Anime to watch.

[prillalar]

Too much fic to read! *brain breaks* While I'm fixing that up, here's what I'm watching from the new anime season.

Ookiku Furikabutte
Expect a detailed and persuasive pimp post on this series once the first episode is subbed. For now, let me say that if I set out to design my perfect sports series, well, okay, that would be a hockey anime with Kiyasu and Onosaka. But if I couldn't have that, it would be a high school baseball series with great characters, lots of heart, and a battery in love. Oofuri is all that and then some. Mihashi, the pitcher, has no self-confidence and it's up to Abe, the catcher, to build him up. And then there's Hanai. And Tajima. And Momo-kan and Shiga-sensei. And and and.

I don't think I can overstate how excited I am about this series. I've watched the raws for the first two episodes. I've read the three manga chapters that Entropy has scanlated. If the manga used furigana, I think I'd be struggling through the raws with my dictionaries. I made a comm for all the fic that you and I are going to write: oofuri_etc. There is also an info comm: oofuri.

You will be hearing more about this. A lot more.


Over Drive
More high school sports, this time cycling. After two episodes, I'm not super-impressed, but now that we've got over the First Trial for the Underdog Protagonist and we're on to Team Building, it should be a bit better. I guess I'm watching because A. it's a sports series, B. the credits sequence promises hot boys in bicycle shorts, and C. Okiayu Ryoutarou is in it. Allegedly. I haven't heard him yet.


Romeo x Juliet
ANN says: "This is a story of a young and tragic love, set in the aerial city of Neo Verona." Juliet kicks some fucking ass. And Okiayu is in this one too.

That's everything I've tried. What new anime would you rec?

Comments

[prillalar]

The lack of furigana is a problem. (There's a bit, but it's not used for every character.) I don't know any kanji and, more to the point, I don't know how to look up kanji, which I imagine is a bit complicated. I suppose it might be a good project to try to learn on, though. Hmm.

[grasshopper.livejournal.com]

I don't know how to look up kanji

I can help!! I use the Multiradical lookup thingy here (http://etext.virginia.edu/wwwjdic/). It's a bit tricky, though, and I've been meaning to make a post about some of the pitfalls of it (it's not terribly complicated, more that it's just time-consuming and sometimes frustrating to use until you get in a fair bit of practice.)

And I absolutely recommend such a project to you, if you're interested in learning kanji. The whole reason I started trying to translate things that were beyond my reading level was to get some more active practice (rather than just passively looking at lists of characters). And after the fifteenth time you forget "ore" and spend half an hour looking it up only to feel like kicking yourself for not remembering lookups 1 - 14, it gets pretty cemented in your head :P

The other nice thing about using this method to look them up is that you start to see and understand the elements that make up the characters -- it's a lot like learning Latin roots, in that you start to see the connections between words. Also it's fun on its own. For example, did you know that the character for "noisy" (with a connotation of "mischievous" or even "evil") is made up of three of the character for "woman"? I will never not find that delightful :P

[insaneneko.livejournal.com]

I totally recommend the multiradical kanji lookup. It is so much easier to use than traditional kanji dictionaries and far more forgiving.

But then, the anime may kick the scanlation group into high-gear and you may not have to bother. XD

[prillalar]

Thank you! That's a great resource. I guess I'll have to buckle down now. :)

It's weird how some things stick more easily in your head than others. When I was doing my Latin & Greek degree, I would have stress dreams about not being able to tell the difference between a gerund and gerundive. (Seriously, that was one that nobody ever seemed to get.)