seated girl - Himekouji Haruka - right away started a conversation with him. Having his shyness in the way, he had a hard time talking with her, especially when she "aggressively" invited him for lunch, then guiding him around school hand-in-hand after school. It's fine, right? It's absolutely normal for two girls to walk around school while holding hand, right!?

Evening. Just when he was about to go to sleep, he heard a knock on the door. After some commotions due to him being in the middle of changing clothes, the girl walked in, introducing herself. She was Kamimori Airi - the dorm's leader. She simply just wanted to check out the newest member of the dorm, and tell him about the dorm's cleaning up duty, which unfortunately fell right onto his room this week. They talked for a bit, then called it a night.

Next day, after school. While walking along the hallway, suddenly, Yuuri heard a crashing sound, and a girl's scream. He then hurried to where the sound came from...







"Uwaa...I'm soaked~..."


There, he found a little girl, soaked in water, with an empty bucket lying on the floor. As he tried to help her, she stared at him with a weirdly red face while murmuring "So beautiful...". She then panickingly ran off, after learned his name.

That evening, she came to his room. She introduced herself as Shirayuki Yumina - a first year student - and wanted to thank him about earlier - while keeping coughing all the time. Just as Yuuri tried to ask about her health condition, she panicked again and ran back to her room. However, it's not Yumina, but Yuuri himself that he should be worried about, as he ended up getting the cold from Yumina and stuck on his bed for the next day.

Evening, Yumina visited him. After apologizing for a while, she offered to help him with wiping his body. Despite worrying about his disguise, he couldn't fight back against her teary eyes, and accepted her offer. And the yuri night began.







"I don't know why, but my face became hot when I wiped your back..."


Later in the night, Haruka and Airi also visited him, and thus, meeting Yumina and having a short chat with her before everyone went back to their own rooms.

Next day, he completely recovered, and was invited by Airi to take a bath together after cleaning up the dorm. And once again, he failed to deny the invitation. They talked about a lot of lewd things, and surprisingly, his disguise somehow stayed undiscovered.

Weekend. Coming back from home after reported his status to his older sister, Yuuri spotted a strange girl drinking tea in the courtyard under the moonlight. He joined after her invitation, and learned that she was Saionji Saya - a 3rd year student.

Lunch time next day, he talked with Haruka, Airi and Yumina about Saya, as he just had another tea time with her in the morning. Spotting Saya in the crowd, he invited her to have lunch together with the group. During the meal, the group told him about one of the unique tradition of the school - Engage - where 2 students exchange their rings and become a couple.







"Ehem...In Magnolia, there is a tradition called Engage."


He thought to himself: In the future, maybe I will also be joining this event as well? However, is it fine for a boy like me, to "engage" with a girl in a normally girl-to-girl event like this?
The End (of the trial).
.
.
.
.
Wow. Nice work Moonstone Honey. You did a really good job on copying almost everything from Princess Evangile. The same "boy-in-ojousama-only-school" setting, the same "onee-sama" system, the same exchanging item (changed from rosary to ring) system, and they even have an event called "Best Engage", which is pretty much "Chants de Noel" in Princess Evangile. The character design is also a big copycat, which Haruka is pretty much Rise's clone, with almost same appearance and personality. Seriously, Moonstone Honey? This is your debut title, can't you at least make something a bit unique by yourself? You think that people won't notice the similarities between your game and the game that you were promoting all over twitter 3 months ago? Too naive.

Let's talk about the story. Different from Princess Evangile, this game seems to be a H-based moege. The trial is pretty short, so I may be wrong, but I just couldn't smell any kind of drama from the game. Along with heroines's personality, chances are you will be filled with nothing but ichaicha for the rest of the game. I mean, I couldn't even be able to find any SFW CG for Airi, both in the trial and on their main page. And she clearly wanted the D, right off the bat. Yumina also seems to be unknowingly on heat every time she speaks with Yuuri. Geh.

Btw, it's just my impression, but the story in the trial just feels a bit disconnected somehow...

GRAPHIC

They brought the damn skirt design from Princess Evangile, changed the color and threw it in here.
They brought the damn Rise's character desi---Oh, I did talk about this earlier, right?
They unnecessary sexualized Yumina and Haruka's pajamas. I don't know that much about girl's clothes, but I'm sure that's not how they work! I mean, look at them! Look at Yumina's pant!







"I'm coming in. Hmm? If I'm not wrong, you are..."


That said, the art is still nice in general though.

MUSIC

Unnecessary usage of sad music when Yuuri got a cold. Come on guys, it's just a common cold! Do you really need to insert the music that sounds like he just found out about his testicular cancer like that?
Other than that, the BGM is fine. Or should I say, normal, not good not bad.

VOICE

I have nothing to complain about character's voices, though I do think that Yumina's voice is a bit too soft, making her sound a bit...weird.

CONCLUSION

Princess Evangile was a big success for Moonstone, but Ojousama to Himitsu no Otome - or should I say, "Princess Evangile 2" was a big mistake for Moonstone Honey. Normally, this game should be able to get away as a decent fap material. However, under the big shadow of Princess Evangile, I don't think this game will have a chance to see the light of the day.

Temporary Score
Story: 2/10
Character: 6/10
Graphic: 6/10
Music: 5/10
Voice: 9/10
Overall: 5,5/10








My previous review:
Sakura Fantasy Chapter 1

Introduction


This is probably a fucking terrible idea but I felt like making a blog to talk/rant/cry/be dumb about stuff. I'll try to be serious about mostly everything I say here, but I doubt I'll manage to not end up lightly flaming or saying bullshit sometimes, sorry in advance about that. T_T

I'll use this post to talk about my trip to Japan as well since blogging two lines would be hella lame.





Japan


Alright, where should I start? Well, my nationality might be Brazilian but my ethnicity is Japanese, so I always had a bit of interest on Japan. I lived there when I was a baby but that doesn't counts anyway. I went there with my grandparents, younger brother and fucking four cousins - two of them stayed with their parents there though -, just imagine the disaster the whole thing was. Getting everyone ready on the airport was hell, the airplane was hell, getting our luggage was hell, bathroom breaks were hell, the whole thing was basically hell if you didn't got it yet. I don't really talk to any of them aside from one of the cousins, which is the closest to a regular family interaction that I have. I call him Mini-Bitch because of reasons and that's how I'll be referring to him through the post.

When we actually landed in Japan and got out of the plane, holy moly what a cold place. We went straight for my aunt's house where we all would stay for the whole trip and got received with a really nice dinner, assorted traditional foods on the table and some fucking delicious apple juice on the fridge. No, seriously, that juice is worse than drugs, Mini-Bitch and I bought it wherever we found it, that shit is fucking dangerous lmfao.

Food was delicious, seriously, the meals felt solid but never really too much that you'd feel heavy, unless you're dumb like me and orders a goddamn three plates large curry dish and eat it all, then you're probably going to die for around an hour just like I did. Not gonna lie though, the lack of meat was hard to deal with after a while. Even when there was meat on the dishes it wasn't the same thing, mostly due to how they prefer to prepare it which is not exactly to my tastes, but still a bit above decent. Fucking drink machines every fucking corner sucked my coins dry on my first week, took me a while to notice where the fuck they were all going. Keep that in mind if you ever visit Japan, 100~130 yen for a good drink basically anywhere might not look like a lot but it'll consume your whole wallet before you notice.

I visit a shit ton of places but I'll only talk about a few of those, either because it was really cool or because it left a great impression for whatever reason. First of all, Osu Kanon had a shopping district that was pretty legit when compared to the other places I visited, maybe it's just because it was the first place I visited when I got there but I'll definitely try to go there again someday. During christmas I went to somewhere-whose-name-I-never-got-to-know and had my first white christmas in my whole life, such magic (Christmas happens during Summer here). I had my first snowball fight, there's something simply unique to feeling your body slowly hardening due to cold after being hit a thousand times by dumb-shits who don't know how to aim when you team up, and I also built a failure of a snowman that I love a lot, I'll never forget you Pedrito. (´._.`)

New Year was w/e, we just had a kinda fancy dinner with crab (which is not exactly that good anyway) and some booze - best part right here. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that Japan has some delicious alcoholic drinks and I'd love to have tried more of them but I couldn't buy anything since I'm not old enough, so all I got my hands on was whatever my aunt had lying around on her fridge and occasionally something I managed to convince her to buy me. ヽ(͡◕ ͜ʖ ͡◕)ﾉ

Talking about booze, I'll leave my rant here that I couldn't find a single decent vodka there! End of rant, so let's get back to cool places. I really liked the planetarium and the aquarium since I had never been to any of those before. I saw the stars Yumemi, I saw them ;------------;. Went to Disney again and that place is seriously overrated. It's a good park and all that but you can't compare it to other Japanese parks or stuff like Universal Studios, Disney is all about making dreams come true and believing in magic. While I look like I'm flaming it, I spent my whole fucking day singing "Do you believe in magic?" so ヽ(◉◡◔)ﾉヽ(◉◡◔)ﾉヽ(◉◡◔)ﾉヽ(◉◡◔)ﾉ. I won't talk about the other parks because I'm not really into amusement parks, they were really fun though, I just don't get all crazy over it.

Alright, let's move to Tokyo now. I visited some cool places that once again I never got to know the name, had some good food, slept on a good hotel and managed to get some booze once again woooooo. I visited Akiba twice and God what a crazy place. First time there was when I met Ren, who I'll talk more about in the end. It's an amazing place that is really fun to just hang around and look at the showcases, specially the figures. I'm not a collector but I got myself some just cuz I tilted and felt like spending money that I could have saved for more VNs, food or clothes. Honestly, I never thought I'd ever see that much porn on the shelters of a store that wasn't specifically a porn store lmfao, gotta love sofmap. I'll try to post pictures later or maybe just make a video about the shit I bought, dunno about it yet. Oh yeah, idols are fucking everywhere, love live is like cancer jesus macaroni penis what a joy it was to listen to u's songs everywhere.

Hm... I think that's enough to define that my trip was amazing and I'd love to visit the country again, fuck, I'm actually going to try and become a teacher there. Talking about teachers, let's talk about Ren now. Oh boy, how do I start this? Ren is a fucking giant and I'm a dwarf, that was basically how people saw us there probably. I came out of the subway station, first thing I see is a tall foreigner with a red-beanie, just like the one Ren said that he'd be wearing, I just wasn't expecting him to be like, 20~30 cm+ taller than me (ﾟーﾟ). He showed me around the place, taught me the good places to get some cheap stuff and explained about a lot of things, such as sofmap's green/blue warnings on used games and how pre-orders work. We had some quality-time you know? Talking about weeb shit and eating McDonald's with no french fries, btw McDonalds became a thing that I always have to mention when I just wanna drop a random comment to some thread of his or a reply to him, I don't remember how it started but it was probably me being retarded. There's not much to talk about our meeting really, we went around the stores hunting for porn games to talk about, had some laughs looking at how broken their english was on game covers, had some McDonald's, quality-time, more laughs as he would hit his head on signs placed on the ceiling of the stores (LMFAOJA8FHEAFHA) and we shared life philosophies that can't even be expressed in digital letters, fuck binary. Great times, buddy, great times. Until he started showing me Love Live hentai, that fucker ruined my idols forever (ಠ_ಠ). I said it before though I can't recall the context, but I'm definitely going to kill you.

I think that's it. I did no edits and I don't think I'll do any just for the fun factor that is reading something written literally straight from my mind, as in I thought about something and wrote it down immediately without thinking about how I'd order things (Akiba was before Christmas). I just thought about it and I actually only mentioned Mini-Bitch once here even though I made it look like he was going to be present everywhere lol. He's a piece of shit but he made this trip a lot funnier than I expected so shout-out to him though he'll never read this nor know about the existence of this blog . Okay, I think that's it, I'll add an @edit below if I remember something relevant to add. Thanks for reading everyone.