📚📚 Read every day challenge - Fall 2022 🍁🍂

December 29th

:snowflake: :evergreen_tree:Home post:evergreen_tree::snowflake:

Card Captor Sakura volume 4 – progress report

Yesterday: Finished chapter 15, continued up to page 61.
Today: Finished chapter 16, continued up to page 131.

Quite satisfied with today’s progress. :slightly_smiling_face:

Poor Sakura though, not being able to sleep after the spooky story about the test of courage and having to go inside the spooky cave the next day where everything starts getting out of hand with everyone disappearing must have been heart attack inducing for her. :hushed:
It was nice seeing her an Shaolan bond a little bit after he had been very standoffish towards her from the start – he’s also starting to develop feelings for her, getting all flustered. Meanwhile, I’m just sitting here feeling relief because I don’t have to deal with any primary school children having (puppy) crushes and teasing each other relentlessly for having crushes anymore; I don’t envy him one bit. :sweat_smile:


Word or expression of the day:
しょうがない - it is what it is, it can’t be helped, nothing can be done

Honourable mention(s):
洞窟 - (どうくつ) - cavern, cave

18 Likes

:snowflake: :christmas_tree: December 29th :christmas_tree: :snowflake: (Home Post Link)

Trying to do some set-up work for the start of the next challenge. I’d like to time track my study time at least for January, just so I can get a more reasonable estimate of what my study load is like atm (for both grad school things and also for japanese). I can never manage to keep it up long term, but it would give me some peace of mind to have a more up-to-date number :sweat_smile:

Read:

  • NHK News Web Easy: 新型コロナウイルス 年末年始をつけること
  • ホリミヤ chapter 42 + おまけ - snuck in another volume by the end of the year! proooobably wont get another one in unless i’m feeling super motivated.
  • マジック・ツリーハウス1 あらすじ - just read the summary and first page to see what the level was going to be like and man. This triggered some deep memories. I read a lot of these books when I was in 1st and 2nd grade and really starting to learn to read on my own (so… somewhere in the ballpark of 20 years ago :face_with_spiral_eyes:), and reading some of these parts in japanese I can vividly remember the way I pictured the settings as a kid. Memory is a crazy powerful thing. Level seems absolutely and comfortably doable, though. When I tried to check these out of the library at my elementary school, the librarian made me count all the words I didn’t know on the first page, and wouldn’t let me check it out if it was over 5 (i never failed, she was merely a fool). And I really only had 2 to look up here, so we’re safe!

Optimistic about being able to read magic treehouse pretty quickly (and hopefully use that to adjust to the physical act of reading pure text vertically and R → L) , so will check out 夜カフェ tomorrow. That’s probably closer to my actual reading level, I’d think. If the NHK easy articles this month were any indication, I’ll adjust to the style pretty quickly and then I will be unstoppable :smiling_imp:

Good Words

NHK
うつる ー to spread (of a virus, fire)
消毒「しょうどく」ー disinfection, sterilization (extinguish the poison, nice kanji for it!)
入れ替える「いれかえる」ー to replace
抗原検査「こうげんけんさ」ー antigen test (of all the things in this article to not have a dictionary pop-up, this is one I definitely would’ve expected them to explain lmao)

ホリミヤ
別居「べっきょ」ー living apart, separate (seems to have tone of not being a good thing, not just merely not physically living together)
えげつない ー dirty, vulgar
早乙女 「さおとめ」ー young girl
派手「はて」ー showy, loud, flashy
沈黙「ちんもく」ー silence, being quiet
狩る「かる」ー to hunt (animals)

マジック・ツリーハウス
押さえる「おさえる」ー to hold in place (めがね)
ながら ー as always
翼竜「よくりゅう」ー pterosaur

20 Likes

:maple_leaf: :jack_o_lantern: :snowflake: :christmas_tree: December 29 :christmas_tree: :snowflake: :jack_o_lantern: :maple_leaf:
Home Post

BU$TAFELLOWS :moneybag:

After like two weeks of holidays and clearing out Kamisama and Orange, I finally got back to Bustafellows. I’m posting early evening, because while I hope I’ll get back to reading more, I won’t count on it. I finished what I’d consider the first scene of chapter one (I don’t count the quick 3-4 screens of intro for all the men). And I also learned that Sylph spent around 7.5 hours on chapter one. Meaning I am significantly behind since chapter 2 starts tomorrow. :scream:

How do I always get myself in these situations? Also 9-nine- starts tomorrow.

And work is about to bury me. :sweat_smile:

17 Likes

I haven’t joined the おいしいごはんが食べられますように thread yet because I’m seeing how far I get today but it’s not yet lunch time and I’m 1/3 finished :flushed:
Truly addictive writing. I might end up finishing this before the new year :sweat_smile:

That sort of educational style irritates me so much. I had an insane vocabulary as a kid due to being a bookworm and I never would have developed it if people were holding me back to my “appropriate” level. I had a giant paper dictionary and determination - what else is needed?

19 Likes

Dec 29, Thu of Extra week of Fall 2022 :maple_leaf:

  • うたわれるもの
Interesting words
  • カタブツ = serious, inflexible person. From 堅物.
  • まつわる = to be related to; to surround. Kanji form is (まつ)わる.
  • (また)ぐ = to cross (e.g. a river). Kanji is for straddling.
  • (もよお)す = to feel a sensation / to hold an event
  • ()(おろ)し = loading and unloading (of a cargo ship). The second Kanji ((おろ)す) seems to be about wholesale.
  • 物流(ぶつりゅう) = distribution of goods
  • 縦断(じゅうだん) = running along the length. Opposite is 横断(おうだん) = cross cutting. Both are On readings of (たて) and (よこ). I can’t recall an On reading of the first, though.
  • 味見(あじみ) = tasting
  • 相伴(しょうばん) = partaking in. ご相伴 in context, probably should be お相伴?
  • 芳醇(ほうじゅん) = thick taste
  • 凱旋(がいせん) = triumphant return
  • 純白(じゅんぱく) = pure white
  • 伝承(でんしょう) = handling down of folklore
  • 重鎮(じゅうちん) = authority; leader
  • 洗練(せんれん) = refining; polishing
  • 荘厳(そうごん) = grand
  • 整然(せいぜん) = orderly; systematic
  • 御伽噺(おとぎばなし) = fairy tale (i.e. it’s not real / child-telling). Has Furigana in context. お(とぎ) is keeping company / nursing. おとぎ(ばなし) is OK too.
  • 光熱費(こうねつひ) = cost of fuel and lighting
  • 丘陵地帯(きゅうりょうちたい) = hilly area
  • 威風堂々(いふうどうどう) = majestic
  • ()()相応(そうおう) = ideal topography = 四神相応(しじんそうおう)(). An ideal topography for the four Taoist gods, with a river in the east, a broad avenue in the west, a basin in the south, and a hill in the north

SFX

  • ムキムキ = muscular

Kanji

  • (Level 34)
    • ジュウ
      • 縦断(じゅうだん),     操縦(そうじゅう)
      • 縦横無尽(じゅうおうむじん)

Replies

Although I don’t really know the answer, searching the phrase directly (e.g. in DuckDuckGo), would reveal websites claiming to teach business Japanese. Perhaps I can trust those?

image

image

These are from Google 日本語入力 – Google.

15 Likes

December 29th!

I was planning to read the final chapter of Orange today, but thought I’d better finish my bookclub reading first, so I read this weeks ABBC portion of Cells at Work.
It took me 2.5h to claw my way through 14 pages and I’m mentally exhausted now so Orange will have to wait until tomorrow!

(Home Post)

17 Likes

December 29 :heavy_check_mark: :ramen:

おいしいごはんが食べられますように, 71-100%

Fastest Japanese book I’ve read so far! 4 days only. Admittedly it was a short one (162 pages in paperback), but I’m still proud of myself. It was surprisingly hard to put down, and easy to read for an Akutagawa prize winner.

So I unexpectedly finished one more book during 2022, and the count is now as follows:

Title Pages Days
1 佐賀のがばいばあちゃん 237 ~11
2 夜カフェ 192 ~12
3 三毛猫ホームズの推理 368 21
4 告白 320 23
5 夜市 179 10
6 208 23
7 化身 275 29
8 つぐみ 245 17
9 十角館の殺人 512 15
10 秋の牢獄 223 10
11 体育館の殺人 379 12
12 叙述トリック短編集 336 24
13 おいしいごはんが食べられますように 162 4

I don’t particularly like that number :sweat_smile: but I don’t think I can hope to finish another book in the two remaining days of the year, so 13 it is!

19 Likes

Caught up with 2 more book clubs! All manga up to date now.

29/12 38 pages Orange (whole letter plus some), 15 pages Cells at Work (this week’s reading plus couple of pages), 3 pages 夜カフェ

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Home post :bookmark: // :maple_leaf::fallen_leaf: Dec 29 :snowman_with_snow::christmas_tree:

・ 本好きの下克上 15 (33% → 70%)

Reading a lot went surprisingly okay! :3 Big part of it is because this book is so great, I can’t praise the author enough. Another part is that I’ve found it very effective to use a pen (or similar item) to trace the sentences as I read them. Or vice versa maybe. Trace the sentence and follow the pen with my eyes. Goes a lot faster since I’m not losing track as much while I’m reading. Just chase the pen with my eyes :writing_hand: :eyes:

18 Likes

Finished it in one day. Holy cow. 100% recommend. What a rollercoaster.

What page count starts to qualify as a book vs short story and how many hours do you have? Cause we could totally sneak another on in with an Aozora + 朗読. :upside_down_face:

14 Likes

Home

I plug my phone into my laptop to download the『明日をくれた君』の朗読 onto it since I hadn’t done that yet and find that literally all the music and audio dramas have disappeared from off my phone, except for one of the songs that I had bought off iTunes. Lovely. So I just re-added all the audio dramas, the 2.43 soundtrack, and Re:coll and left it at that for now. So freaking annoyed. Hm, I think I’m gonna try and see about getting the mini dramas on the 2.43 official site, which are in video form, onto my phone as mp3s too. Oh, speaking of, since the videos are all linked from twitter, I should make sure I have everything downloaded in case the muskrat man-child does actually tank it…

Anyway, I read the last 34 pages of 明日をくれた君に、光のラブレターを. aaaaaaaaaa it was so sad. So good, but so sad. The epilogue cleared some things up, and some things I’d suspected it turns out were true, and it ended on a hopeful if still bittersweet note. Shame this book doesn’t get more attention, it was so good.

16 Likes

December 29 :maple_leaf: Home Post

Today I got back to 13 sentinels and played another section! It was a bit rougher of a read than the others have been just due to the characters involved and how they talk, but I got to meet the famous yakisoba pan man so it’s all worth it :joy: I’m still definitely in the beginning stages meeting all the characters and it’s a great time, but I’m also excited to get back to BU$TAFELLOWS tomorrow :eyes:

19 Likes

:phone: Home :broken_heart:

December 29

人間椅子 -

ジョジョの奇妙な冒険61
16 - 100

Oh man, about 250 pages to read in 2 days to meet my goal :cold_sweat: I got plans. Idk where I’m going to find the time for that :scream:

17 Likes

:grin: Oh, if we’re counting short stories I already have 人間椅子 which I’ve left out! :+1: And I could also add manga, or books I started last year and finished this year, or books I started this year but haven’t finished yet. It all gets a bit confusing, but ultimately, it doesn’t matter. I read a lot of good stuff this year, and I plan to read even more good stuff the next, and that’s what’s important! :books: (I still considered starting a 赤川 次郎 just in case I could fly through it, but it’s unfair to me and the book to be so time-focused, so I let it go.)

13 Likes

Home Post

Day 50 Progress:
お隣の天使様 五冊 - 18.92% → 26.19%

I’m still hanging in there!!

Actual decent reading today, maybe the fastest if I’ve ever been. My current goal is to be able to read about 10% of the book (around ~4500 words) in a reasonable time, like 2-3 hours. Then I can try to play a VN or something I actually want to read, lol.

Word of the Day: こしらえる - to make or manufacture. The kanji is making something exist with your fingers. Simple enough!

Hope you enjoy!! I’m not exaggerating when I say 13 Sentinels is probably my favorite piece of science fiction and maybe media in general from the last 2-3 years. When it kicks into high gear, it’s just one crazy nonstop ride to the finish.

17 Likes

:snowflake: :christmas_tree: December 30th :christmas_tree: :snowflake: (Home Post Link)

Read:

  • NHK News Web Easy: 中国から日本った 30から新型コロナの検査をする
  • ホリミヤ chapter 43 - harder chapter just because 堀さん gets 宮村君 to switch speaking styles and personalities to be more aggressive as a sorta kink thing? This part has never made a ton of sense to me, but it seems that they don’t really understand the “why” of it either. something something “gap” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ they are both in on it so you do you, lil weirdos
  • 夜カフェ page 7-8 - definitely quite a bit harder than magic treehouse, but once I got past about the first sentence I got into a pretty good flow. Comprehension bumpy, and still slow, but definitely felt short term do-able though!

I was just talking about the ず negative form with someone earlier, and then it came up in two of the things I was reading today, so that was some good timing :sweat_smile:

Good Words

NHK
検査「けんさ」ー inspection

ホリミヤ
妙「みょう」ー strange, weird
怒鳴る「どなる」ー to shout, to yell
盛り上がる「もりあがる」ー to get excited, to rouse
迷う「まよう」ー to hesitate (here 迷わず)
馴れ馴れしい「なれなれしい」ー overly familiar
痴話ゲンカ 「ちわげんか」ー lovers quarrel

夜カフェ
深呼吸「しんこきゅう」ー deep breath
思わず「おもわず」ー unconsciously, involuntarily (“without thinking”)
半紙「はんし」ー japanese calligraphy paper

replies

Right? Like, the books are in that library for a reason. They should be relatively readable for kids, it’s not like some first grader is picking up Paradise Lost. Some people get some weird ego trip from having the power to stop kids from doing something that they want to do (and something that’s good too! kids reading is a good thing why are you stopping this!) and it’s the worst.

!!! I’m even more excited to start it now :joy:

18 Likes

Last update 19d ago :joy: . I ended up disappearing again, whoops.

Wanted to leave just a brief update before the new thread starts. I’ve been in a nice routine with うたわれるもの, reading pretty much every day and adding a lot of vocabulary from it. The only downside is that they like to use less common kanji spellings for quite a few words, and luckily the monolingual dictionaries can usually tell which are more widely used but still, it’s kind of a waste to add something with different kanji instead of the more common ones so it’s been tricky in that sense. I guess in the end I don’t really mind adding the same word with different kanji in different situations with different context sentences, because at some point in the future I’ll eventually run out of things to add and going for those 20 words a day will be hard anyways, but if I come across a new word I would rather it be with the most common kanji first and then at some point later the variation, instead of learning the obscure version first.

But anyways the game is so far pretty nice, I have almost 50 hours clocked already. I’ll be honest, even if I’m understanding the vast majority with little issues, the overall story is a tiny tiny bit hard to follow sometimes. I know what is happening overall, but at the same time there are a couple things going on that make unifying the plot a bit challenging for me, like I know what happened so far but at the same time… it’s hard to link everything neatly and tell where it’s going :joy: . I should probably sit one day and write and think about all that has happened so far. Perhaps I’m still missing context, and I’m sure there are many things that I haven’t seen yet, or perhaps it’s also my brain which can’t keep track of things very well sometimes. The characters are so far really nice, I’m really enjoying the interactions between them and the slice-of-lifey scenes in between the story. I guess a good summary of my experience with this VN is that I started it with some curiosity for being a new VN after Loopers, then I thought I wasn’t really into it after a few hours, and then it started being pretty interesting and I started liking the characters more and more, and now I really enjoy reading it everyday, it’s become like a little ritual at this point → VN, Anki and chill. My HTML sheet says I’ve read almost 150k characters, but Textractor tracks things a bit weirdly sometimes in this VN so that’s probably not accurate at all by a few thousand characters. Still I’m pretty happy that I’ve read this much in a little less than a month, it’s more than the entirety of Loopers and that was a four-month schedule :joy: . It’s also the first game of a long trilogy so I have a lot of entertainment covered for a good portion of the coming year.

New VN club pick starts today which is also awesome, I’ll have a bit more variety with an already established routine. Hopefully this one brings me much more common vocabulary compared to the fantasy and war type of うたわれるもの.

17 Likes

Was looking forward to finishing コンビニ人間 this week, but it’s been very hard to read more than a sentence a day since I got very sick earlier this week.

With how much is still left and considering how much I can probably handle I have to abandon that idea. I’ll see how far I can get.

18 Likes

Oh no! :scream: Get better soon! :sneezing_face: :face_with_thermometer:

Just give yourself some proper rest, and soon you will finish the book in no time. :+1:

14 Likes

December 30th

:snowflake: :evergreen_tree:Home post:evergreen_tree::snowflake:

Card Captor Sakura volume 4 – progress report

Yesterday: Finished chapter 16, continued up to page 131.
Today: Finished chapter 17, continued up to page 176.

Almost done with the volume; in fact I stopped before the last dozen of pages on purpose to give myself an easy time finishing it tomorrow. :wink:


Word or expression of the day:
抜け道 - (ぬけみち) - bypath; secret path; way of escape; loophole; excuse

Honourable mention(s):
拝見 (+する) - (はいけん) - seeing, looking at
蛍 - (ほたる) - firefly

18 Likes