I’m Japanese but I would like to participate. I will practice my English by reading your posts but I will do the Japanese short story challenge if that’s ok!よろしくお願いします。
I’ll only do the Ascending Stroke Order Kanji Advent Calendar and post a daily picture of my tiny practice sheet in this thread.
Apart from that, I might do a tiny bit of the Origami calendar but only for a maximum of 3 days during the whole month. I’ll probably get to it around the holidays and post my successes or failures as well.
That’s unfortunately all I can muster alongside all the other daily things I need to do.
I am thinking that, daily writing prompts by daily illustration, or daily questions, might be nice.
So far I have been avoiding writing (only occasional sound recording), where writings are easier to be double-checked before posting, or proof-read on whether my points are easily understood, or having good structures.
I had offered to do something on the sentence a day challenge, but the majority did not want it. Therefor I recommend checking out renshuu.org’s forums and their writing practice. You could go through old questions and use them for your advent practice you’re more likely to get feedback over here or on HelloTalk though I believe
Words of the day: 乙な味 (strange taste; spicy taste), 乙夜 (second division of the night (approx. 9pm to 11pm)
This is the most involved one-stroke kanji I could find (surely just drawing a line for 一 would be a little boring, right?). It’s WK level 57, and means things like the latter, duplicate, strange, witty. It’s also a radical.
Here’s a video of Japanese Calligrapher Takumi writing it (2.26 mark):
I only heard that there are only few people who would correct the writings. Other than that, I am not sure how fast responses are expected to be corrected, or totally ignored at all.
Gotcha! I’ve submitted there a few times and never had an issue getting corrected, but maybe it varies a bit day to day. I also only write short things (1-2 paragraphs) and know when I’m correcting English the very long journals are not my favorite
If possible, I would separate vocabularies by Kanji reading (regardless of Kun, On, or Nanori), but it is difficult to judge new vocabularies I haven’t seen before.
As this is just for some brief learning fun, I didn’t want to choose a word for each reading, just a couple of words that looked interesting to me. You are welcome to provide a more complete list if you like, but I think I’ll stick with one or two fun words each time.
Japanese time is traditional divided into 12 total blocks, so it’s not as odd as it sounds. What is odd/difficult is that they divided those blocks into 6 parts each for daytime and nighttime. Evenly within daytime and nighttime though. So in winter, the daytime blocks are really short because it’s all the daytime divided into 6 parts. But then in winter, the nighttime blocks would be much longer.
ふさふさ in tufts, bushy, thick, luxuriant (to describe a “carpet” of moss)
Grammar
V-る+のみだ similar to ばかり, means “only”
I still need to hunt for some interesting onomatopoeia and grammar in today’s reading. I’ll update accordingly. (Also still debating whether I’ll do some reading specifically for the advent. I probably shouldn’t. But…)
Edit: Well, I decided I couldn’t resist adding a reading advent too. I will be reading 叙述トリック短編集, a collection of 6 short mystery stories that use narrative tricks to confuse the reader. I will be posting my updates on that over at Natively, if anyone is interested.
The first one is simply terrible and I love-hate it.
To have a bit of a different feel when writing, I used a 0.3mm mechanical pencil for the first 3 rows, a 0.5mm one for the next 2 rows and a pen for the last 3.
Granted, the 0.3mm and 0.5mm almost didn’t make a difference in terms of looks, so maybe I’ll swap the 0.5mm pencil for another type of pen tomorrow.
December 1 - Day 1
Winter/christmas song
Kanji writing
Origami
Winter/christmas song
I really enjoyed the first winter song today! It’s a very catchy upbeat song. My process:
Listen to the song and enjoy the beat
Repeat the song while trying to follow the subtitles on the youtube video
Repeat following the lyrics with furigana found on a different site
Finally, listen to it again while reading the English translation
Doing that last bit made me wonder - is this a church song? Nothing against church songs of course. Just very curious. This would be the very first japanese church song I would have ever heard! I also wonder how others prefer to listen to songs now.
Some kanji/vocab learned from WK that I heard correctly/recognized:
指 ゆび finger
神様 かみさま god
星 ほし star
声 こえ voice
May or may not list these for every song. Depending on how much time I have.
Combining these two cause I took the photo together and couldn’t be bothered to crop.
On kanji writing, I copied your idea @omk3 to include interesting related vocab.
On origami, that was a nice simple envelope to start with! Surprisingly, I could easily follow and learned of course the word for envelope 封筒「ふうとう」. They kept saying something like おりつけます and おりあげます. Turned on closed captions but still couldn’t figure out exactly what they were saying. But I figured out the root at least. 折る「おる」and read the conjugations. I recognized a bunch of other vocab but don’t have enough time to list all of them today.
So… tomorrow I’m travelling for 2 nights, 3 days. I think I can still do it while travelling. But may not write as much notes like today!
I also love this idea of using different pens. But maybe i’ll save it after travelling!
Advent Calendar, Day 1
Winter Song
Kanji vocab + writing
Calendar Translation
I’m doing a separate non-Japanese advent calendar for myself this month as well; it is composed of tea, chocolate, Pokemon cards, and video games. I’ll post about the details of that under a cut.
Winter Song
I really enjoyed the song for today! (orion, by 米津玄師) The lyrics site tells me it was the ending theme to the second season of 3月のライオン. I’ve only listened to it in the background for now, but I plan on interweaving it throughout the day as I listen to stuff as I work. Hoping to low-key work on my listening comprehension as well, haha; I definitely heard 神様 in there somewhere. ^_^;
Kanji
I too am doing 乙 as my kanji for the day; one stroke kanji is slim pickings, and this one looks interesting! No pictures of my writing practice yet; I need to go find paper first.
First line is pencil, second is pen. I tried to write the kanji in a variety of sizes, too, hence the slight weirdness.
Words I picked out!
甲乙つけがたい (こうおつ) - difficult to say which of the two is better
乙女座 (おとめざ) - Virgo (the constellation)
乙 (おつ) - second (party to an agreement); (な) stylish, chic; (な) weird, strange
I’ve always had a soft spot for names of constellations; don’t know why.
Calendar Translation
Alrighty, here’s the original, followed by my translation. I wasn’t worried by trying to match space constraints of the calendar or anything. If you see anywhere where the translation could be improved, I’d really appreciate any feedback! I’m still learning, so this may all be a bit iffy.
According to a friend, this work gives off similar feelings to “a Taiga drama with an incurably sick boy”. So working off of that, Blood is a former bad boy supporting the boy? And he rakes in money working as a host at night to pay for hospital bills?! While doing a daily commute to the hospital to nurse the boy?! And finally, through a window looking out over the changing season, the final leaf…!! (What kind of drama is this?) …Or something like that.
I’m not totally sold on that “through a window looking out over the changing season” line, so if anyone has a better idea of how to write that, I’m all ears! Maybe @Hiroya could weigh in if you feel confident with your English?
Personal Advent Calendar
As for my personal advent calendar, each day will have one of each:
A tea bag (random between a fruit tea, peppermint tea, and green tea)
A chocolate (flavor is random between normal, white, dark, or caramel)
A game written down to enjoy as I munch on my snack (comfy replays only). I’m not intending on doing a full playthrough or anything; this is purely just to sit in nostalgia.
Here’s a pic of my homemade advent box; the box itself is one used for storing thread. I only had enough room for twelve days, so I’ll have to refill it partway through.
Every three days I’ll also open a pack of Pokemon cards (since I only bought 8 of them).
So today’s stats:
Tea: Raspberry
Chocolate: Dark chocolate
Game: My choice for Pokemon gens 1-4. Will ultimately decide after work, but I’ve narrowed down my options to the GB Pokemon TCG game, Pokemon Yellow, Fire Red/Leaf Green, or Heart Gold/Soul Silver.
Pokemon Card pack: Evolving Skies. This expansion is notorious for its awesome alt arts and terrible, terrible pull rates, so unless I get really lucky I’m not expecting much. I’ll post a picture or something of what I get when I open it!
Edit: pulls pic! Not bad, not bad. I like the Salamence.
This one was a bit difficult because I kept wanting to write a Z, also have a tendency to curve lines more than need be and make them curlier.
Looks like we all chose the same one today!
Though it seems like it was this or 一, so not much choice
For this challenge I’m going to be writing the kanji on top of the kanji in a grid, then with just the grid, then without a grid and finally with a fancy brush and try to write it a bit more stylised.
It’s great to see all the other little fun things everyone else is doing!