Not many kanji to choose from now, though scrolling through Jisho I’m always surprised by the sheer amount of cool looking kanji that just have nothing associated with them, what ancient secrets do these kanji keep?
Starting this challenge I thought the hardest thing would be remembering stroke order, but once it’s been written a few times it’s quite easy to remember, a lot feel pretty natural in their order. But what I wasn’t expecting was how hard it is to try and keep the kanji in proportion to itself. My first attempt without a kanji guide must have been listening to Free Bird because no silly box could contain that eagle. I also think I was getting a little too liberal with that last, long stroke of 鳥 (not the dots), it was becoming a little too curly
There, fixed that for you
I mean, we’re talking Dazai here, no? I’d be really surprised to read a happy-go-lucky story authored by him…
Indeed! Especially as I did not participate because I could not come up with a good idea on what to do because I had set myself on reaching 1000 pages this month, and so I was a bit preoccupied
But today I had a good idea or two, so I’ll save them for the next calendar thing!
Please let us know when you do! I would like to read more stories like 人間椅子 and the like
Words of the day: 片鱗 (part; portion; glimpse; bit), 目から鱗が落ちる (to see the light; to be awakened to the truth; to have the scales fall from one’s eyes), 逆鱗に触れる (to infuriate one’s superior; to incur the anger of one’s boss), 介鱗 (fish and shellfish)
Our very last kanji! It’s hard to find any frequently used ones with so many strokes. 鱗 means scales (like of a fish). It’s a Jinmeiyō kanji (used in names) and 2494 of 2500 most used kanji in newspapers.
I used glue instead of double-sided sticky tape because mine wasn’t transparent, and added a small wire hook instead of a ribbon after having already glued it.
Book:
The very last footnote in the book I had been reading as part of the advent challenge goes like this:
初生びな鑑別法の一つだが、実際には熟練が必要であり、こんなに簡単にはいかない。
Talk about a coincidence!
Song:
I haven’t commented on the song advent calendar at all so far. I listened to each day’s song as I was doing my writing practice. As the writing took longer and longer each day, the songs started to be too short, so I sought more music in this thread :https://community.wanikani.com/t/favorite-japanese-music/59735. It’s been a while since I actually selected music to listen to instead of listening to whatever was on on the radio. I’m inspired to possibly keep looking for Japanese music that may suit my tastes, so thanks for the incentive
That’s all folks!
So, this is the last day of our advent! Thank you to everyone who participated, and everyone who just dropped by to see what we were up to! I hope it was as productive and fun for you as it was for me! Have a lovely Christmas (/holiday/rest of December) everyone!
Last day of practice today.
I picked two Kanji again, one slightly Christmas-themed one…and a crab.
But not a regular crab, a king crab!
Since I didn’t grasp the opportunity to write crab and alligator when the time was right, I opted for the king crab as some sort of compensation – surely it is a distant relative of the Crabigator, no?
All in all, the challenge was welcome and I got an opportunity to practice writing some Kanji regularly for a short period of time. Granted, the last few days became a little bit painful and tedious because of so many strokes per Kanji but it was still nice to see what kinds of Kanji exist and the Kanji all of you picked for your practice.
I quite enjoyed seeing everyone’s contribution and it was nice being a part of an unconventional Advent calendar. Maybe some of us will do something along these lines next year again – who knows?
With that, I want to wish everyone who celebrates Christmas a Happy Holidays – and to everyone who doesn’t celebrate a pleasant weekend.
Interesting that it wasn’t that difficult apart from it taking a lot of time but 20 sheets…20 SHEETS?!
I did not expect this many, holy moly! Now, I really need to take a look at the video.
You have (had) a lot of perseverance for attempting and succeeding to make this one, congrats, again!
the last day!! 逆転裁判 – pretty sure this is a novelisation of the film, which ofc is an adaptation of the first game (with some other stuff? Can’t remember). Just a fun little piece of familiarity to close out the calendar, nothing too exciting here though it’s always fun to see the 矢張・やっぱり pun in action.
this has been a really fun month, even when i wasn’t super into whatever i was reading. i’ve been really proud of myself for reading (sometimes quite a lot, depending on the sample) every day, and it’s made me want to keep going even after this!
following this thread has been great fun, and i’m looking forward to doing this again next year! hope everyone had as much fun/found it as productive as i did
I may not have uploaded my writing every day, but I did my best to follow along. I’m a bit sad I couldn’t do the same for the origami, but I underestimated how exhausting this season is. Thank you for organizing this @omk3 !
This story made my daughter laugh at moments, which she needed as she is a bit bummed by not being able to visit her American grandma due to weather. Even though I didn’t get everything, it is always nice to see her comprehension after living 3 years now in America.
Last one. Daughter wasn’t to into morning reading this morning so I more or less just read it to myself. From what I could understand it seemed to be about a woman and her family receiving favor from some demons dancing around a fire one night due to them feeling… sorry for her. Will have to go through again.
Today I read メリイ・クリスマス by 山川方夫 and it was not about Christmas, but was about aliens and love. I listened with this 朗読, which while well voice acted, had an unfortunate lot of background noise.
I’ll be posting one more time tomorrow as a bonus. It’s a very short piece here and the English it’s translated from is here (small PDF). Some people find bilingual text reading helpful, so thought I’d mention it.
I feel the biggest thing I need to work on is trying to get my lines and structure more straight, they seem to always want to resist straightness and go into a curved line, or just go full on curly. It feels more natural to go curly, why must you be this way hand. Though I wonder what the ‘acceptable’ amount of straying from the set form is
The super-squiggle impossible to read kanji style still follows a set form, so I wonder how much you can do your own way until it enters abunai-territory.
Thanks a bunch for setting this up @omk3, it was a lot of fun! And it’s been great seeing everyone else’s entries each day. Hope you all enjoy the holidays and new year!
Did these two on the same day and I made so many mistakes on the kanji for Day 24 because i was still thinking about Day 23 kanji! Two obvious ones with X marks but there’s another one hiding in one of the rows.
Origami
Now this last one could not have been coincidence could it? Such a fitting ending to the challenge!
Thank you for organizing and making the advent calendars @omk3 and @deliana88. Enjoyed learning to write so many new kanji, making origami and learning vocab in the process, and discovering new japanese songs and artists! Also had fun looking at what everyone else was doing and learning from your posts too!
This was my first challenge on the forums ever and now i’m motivated to join more in the future!
It’s been great reading about everyone’s daily tasks with these advent calendars. You all inspired me to start practicing writing kanji again next year (though I’m not great with New Years’ resolutions ).
Sorry I haven’t been posting, but I’ve been listening to the songs again and reading through the lyrics as I go, but only in the last couple days did I actually start parsing through the lyric sheets again for vocab words I don’t know and adding them to lists to SRS later.
The songs “advent” calendar does go through the 31st, if anyone is still interested!
I also just created a new thread with a countdown to the New Year’s 紅白歌合戦 and asking for more song suggestions if anyone wants more Japanese music for the holidays.
I haven’t posted here in a week. Here’s last week’s progress:
December 20 + December 21 + December 22 + December 23 + December 24 + December 25 + December 26 + December 27 + December 28 + December 29 + December 30 + December 31
Translate sentences (try to read posts & then find out the meaning); adding more to my anki deck; asking native speakers about words/phrases, how to use them & examples.
*Continuing to listen to the same song & trying to learn it
Thanks for letting me post within this forum. This small group’s post was inspiring to refocus some of my energy back into Japanese, something one might think would be duh for someone in my situation, but living in America again has indeed stunted that part of my personal development for too long. I’m not a very active forum poster, but cheers to all here and I might find you lot sometime somewhere amongst these forums again.
I must admit I have been missing our daily activities here. So today I made a clumsy attempt at writing 明けましておめでとうございます with a brush pen, and folded a rabbit for the new year. I wanted to also practice the rabbit kanji, but apparently the kanji for Year of the Rabbit is different to the うさぎ kanji, and I wasn’t sure which one to choose, so I chose none for now.
I didn’t particularly like the rabbits of our good old ばぁば so I looked for rabbits elsewhere, and… I destroyed four papers in the process. I’m realizing she really was amazing in explaining and showing the steps - I never ever made a mistake while following her instructions.
Here's the one rabbit that didn't end in crumpled paper and frustration:
Me too The kanji calendar turned writing kanji from something intimidating to something fun for me and majorly contributed to my decision to start a 10-year diary in Japanese I’m tracking my first two months of that project over at the Write Every Day challenge. I’ve composed and written down maybe 4 sentences in Japanese before today so the quality will be somewhat embarrassing I’m sure:p
Advent of Ascending Kanji - Day 23 
Kanji writing
).
The kanji calendar turned writing kanji from something intimidating to something fun for me and majorly contributed to my decision to start a 10-year diary in Japanese