[2024] 多読/extensive reading challenge

Oh darn you’re right :flushed: I guess I read it wrong because “snowy season” was more obvious than “thunder season” (though that actually makes me want to read that book in particular because I really like the idea!)

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I have my eye on this book for the same reason. The title is pretty cool!

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I just completed my 100th book (including manga) on Book Meter. It’s crazy to think about, but from late 2017 through all of 2018 (about 14 months) I only completed 9 books, which means from 2019 to now (about 20 months) I completed 93 books. That’s about 7 times as much per month!

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Alright, the people have spoken – I’m going to pick 狼と香辛料 as my next novel. It’s a little over 300 pages and, flipping through it, the font is smaller and the text seems to be denser than my last book, so it might be tough to stay on the same pace. I’m going to try to finish it in three weeks; 15 pages per day. If it seems unsustainable I’ll adjust to a four-week pace to bring me down to 11 pages per day.

レッツラゴーでございます~

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Getting some ARIA vibes here.

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Haha, I’ve never read it (though I see it mentioned constantly around here for some reason). I’ve been replacing Persona Q2 recently and Elizabeth says it sometimes, along with other absurd things you wouldn’t normally find mixed into a hyper-keigo speech style.

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I don’t really have that much time to read this month but I started to read a visual novel. For me reading is still really hard I only manage to read around ten sentences or so every day. I put new words into a srs to help me remember them.

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The experiment is over! And the results have exceeded my expectations.

First of all, the data:
As I said, each day I read until I added 10 new vocab to Floflo. I didn’t add most onomatopoeia words and I also skipped some frequency 1 words I didn’t think I’d remember. This meant I read between 3 (at the very beginning) and 13 pages (towards the end) a day, but most often I was in the 7-11 range.
According to Floflo I went from 51.1% of words known to 90.6%. That seems like a lot (and it is), but the truth is that I ignored many many words that were misparses caused by the furigana (not trashed in case they are relevant in other books), so the initial percentage is probably not a good estimate.

The actual feeling of success, however, doesn’t really come from the data. Part of it came from the fact that it was just enjoyable, and I could often read straight through pages or just looking up some words here and there. The fact that I could only read until I reached the 10 words added a ‘gamification’ feeling to it. It went from the usual mindset of ‘I have to read X pages’ to ‘I get to read some more today’ and ‘Let’s see how many pages I can reach til 10 new vocab today’. But I think the key was that since I’m concurrently reading a bunch of other higher level books (獣の奏者、魔女の宅急便、本好き下克上) among other things, I kept finding these words I’d just learned in a bunch of different contexts, even words that were just frequency 1 in ポレポレ日記, so the reinforcement was excellent. Another unexpected consequence was that since I could read most of it easily, some basic grammar that I’d seen a thousand times but never quite understood finally clicked for me.

It turns out that reading this easy-ish book to get more vocab ended up helping me with the more difficult books (which I wasn’t expecting to notice after such a short time). The best part is probably that I’d been feeling kind of stuck with Japanese for a bit and this made me feel a real sense of progress once again. Even if it’s just psychological, it’s still motivating.
It also felt good to finish a book in less than a month (which doesn’t really happen with bookclubs).

I’m not going to pick another easy book right away, since the bookclubs and other harder books are calling to me, but if I feel stuck with vocab again while reading those books I might go back to it. For now I’ll try to keep adding higher frequency words to srs, just not all of them.

Brb catching up with bookclubs after this crazy week.

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I hope @Raionus gets to read your story. It’s always highly motivating for a creator to know their product is helping people :slight_smile:

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Congrats! How’d you like the actual book though? :slight_smile:

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So far うらら迷路帖 has been enjoyable, but also painful. Each chapter is 12 pages long, which for a dense 4-koma manga is a bit exhausting. I’m used to 8 pages per chapter from ご注文はうさぎですか, こみっくがーるず, and きんいろモザイク. For this reason, I’m not sure I want to immediately read volume two of うらら迷路帖 and instead might try one of the other Manga Time Kirara manga I picked up digitally from the sale. The question is, which one should I choose?

  • 恋する小惑星 - Apparently follows the merger of the astronomy club and the geology research club. That’s awfully specific, but the specific premise of these manga tends not to be terribly important.
  • スロースタート - Follows a girl who is starting high school a year late.
  • (Lazy option) こみっくがーるず volume 5 since I already really like this series.
  • (Exhausting option) うらら迷路帖 volume 2 since it’s still decent even if it’s exhausting.

Has anyone read (or even watched the anime adaption of) either of the first two? Looking for non-spoilery opinions. In my position, which would you read next?

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I watched the Slow Start anime, and liked it quite a bit. It’s firmly in the “cute girls doing cute stuff” genre, like GochiUsa or A-Channel, but still a fair bit of fun.

That’s generally my feeling on reading 4-koma in Japanese. But why, though?

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You mentioned before, but I haven’t had this happen since the first two volumes of ご注文はうさぎですか, at which time my reading level was much lower. For the last year or so I’ve really enjoyed slowly reading one Manga Time Kirara 4-koma manga and a “regular” manga at the same time. These 8 page chapters take me as long to read as 30 pages of a regular manga because they are so dense, so I suppose a 50% increase to 12 pages for うらら迷路帖 is quite a jump.

Good to know, thanks!

I watched the anime adaptation of 恋する小惑星. While it has quite a bit of a slice-of-life elements, it also manages to get a more tangible sense of progression towards a main goal which most other slice-of-lifes tend to be more slow about (if at all).

Overall I felt the show was somewhere between ok-ish / good. The characters are nice but none of their personalities are incredibly interesting, nor did the dynamics of their interactions particularly leave much of an impression on me; though I wouldn’t call them boring either. It definitely had some nice / fun / interesting moments.

Keep in mind that slice-of-life is one of my favorite genres so I tend to be very lenient in my opinions for these kind of shows.

EDIT: From the content of the show, it wouldn’t surprise me if the manga got heavily into geology / astronomy terminology in some parts. Trying to be as spoiler-free as possible, there are some events that the club takes that cross the normal boundaries of something a club would just do as a hobby, so I’d expect a denser vocabulary for those arcs.

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First half of this year was abysmal for me as far as reading Japanese. (Not bad for English though.)

Good news is I’m back to working in a Japanese high school which means free books from their library! I’ve been checking two out at a time. Once I check out 20 I get a prize. (Yes even Japanese high school libraries have point cards, haha.)

Recent reviews of books I’ve read:

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店長がバカすぎて

Super cute book with a loveable “antagonist”? I liked the overall theme of even the most frustrating circumstances you can (and should) find your passion in why you work where you do. Learned a lot of book-related vocabulary. I was incredibly confused every time I read バックヤード until I finally looked it up and found it can also mean backroom. Was wondering why this bookstore was so homey haha.

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レトリカ・クロニクル 嘘つき話術士と狐の師匠
Picked this book out from the “most requested” section of the library. It’s a nice story and all but, let’s just say highschoolers aren’t going to be requesting Shakespeare-levels of literature. The book is about a teenager who learns how to wield his tongue and the art of twisting words…but the actual scenes of him doing it are kind of just meh. I figured if I could understand how he plays with words, it must not be that exciting. I thought it was going to go a more serious direction in the end but it did the anime-like cop out.

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ぼくはイエローでホワイトで、ちょっとブルー

Wow I loved this book! Only my 2nd non-fiction book I’ve read in Japanese but it was really amazing. The author is a Japanese woman living in England. She has an Irish husband and she chronicles the experience of her biracial son as he enters his 1st year of middle school. The themes range from classism, racism, LGBT, nationalism, and more.

The chapter that moved me the most was when she visits Japan with her son and they have an encounter in a restaurant. One of the customers realizes her son can’t speak Japanese and berates her about it and then starts ranting about the Chinese and foreigners and etcetera. The last sentence of that chapter really hit home for me: 「日本経済が中国に抜かれることより、自分が生まれた国の人が言った言葉を息子に訳してあげられないことのほうが、私にはよっぽど悲しかった。」

There’s a lot in this book that I wish could convey to my Japanese friends and coworkers myself about America. Now I can just recommend this book. (Though funnily enough it was my principal that recommended this book actually!) I’m glad it’s so popular! :slight_smile:

Books I’ve checked out but haven’t read yet:

アーモンド
コーヒーが冷めないうちに
羊と鋼の森

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Weeeell. I guess it was nice enough that I wanted to keep reading it, and it’s always refreshing to see kids acting their age but… I’m definitely nowhere near the age bracket it’s aimed at.
I did find it funny that (spoilers ahead but probably not that relevant and if you aren’t going to read it you might not care at all) the main character is supposed to have a crush on a guy from school, but she just keeps talking about how pretty and perfect her female friend is. It would have been more interesting if she realized halfway that she is actually interested in her friend, but of course that wasn’t going to happen.
I guess this happens in a lot of media, but I will forever be amused at oblivious authors accidentally writing gay undertones.

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That sounds really interesting, thank you for the review! (Added to my ever-growing pile of want-to-read books :blush:)

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Reminds me of the anime adaption of 響けユーフォニアム, except I’m sure Kyoto Animation did that on purpose.

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upside_down_face

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I have been seeing this a lot on bookmeter and have been considering to purchase it. Was it a relatively easy read?

I was reading this a couple of weeks before, but I gave up when I’m barely halfway into Chapter 2. It is an interesting story, but it got boring for me. Interested to know what you think of it once you’re done reading it! :slight_smile:

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