I am reading Chapter 4 of 青ブタ11 and I am in “Chore Mode” where I am getting enough to get by but my mindset is more on finishing than enjoying it. I am literally about to be done, its interesting, but its just longer than the more recent volumes so the small details of what train station he is at or what food they want to eat is becoming quite the grind.
I have an hour and a half left. I can and probably will finish today. But I am gonna need a break from the series until my vacation.
Home 
December 18
人間椅子 -
ジョジョの奇妙な冒険57
116 - 131
I forgot to read during the day, so I only had Notorious BIG at night and I did not want to read far 
him and his stand creep me out!
I read this week’s assignment for 体育館の殺人, a few chapters of 黄金仮面, and my advent reading. I’m below 100 pages left in 3 of my 5 books left for the year (technically ユージニア won’t be finished this year as the book club runs long). I’ll probably be able to finish 2-3 books next week which is wild 
December 18th (Home Post Link)
Extremely busy day, so didn’t get to start reading until super late. But managed to sneak some in!
Oh! Just noticed from my calendar update that today is day 90 since I started committing to an extensive reading program! So, basically, 3 straight months of reading at least 15-20 minutes a day minimum, usually vastly overshooting that. Also, 3 months since I stopped sentence mining/anki/wanikani reviews (not looking forward to that if I choose to go back and catch up on those 
)
Read:
NHK
避難「ひなん」ー taking refuge
アンケート ー questionnaire (from "enquête”… aaah the french…)
財団「ざいだん」ー foundation (institution)
なるべくー as much as possible, if possible
ホリミヤ
不良「ふりょう」ー delinquent, hooligan
加減「かげん」ー extent
拗ねる「すねる」ー to pout, to sulk
敵わない「かなわない」ー no match for, powerless against
Posting for yesterday again. Another fairly good day. I think the next few may not be great - I have an overnight flight Tuesday so will prob read a bit at the airport.
18/12 8 pages かみさまがまちがえる, 3 pages 夜カフェ, 1 page おばちゃんたちのいるところ (finished chapter 4), 6 pages Cells at Work (finished last week’s reading)
December 18 
Home Post
I was pretty busy again today so didn’t do a whole lot, mostly just figured out my BU$TAFELLOWS purchase method and adjacently remembered that 13 sentinels is on sale for a couple more days so I ended up messing with the demo to see if I wanna grab it as well. I haven’t 100% decided yet, I’ve heard a lot of good things and it’s definitely the sort of thing I like, but it seems less VN-like than other stuff I’ve played which could make it more challenging at this point, though I kept up with it pretty well in what I played so who knows! Either way I’m excited to get going on BU$TAFELLOWS again, I should have time to play tomorrow 
Day 39 Progress:
お隣の天使様 四冊 - 64.08% → 66.19%
It’s kinda funny that when I’m desperately trying to get some reading before three hours of sleep and work is when I feel like I’m reading the most fluently. Probably because my brain has chosen not to tell me I know nothing and is too busy urging me to hurry up and read so I can pass out.
Word of the Day: 陰口を
Well… Chapter 4 was a chore the first half and then things ramped up real quick and the ending made me wanna read volume 12 right after. JUST WHEN I THOUGHT I WAS OUT THIS SERIES PULLS ME BACK IN! X_X
For real though I won’t read 青ブタ12 until my trip. I’ll just finish Shield Hero 2 this time, I swear! But that climax and ending really got me out of Chore Mode.
this might not be exactly what this thread is about, but i need some tips.
I read two light novels during the summer and the most annoying thing was, even though i wrote down the words I didn’t know and had to research (too many 
) i could never remember them and I could never find them in my list when they appeared again.
how do you guys deal with finding the words in your vocab list again when you had written them down like 2-3 chapters ago? do you have a digital list, that is searchable? or do you group words into categories?
would be grateful for any advice because I’m in the third volume and I’m kind of stuck, because the motivation died down with all the research.
I tried going the SRS route and that drove me kind of insane. My recommendation is just keep looking them up when they come up and your less than 70% sure what the meaning is the next time you see it. Reading is great way to rep new words. It can be frustrating after so many look ups for the same word but trust me, you’re brain is in fact doing what it needs to remember the words. Eventually those trouble words become “the word I keep having to look up” and then you never forget it.
I have over the years had two approaches:
the “assume they’ll come up again” approach – here I don’t even write down vocabulary I encounter and don’t know, I just do dictionary lookups to the minimum necesssary to be able to understand and move forward in the book. I figure that eventually words will repeat and I’ll pick them up over time.
the “use an SRS” approach – this is similar except I just throw the words into an SRS periodically (my dictionary has a “history list of words looked up” feature) and spend 15 minutes a day in reviews. The trick here is making the process of going from a word to having a new SRS card as quick and automated as possible. Currently I’m using jpdb.io, which has some pre-existing decks for some books and also makes it easy-ish to add new cards for given words. If you read e-books it’s possible to automate further, but since I read paper books I can’t advise there.
In either case if a word comes up twice in a book I don’t try to re-find old notes or anything, I just look it up in the dictionary again.
Some other suggestions:
It seems (to me, at least) like people have a pretty negative reaction towards looking words up while reading. “It breaks immersion to look up words” is a pretty common sentiment, but as far as I can tell there’s really not a lot of evidence for this being the case (I am a linguist preparing for grad school in the applied linguistics of second language acquisition, and have been doing a published academic literature review alongside this japanese reading challenge).
Once you look up a word the first time, you start to form partial knowledge of that word, how it’s applied, and get baseline of understanding for what it means. Just because you need to look it up again doesn’t mean you are back to square one with the word. You’ve already seen it once (or a even few times), and now you just are seeing it and reinforcing it more. In some studies, even with seeing words up to 20 times(!!) participants still were needing to look up words to remind themselves of parts of meaning or usage.
While it’s true that if you are looking up every single word all the time your reading is going to be slow and laborious (perhaps at that point you might want to look for an easier bit of reading), look-ups, especially quick refresher look-ups, have a bad reputation that I don’t think they rightly deserve.
Might not be the most practical advice, but as long as they don’t make you not want to read anymore, using a dictionary here and there for words you already partially know is fine!
thank you for the advice.
I had that with one word, because it was so annoying to look up and the reading was kun for both kanji and now it is burned into my mind. won’t repeat it here because nsfw
thank you. I also prefer a paper book over ebooks especially since my kindle doesn’t work with japanses books (too old) and on the tablet the display lights make my eyes go all weird when I stop reading…
I guess i just have to go with the look up technique. I don’t really like using apps and looking up via tablet while reading the paper book is ok, but I thought there might be something easier.
but I guess I stop writing the words don as you suggested since I never look back onto the list anyways
wow . the wanikani people seem to be smart 
I already have difficulty when my danish teacher starts to talk about the different tenses with their proper term 
thank you for the info.
the problem I have is, that with looking the words up on a online dictionary I can’t read while I don’t have an internet connection… so no reading japanese on the train or something. and most paper dictionaries are either too big or they don’t have those slang term or not really daily life words that appear.
There are dictionary apps that work offline. If you have apple products, I can heartily recommend Midori that works offline. (It isn’t free, but it was cheap when I bought it many years ago, and I think it is still a similar price). When I care to save my lookups (like when I’m reading a longer work and I want to know how much I look up), that app lets you bookmark terms and save them to folders. So far I haven’t done anything with that. Only used it to see how many different folders I’ve saved a word to.
I know there are other apps out there that also work offline. So that is the benefit of looking up via an app on your phone/tablet.
ah! in that case writing down words you’ve looked up could be really helpful, actually! If you can organize them well, it should make finding things you already know that you have looked up before much faster. I was assuming (sorry ) that you were able to use a quick online dictionary, which is usually must faster to do very quick searches than making your own lookup sheet.
Hmmm, finding a system that works well for you might be pretty personal, though. Searching them will definitely be easier if you do it digitally (even if you just keep a list on a notes app on your phone, or something like that).
I believe you can also download an offline version of some japanese dictionaries to use, if that seems like a better option. I’m pretty sure there are some that let you bookmark and tag words specifically for organizing them like this. (ah MissDager beat me to this point 
)
So, to clarify, the reason I don’t like looking up words while I’m reading is because I enjoy reading, and I don’t particularly enjoy doing dictionary lookups. I thus want an hour of reading to have as much reading and as little dictionary use as I can get away with. By “interrupts the reading flow” I mean mainly that if it takes too long to look up a word or I get distracted into checking multiple dictionaries then I forget where in the paragraph I was and have to re-read bits of the text.
Oh I’m sorry if it seemed like that was targeted at anyone! (I hadn’t fully ready your reply until after I posted mine, whoops) It’s just a kind of general sentiment I’ve seen in language learning communities (not just japanese, even). How much you use a dictionary is definitely a personal preference (and whatever keeps you motivated and enjoying it is the most important thing, in the end), I just find that people, especially when they are starting to read, are way too scared of over-using it when they would still get a lot of benefit from doing more lookups than they are currently doing.
My approach to this is the very old-school 1990s solution of a standalone electronic dictionary:
but as @MissDagger says, there are smartphone offline dictionary apps that are going to be cheaper and less faff than a special-purpose dictionary.