[2024] 多読/extensive reading challenge

Not every day you see さすが written in kanji.

12 Likes

さすが? I think you mean りゅうせき…

Heh, saw this in Persona the other day, too. Luckily there was audio.

2 Likes

I saw this in a manga quite recently, just don’t remember which title it was!

And yesterday I first discovered 貴方[あなた] in Soul Eater. And before that 貴公 in 炎炎の消防隊. That adds to my list of 君, お前, 貴様, 己, even 僕. So many ways to refer to “you”.

By the way, I was avoiding this thread for a while. Reading isn’t my strong suit and I don’t really like reading in any language (audiobooks are such a great invention!).

But last week I completed my first manga volume in Japanese. Before that I only read a few chapters at most. Well, I now re-evaluated this point. I read the next volume of manga within a day. I’m reading Soul Eater starting from volume 9 where it started deviating from the anime. There’s still over 10 volumes to go and I’m looking forward to it :slight_smile:

Before Soul Eater I was avoiding manga with furigana… because I was too proud and considered it cheating. But now I really appreciate how easy it is to lookup vocab having the reading available. And the furigana is pretty small so I look at the kanji most of the time anyway.

I think when I’m done with Soul Eater I’ll try to read a light novel with furigana. I have two volumes of この素晴らしい世界に祝福を waiting :wink:

Gotta read more. Reading was the toughest part for me during JLPT.

10 Likes

My favorite is 汝, I learned it from Nausicaa (the manga, obviously).

1 Like

Sounds like a pronoun that some kind of a じいさん would use.

3 Likes

It was used by monks in the story, but to be fair they do fit the じいさん category.

1 Like

The test is: do they refer to themselves as わし? :laughing:

2 Likes

I’m not 100% sure, but I think they used 我.

1 Like

I once wanted to read Nausicaä but it was years before I even considered learning Japanese. Back then I was discouraged because of the terrible mirrored English edition.

Now I think I might get back to it someday :slight_smile:

2 Likes

I definitely recommend it! The story and art are amazing. That being said, tiny font and no furigana (yes, including on 汝), so I’d recommend having some solid kanji knowledge before attempting it. :sweat_smile:

2 Likes

Aww, it wasn’t terrible. I’m 95% sure it’s the first manga I ever read, aside from possibly a scanslated version of Ranma 1/2.

More recently, I bought a copy of the new two-volume hardcover edition, and let me tell you, I’m really not a fan of the massive sound-effect lookup index at the back.

Also bought the first two volumes of the Japanese version in 2017. Not sure why I didn’t buy all seven (I guess I don’t really need three copies of Nausicaä?) but I haven’t really tried reading them yet.

1 Like

I saw that one in まちかどまぞく. It was on the first page, also no furigana. The speaker was an ancient demon or something like that. This is the manga I shelved for now, because it had a bunch of stuff like that which I didn’t know.

I didn’t really mind that. After a short period I stopped referencing the index because I realized I didn’t care about the sound effects. The manga was good overall, but it seems like it’d be really hard in Japanese, so I’m not inclined to reread it in Japanese any time soon.

2 Likes

Terrible is a strong word. But it’s the only one I have for manga editions that mirror panels. It really stands out when everyone is suddenly a lefty.

Everyone in Lucky Star is a lefty. Most of the ones that aren’t are ambidextrous…

See! You remembered this :wink:
The only two things I know about Lucky Star is:

  • there is a parody on Intial D
  • it is very important to eat your chocolate cornet properly, although it did not include instructions on which hand to use.
2 Likes

I remembered because the sheer weight of sinisterness in the manga honestly made me wonder for a bit if the chirality ratio is different in Japan. Apparently Kagami Yoshimizu just likes making his characters left-handed.

I’ve read a book that used all of these(and then also taught me 貴女 and 我儘 and various other interesting things I didn’t know before in kanji) and basically never had any furigana. So, I learned all of these from the same book :slight_smile:

Other than that I think I’ve seen all of these in SAO too, though not all in the same volume, and sometimes with furigana

7 Likes

Happy to report that I just finished 鹿の王 1. I did not initially plan to read it that fast (took me around 3 weeks, I think) but I noticed that I did not yet have a finished book this month, and that made my Bookwalker page look a bit sad… so I decided to finish a book this month. And somehow I thought I might try to finish 鹿の王 - I did not really believe it until last weekend when I was able to read a big chunk, and then all of a sudden it was really doable :slight_smile:

Book review - no heavy spoilers though

For those of you who know 獣の奏者, the structure of this book is very similar: The setting is a medieval-style world, and there are several protagonists, whose stories rank around each other. These main narrations are occasionally interrupted by the historical whereabouts of the world or by explanations. Maybe I’m getting a bit used to that style by now, but I did not find those episodes as heavy and tiring as the ones we recently had in 獣の奏者 - except for one larger chunk rather in the beginning, where all the countries and landscapes are explained and who fought whom and who conquered whom and all that, the explanations feel more interleaved with the main narration. The genre is listed in Wikipedia as fantasy and medical, so there is also a fair amount of medical stuff, at the general level of knowledge of that era, so it feels a bit like “The Physician”. Other aspects of the story reminded me of books like “Winnetou” and “Sherlock Holmes”, so overall I found it a very nice and entertaining read. One also gets a fair bit of exposure to animal-keeping and breeding etc (but no bees!).
This book is actually only the first part of what used to be a long book and got later split up into two books, so that seems to be very similar to 獣の奏者 as well. I was curious to see how the first book would end, and as the last chapter was not very action-packed, I wondered whether it would just be split at a random boring location, but literally in the last two sentences the author built a Cliffhanger of Death :slight_smile:

Verdict: I really enjoyed reading the book and watching the world unfold in my head. It was a relatively easy read; grammar-wise it is not very demanding (I’m at N3 level and I found maybe two or three unknown grammar points overall); vocab is of course always a challenge, but except for the fantasy words that the author seems to be especially fond of, I thought it was ok, with enough repetition to get used to a bunch of the vocab, but with enough variation to keep it an interesting read nonetheless.
I was a bit sad that it is so similar to 獣の奏者 contents-wise, so I guess when I’ve read the first two volumes of both these series, I will definitely want to read something else for some time.

18 Likes

Just finished up my 26th manga volume this year, which puts me halfway through with my goal (of one per week) and way ahead of schedule. To celebrate I’m going to cut myself off – no more manga until I finish 氷菓, which I’m dreadfully behind on.

14 Likes