November 20th
Home post
Aria: the masterpiece volume 1 – progress report
Yesterday: read up to page 284
Today: 
finished volume 1
I’m done with the first volume!
While I’m usually not the type to celebrate anything I do or accomplish, I will allow myself an imaginary pat on the back this time around because this is the first actual piece of Japanese media I’ve ever read. 
Admittedly, it feels weird and unpleasant but I need to work on improving my self-hatred and that’s one step towards being more kind to myself.
I didn’t understand more than 70-75% of the whole book because there were still plenty of grammar constructions I’m not familiar with. I am willing to overlook that for the time being because right now I’m priotitising simply being able to read consistently and understanding the basic gist of things as I don’t want to make my early reading attempts too complicated and off-putting.
Once I have revised a good chunk of beginner’s level grammar, I’ll start looking more into the grammar points I’ve encountered* and will encounter in future reading material.
*(I wrote some things down from Aria volume 1 to check out at a later point).
So much for that.
And that brings me to another point which is that I messed up: I miscalculated the time it would take for my book order and for me to read through volume 1, because the next batch won’t arrive until next week. Meaning, I don’t have the second and third volume yet, whoops. 
My mistake won’t be a problem, though, because I wanted to adjust my reading schedule and material anyway. I noticed that I really can’t make proper progress on Aria during the week as it’s still demanding enough that I can’t comfortably read it in a very short timeframe per day,
This is why I’ll do the following:
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If I can set aside at least 20 minutes for reading during the week, I will read Aria.
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If I don’t have more than 20 minutes to read, I’ll read Card Captor Sakura instead.
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The weekends, on the other hand, will still be dedicated to Aria because I have enough time to make satisfactory progress per reading session.
As to Card Captor Sakura: I wanted to revisit some manga from my younger years in Japanese instead of my primary language which is why I bought the latter some time ago. From the bit I’ve seen, it looks to be easier to read because there are less Kanji per sentence.
To save some time per post, I also won’t add my words of note anymore – from now on it will be ‘the word of the day’ and one ‘honourable mention’ instead.
Word or expression of the day:
体験 - (たいけん) - personal experience, physical experience, one’s own experience
Honourable mention:
平たく言えば - (ひらたくいえば) - in plain words, in plain terms, put simply