The summer is almost finished, so it's a good time to think whether it was meaningful or meaningless.
Considering studying languages:
- I was able to finish reading "Fate/stay night" last weekend. I think it took me 1-1,5 hours every day, so, yeah, it was a very long novel. It was really fun and provided a lot of useful words and expressions - maybe more then a thousand;
- In late July I tried to take a test to determine my Japanese level and the result was Pre-Intermediate. Not bad, but I hoped for higher figures. I think the main problem is that I never tried to prepare for such tests - at the beginning I learned necessary grammar and vocabulary, and then I just studied the things which I encountered. So for several weeks I drilled grammar - there are heaps of grammar points about which I had no idea. Also I specifically tried to acquire as much words from JLPT sheets as possible. So I'm going to tackle this j-cat test this week again and hope for higher results;
- Going for another visual novel now :)
On other things:
- I usually don't read fanfiction. But somehow I came upon "Hill of Swords" - a crossover between visual novel "Fate/Stay night" and light novel "Familiar of Zero". Quite a big story (~350k words)... and it is just incredible. After several chapters I was completely hooked and was almost unable to stop reading it. The plot is based on "Familiar of Zero", which has a good plot, but it's completely wasted by dumb and silly characters and tons of fanservice. The fanfic fixes the problems by swapping the main hero with the one from "Fate/Stay night". As a result narration is greatly improved, characters are more reasonable, fanservice is more adequate. Now I'm rereading it with slower speed to savour it; if only there were less typos >_<;
- At last read "Stranger in a Strange Land". It was interesting to read, but left mixed emotions as the ideas are aren't really close to me;
- I remembered that many years ago I read some fantasy book and was able to find out that it belongs to series of four books named "War God" of David Weber. So got them, they were fun, though didn't give any useful thought after the finish;
- Tried to read "Chronicles of Thomas Covenant", but my determination completely failed in the middle of the second book. I just can't approve of such a hero, he is too different from me. This series increased the list of books, which I dropped without finishing them. By the way, this list have less then 10 items;
- Currently reading "Dresden files" - quite interesting and entertaining;
- There were many frictions at my job - I almost threw it up, but one way or another it became more reasonable and peaceful; so continue it for the time being;
- Got some new health problems, hope to be able to fix them soon;
- After 6 years of wearing the same glasses I changed them at last. The first impression: I see world in HD! Well, with these glasses my effective eyesight is ~1,5 dioptres, but it is twice as good as in previous glasses. Anyway, now the world is much clearer for me :)
