Busy busy busy. Freeze is coming soon, so had to go do a bunch of garden work today. No more fresh ネギ for my soups
Read:
赤い手袋 – oh wow, the imagery in this was way better than I was expecting from something that would be at a readable level for me. I really really liked this, thank you for sharing @pocketcat ! I was not familiar with 小川 未明, but I’ll definitely be checking out some other writings. I’d say maybe softer end of N3 for the level, but nice practice for some literary form stuff with the rest of the grammar being on the easier side (or maybe i’m just inexperienced in reading anything that’s not 日常系 manga )
Tae Kim 183 → 192 – causative and passive forms
からかい上手の高木さん → chapter 12, 13
Good Words
互い「たがい」ー each other, one another (noun)
疑い「うたがい」ー doubt, suspicion
照れる「てれる」ー to be embarrassed
ごまかす ー to evade (a question), to dodge
6/11 11 pages Spy Family (to end mission 14), 14 pages 夜カフェ (to end chapter 11), 4 pages シャドーハウス
Basically caught up with last week’s reading of Spy Family and 夜カフェ. Bribed myself that if I do that I can read a little more of シャドーハウス! Now I just need to start the IBC read and read last week’s reading plus this one, and I’m kind of up to date!
I’ll probably try to finish 夜カフェ volume 2 in the next couple of days.
Oh yes, I can see that. I suppose when I said “~N4” last night I was thinking “if someone has all the N4 grammar down” but it’s a bit ambiguous. There may well be some N3 grammar in there as well, I’m not totally sure But I’m glad you liked it! It’s always a joy to discover gems like that, much of the earlier level Japanese reading material can be a bit tedious.
(Deleted first response as I realized I wasn’t sure which letter we’re talking about – are you at the “post arrives” section which has three letters in succession?)
Anyway, yeah, I tend to skim over the letters and other examples of that classical-ish written form, because I’m too lazy to study what it means in more modern grammar/vocab.
Just to let you know that we even ran a whole book club on his short stories! Here is an overview of which stories were best received by the participants:
And if you go to the OP of that thread, you can find individual discussion threads for each story, with grammar Q&A, contents discussions and everything.
Yes the post arrives part, I was talking about the first letter, I decided to stop reading after that because it was too much
Glad to know that it isn’t really meant to be properly understood, I could get that it was about the victory of the Russo-Japanese war and that charity would be appreciated but all the additional fluff and crazy kanji went over my head (and no commas, no full stops, nothing to separate anything from anything)
I only read a tiny 1% yesterday due to lack of time, but managed to finish the first chapter today with time to spare. The way information is revealed gradually is nothing short of tantalizing. I’m really enjoying it so far. This is my first Riku Onda, and if the book continues like it started, it definitely won’t be my last.
Tomorrow it’s time for the new Autumn Prison re-read club, although I’m not sure how much reading time I’ll have. And then on to the next portion of the Mystery Club pick. This is a very busy reading month.
That’s about how much of it I got, too. I assume Soseki’s original readers would have read it as a parody of the style of actual charity-begging-letters they might have got through their door, though.
Something that I’ve noticed about reading through these transcripts is how I can parse so much of what she says, but when I move over to NHK Easy articles, it feels like a different ballpark. I don’t think that it is a matter of using simple kanji, because these are chock-full of new words every time I go through them. However, it’s almost like their sentence structure is different from other Japanese material I read? Not too sure about it, but it’s good practice nonetheless.
Today I read chapters 29 and 30 of Shadows House, and then started reading God Bless the Mistaken. I’ve only read half of the first chapter but it seems interesting so far!
Hehe, new character + character development of another character. Maybe won’t be as annoying anymore. Spoiler: New character Charlotte is very cute. Wilfried (or however his name is spelled) is realizing that there are several sides/truths to a matter/incident. Also finally starting to show respect for Ferdinand.
Thought I found a typo: 階段を上がる . 上がる is intransitive and should take the particle が, not を. Thought it was supposed to be 階段を上る, but then they used the same phrase just inflected (階段を上がってきた).
I guess you could think of those as the “を with a normally-intransitive verb of movement” thing? The examples with more than a handful of cites are all stairs and slopes and ladders and so on.
Some of the hits are not real examples, incidentally – for instance if you look at “料理を上がる” they turn out to all be 料理をお召し上がる…
I feel your pain. I just finished the ユージニア chapter, plan to cram in 体育館の殺人 and 秋の牢獄, and I need to read the next section of 死仮面 I took ユージニア so slow because I kept getting distracted by little details and looking things up, hopefully the others aren’t so intense
November 6th 
)
November 5
Nov 6 
I took ユージニア so slow because I kept getting distracted by little details and looking things up, hopefully the others aren’t so intense