Could just be different educational standards put forward by each state? I’m sure we did study some poetry at some point in elementary/middle; not enough for me to remember at this point, but I’m sure there was something.
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As a side note, this might not be the impression it would have given its original Victorian readers. Look out for all the references to what would have been cutting edge technology – you’ve already got the trains and the fact Jonathan writes his diary in shorthand…
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Very true; this would’ve been the equivalent of a modern thriller for sure. Amazing how the passage of time can alter your perception of a work.
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I keep thinking about what you said and I’m torn between researching how new/old lamps were at the time vs focusing on reading itself since they come up every other sentence on the page I’m around lol
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Oh, what is this? (Also, today’s the first day in a while we get an update!)
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Every time you practice a schedule (grammar/kanji/vocab/sentence reviews) on renshuu.org, there’s a kaochan gatcha and this was the gatcha I got for my N2 grammar review :3
also rip, I’ve got a big backlog yet… Have you caught up?
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Oh, very cool. 
A gacha I can get behind!
I cough never ended up reading May 5-8, but otherwise I’m all caught up! (Besides today’s entry.)
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It’s a cute gatcha! My favorite aspect of side motivation on Renshuu though is probably the garden. You can plant trees and flowers that grow when you do your reviews. And if you do the daily missions, you can buy pets including an animated turtle, cats, dogs, deer, and more.
Lol I’m still on May 4th (whoops) but I won’t sleep before finishing it tonight
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I think I need to copy you until I get caught up with the to do boxes 
5.5
5.7
5.8
5.9
5.11
5.12
5.15
5.16
5.18
5.19
5.24
that’s a little depressing
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Just gotta be like me and never cross them off
頑張って！
I find it does help to read the shorter ones first; there’s a few that’re only a page or two long. Mina’s letters, for instance.
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Sadly (?) I am determined to go chronologically. I know at least though if I can commit to 4 pages a day that I will catch up at some point. I think when I did the math, our version is about 3.5 pages a day. I just got to work up to committing. 
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Ahhhh, I was wrong about what I read last night. I read the part of May 5th that’s in chapter 1! I just have the other half of it left 
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Just a heads up (since I’m only just checking now <.<), Lucy’s May 24th entry isn’t actually labeled by date in the Kindle version of the book. It’s easiest to find it by searching for 五月九日 for Mina’s letter: the next letter is Lucy, then the Lucy letter after that is the May 24th entry.
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ahhhhh, I noticed those weren’t dated… I just hoped that they were sequential… Do you know the dates of the two middle letters?
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Lucy’s first letter is undated in the English as well for some reason (at least in my English copy), so it looks like this:
Mina (May 9th, labeled in EN and JP) →
Lucy (unlabeled in both languages) →
Lucy (May 24th in EN, unlabeled in JP)
Dracula Daily treats Lucy’s first letter as coming the next day after Mina’s first, iirc.
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Thank you!!
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Today’s entry is a telegram, which means it’s all in katakana. DX Ugh, I’m always awful at reading these. I wonder if telegrams of the time period (or even today, for that matter) are limited to just katakana? Anyway, let me puzzle out a “translation” here…
Original: イツデモカケツケル ヨウイアリ。キミタチニ ミミガイタイ ハナシアリ。
Converted: いつでも駆けつける用意あり。君たちに耳がたい話あり。
Let me know if I transcribed that wrong.
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At the time they would I think have sent them in Japanese morse code, which is kana only and doesn’t distinguish hiragana and katakana; writing them in katakana is the convention. Dakuten and hanten marks were extra characters (like punctuation) so sometimes were omitted to save money. The message was sent over telegraph wires to machines that auto-printed the morse code; then an NTT employee would hand-write the message on paper with a brush for delivery to the end-customer 
(No, really, that’s what this NTT history page says!)
NTT still offer a telegram service today (popular for wedding congratulations), and you can use kanji and hiragana. They have also just changed at the start of this year to drop the old kana-only service (likely hardly used any more) and to charge by the page rather than per character. I kind of feel this isn’t really a telegram any more…
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May 5th
Jonathan’s talking about shaking hands with Dracula and saying his hands feel cold as ice and all I can think is
Foreigner - Cold As Ice (Official Lyric Video) - YouTube
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