translation gripes

Gnar. I really really hate trying to decipher tiny handwritten kanji. Even worse, I'm definitely losing my grip on remembering the hiragana. OTOH, at least I do seem to remember various patterns, so I can usually identify verb suffixes even when I haven't yet looked up the kanji to find out what they mean. And besides, at least this is just informal prose; while trying to confirm the usage of one particular kanji-scrawl just now, I ran across this paper on transplanting the English sonnet form into Japanese. Ay chihuahua.