Picture Book Challenge 2020!

Japanese Language Reading
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Hello fellow crabigators!

The challenge has begun! It’s never too late to start, so read on for more information!

Do you know about the EhonNavi website and their HUGE, BEAUTIFUL, WONDERFUL library of Japanese children’s books that one can read IN FULL, FOR FREE?! Apologies for the caps, but I am hella excited about this resource. The only catch being that you can only read each book once. The website organizes the books by age group (0 - 12 and adult) based on, from what I can tell, self-reporting of who has read the book. For more info about using EhonNavi, check out this guide.

SO, THE IDEA THEN.

For 2020, I plan on reading the entire free portion of the EhonNavi library. That’s over 1000 children’s books! I’m super pumped as it seems like a great way to get a lot of Japanese reading exposure. The idea here isn’t to understand every word, but rather to see what I can pick up as I read. I’m also a sucker for cute things, so I feel like this content will be extra motivating :joy:.

Year long?! Are you crazy?

Maybe. Previous challenges were only a month long (Age 0 & Age 1) which worked because there weren’t toooo many books in those categories. But! Once you start getting into Ages 2, 3, and 4 there are a lot of books. I think a year-long format for the challenge works better. We’ll just have to help keep ourselves motivated as we go!

Join me?!

Having company on this journey would be great! To help us, I’ve made this simple app (linked below!) which lists and links to all the EhonNavi books. Also, it lets you check off the books that you’ve finished, so you can keep track.

The app uses your browser’s local database (IndexedDB) to persist your progress across page refreshes and browser closing / opening. The only caveat there being that if you go to a different browser, you won’t see your progress. (I set it up this way for simplicity and to not have to deal with a user database, etc!)

This thread’s purpose

I figured that this thread could be used to help us stay accountable along our journey! Also people could ask questions as they read, if they encounter anything that they can’t figure out. Or share their favorite books, things they find that are cute, any frustrations they’re experiencing (like: is what I’m reading a useful Japanese word, or just some random sound??), etc. The second post will be a wiki where people can post their progress.

Thanks for taking the time to read through this post! And if you’re inspired to join me, hurrah!

Resources

During the challenge, the following resources might be useful:

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It has begun! :tada:

Good luck with the challenge everyone! Look forward to hearing about your progress!

If you’re planning on joining (it’s never too late!), be sure to add yourself to this post if you want to share your progress! For instructions on how to edit this post, see this other post I made.

Username / Name Number Of Books Read Favourite book so far
NickeeCoco 695 なめれおん
nbeck0212 183 ほっぺに、ちゅー。
Elizabella 160 おしゃべりえほん
deadhippo 126 ともだちタワー
smt_139 76 しゅっしゅぽっぽ
Hibiscuss 91 くれげのりょかん
matskye 50 しずかなみずうみ
Emiloow 42 -
ShaunOfTheLive 30 しずかな みずうみ
nataliefleming 16 はじめての A・B・C
beyondandabove1 13 -
Pep95 12 ともだちタワー
kumosayi 8 ともだちタワー
guildofgold 8 -
Saida 16 -
Neriander 14 とんとん いすたん
Krysta84 6 おんせんたまご
rever4217 3 -
Haiena 0 -
repetersen 0 -
tashimi76 0 -
aarifs 0 -
Ufgators2424 0 -
onegreyelephant 394 おともだちたべちゃった
livandi 5 たっちだいすき
magglett 50 さわさわもみじ
CakePie 19 ともだちタワー
sofyoshka 12 しずかな みずうみ
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This looks pretty interesting, and you made the app. :open_mouth:
Aw, you have to create an account? I’m lazy. u_u

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Interesting… color me intrigued.

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To use ehonnavi? Yep! It’s actually rather simple if you follow the linked instructions, but I understand can be hard to find the motivation sometimes :slight_smile:

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I’l have to check it out after work, but I would certainly be interested.

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@RachelG could you please make this post a wiki? Cheers!

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This is interesting. But it means reading 3 books each day and even in the most beginner book club I failed to read 1 page per day :sweat_smile:

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Yeah, it’s a LOT of books. But from what I’ve seen of the Age 0 and 1 books, a lot of them have few words and are mostly pictures.

Also, my strategy this time around will be different. Before I would look up most everything that I didn’t know, which slowed me down significantly. Now I think I’ll just try to read and pick up what I can. Maybe have Jisho open as I read, but not stress too much if I’m not getting all the words, as long as I get the gist. That should help make it quicker :D.

Just my thoughts on the matter! It’s an ambitious goal, but the journey is ultimately more important imo :).

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I’d love to join you! I haven’t started reading yet and have been looking for an easy start that automatically builds in difficulty over time. This seems to be the solution to that.

What kind of deadlines are you planning on setting? Weekly? Daily? Monthly?

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This looks like fun!

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I gotchu! :star2:

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Hey @RachelG ! Could you actually, instead of making the first post a wiki, make the second one into the wiki? The one with the message:

We’ll start January 1st…

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Yay, glad to have you! I’m not quite sure yet what kind of deadlines I’m planning to set. Might do monthly or biweekly – I’ll probably have to adjust as I go as I imagine the books will get more difficult as the age progresses

You have any thoughts on deadlines for yourself?

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Sorry, I misunderstood what you meant by ‘this’ :anguished:

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Done :call_me_hand:

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I’m not really sure what is doable. You mentioned there were 100 books. Do you want to do 1 a day or all 1000 in the year?
If the latter, maybe 20 per week is an option, with a two-week space for any issues where not as much can be read. That seems quite ambitious though :sweat_smile:

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Let’s see, this is the breakdown per age group:

Age #
0 92
1 63
2 117
3 478
4 199
5 133
6 56
7 37
8 32
9 26
10 20
11 10
12 7
Adult 28
Total 1298

If I were to plan it out, I would aim for about 4 a day ( 1298 / 365 = 3.556). Maybe I’ll start with that and adjust accordingly! Definitely a very ambitious project, which is why it’d be great to have company along the way, to help motivate each other :heart:. I’m also really interested to see how the whole thing goes :D.

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I feel like 4/day could be doable if I attach reading to my lesson + review time on WK. That’s at least 4x a day. Or, if I want to log into the community forum I first ask myself, “Have you done your reading today??” And then hope that I don’t ignore myself! :wink:

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Yeah it’s all about making a habit out of it, I think! I might try to follow your lead and associate it with doing WaniKani reviews as well!

Hmm, also how do you all think we should use the wiki progress tracking post? Maybe it just tracks overall how many we’ve done and we can update it as we progress? In past challenges, people have created journals as well, but that might be realistic given the amount of books. Would love people’s thoughts!

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