Today I managed to read 120 manga pages and a whole page from 5分で読める恐怖のラストの物語. It seems books I had a hard time reading in the past are much easier now.
Of course books are usually easier than visual novels and I won’t be happy until I can read all visual novels I’m interested in and understand most of it. There is still a very steep hill to climb.
Almost done with volume 7 of 無職転生. I feel like my reading speed has been increasing.
I didn’t expect the guy to be traumatized enough to get ED. This is funny, silly, and depressing at the same time.
Finished reading volume 2 of hero Avan yesterday. Will be diving into volume 3 today. I thought it was interesting as the focus turned to Roca more this volume and him being the key to have Matoriv join the party. It was quite fun and I think it will be a great source for returning to it later on. One of the differences with the Dai series, is that they seem to be forming more or less like a hero party in DQ and eventhough they’re constantly on the run the little moments together as a party really add to the experience.
So, if anyone’s interested how my diagnosis went, I scored just within the norm for hearing in background noise after all, although I had to really struggle to figure out the words and I think that if I didn’t 頑張る so much or was feeling a little bit worse I might as well get the score just below the norm. Still, it isn’t that hopeless, at least, even if the problem is there.
There are other things, thought, that are outside of the norms:
^ increased sensitivity to sound (as in, I was bothered by sounds most people consider normal - it was an interesting find, because I always thought my main problem was hypersensitivity to touch and that my sensitivity to sound is more or less normal. Just now I’m discovering that nope, the sound that toilet makes while flushing shouldn’t be perceived as annoying.)
^ problems with judging the sound pitch - well, I suspected that considering how people hate when I’m singing (and I like singing…) and how the pitch accent in Japanese is an alien concept to me
^ problems when I was hearing two sounds at the same time and I was to say what just my right/left ear was hearing. I consider this exercise impossible to be done 
All in all, not great not terrible, I guess. I had my suspicions confirmed that I struggle more than most, but it also wasn’t a complete disaster, so maybe with some extra work I will be able to conquer Japanese (and other languages) listening after all. 
Just finished reading through the last chapter of volume 3 of hero Avan. This volume dives more into Avan himself as he learns his new signature technique that makes up part of Avan Strash. It is quite good. I think my only disappointment is really just that Leila is there so she can wear sexy outfits, but that is not uncommon in DQ or Dai sadly. Anyway the volume ends on a good note and they add some crossover in an after special comic.
Next volume comes out in March next year 
In the meantime I think I’ll read more of Spy x Family starting tomorrow.
Day 82 \o/
I’m finally free of the graded readers I bought \o/
Finishing wadanohara means I’ve finished 4 manga so far, putting me ahead of my extensive reading goal of 3 manga by the end of the year.
18 more days to reach 100, hopefully my continual posts here aren’t annoying anyone >.>
I bought a book recently and got excited and wanted to share it here I also miss this place 
The book is in Japanese, but there’s English translations that run alongside (in rather literal English). It’s also mostly just full-page pictures too… but it’s still reading Japanese!
It’s all about Ukiyo-e, but focusing on yokai and ghosts and all that fun stuff.
Picture (it’s kinda hard taking photos of open books)
Also, I’ve been keeping up reading stories on Hukumusume almost daily, I’ve not been reading weekends and sometimes miss a busy day in the week, but thanks to these threads I’ve been keeping up the habit!
I’ve forgotten - when are we going to do the next challenge? Dec 1st or Jan 1st 
I think we were planning to start a new thread/challenge on January 1st!
Meanwhile, there’s me, I still haven’t written the summary post I meant to write for the Fall challenge 
I didn’t forget, I’ve just been trying to claw my way out of a stress hole for the entire month of November
Emerging back from the depths!!!
I haven’t had the chance to write for a while, I just came back from two busy weeks and a few last hectic days, but I’m back to normalcy again 
. I’ve been keeping up with NieR: Automata though! What a game, seriously, I’m loving it. I’ve played 27h so far, all in Japanese, and although I’ve most definitely missed nuance here and there, I’m surprisingly able to follow everything just fine. Now, the magic of these games is fully grasping the philosophical questions they raise; I would love to understand everything completely and not miss a thing, but time to time 
, I’ll get there some day hopefully!
But I’ve missed this thread a lot. I will try to keep posting semi frequently until January. But on a side note, I think I’ve kind of settled for an SRS app, finally, and the winner is Houhou. I just want to stop jumping from one to the other, and I like that Houhou is basically just custom WaniKani. So hopefully I will just put everything in there and that’s it to build my own collection, not changing again every couple of months. My only issue is that it doesn’t allow combinations like “zya” for じゃ 
, it’s my preferred way over “ja” but it’s a small inconvenience.
But anyways it’s nice to read you guys again 
I hope everyone’s been doing well!
I continued with the challenge. I even found a way to change the calendar to include a November checklist. Now I have finally finished 天使な小生意気 Vol. 1. Most of the words I didn’t understand but I know the story because I have watched the entire anime and read the entire manga. I also have the English translation of Vol. 1. So I figured it would be no problem to go through the manga. Well, I was right. Now that I’ve finished Vol. 1, I have remembered why I only read this manga once. This was written back in the time when persistent harassment equaled love. Anyway, I have finally finished. I skipped a few days coming down to the end. I got caught up in an English series, The Expanse. However, I remembered that I only had a few pages to read so I decided to finish it today.
I went searching on Bookwalker and there is another sale on. I got over 20 volumes of manga free. Now I am spoiled for choice. What should I read next, a shoujo or shonen? Well, I can decide that tomorrow. Or maybe I should take a few days break and start again in December? It only took me a month or so to read 天使な小生意気 if I exclude the breaks and the times that I only read one page. Well, I will see how I feel tomorrow.
Read through volume 2 of Spy x Family. It was much easier to read compared to volume 1, so something is going well. Despite that it is still wrecking me here and there lol. Anya is still really cute and the star of the manga. This volume ending on quite a cliffhanger, so I gotta continue reading
After finishing this volume I’ll take a break from reading (every day). Oh and I reached 30 volumes read on bookmeter. 
Finished volume 8 of 無職転生 earlier this week, and started 9. It’s been much more lighthearted compared to 7. Never thought I would be reading about someone’s quest to cure his boner., but here we are 
I’m kinda confused about シルフィ and フィッツ now though, because I could swear that they were talking to each other as separate characters in a short segment of Volume 8, but most of the time it looks as if it’s really just 1 character. The way that other characters are referred to during her short segments kinda gives it away that the writer is trying to pull one on the reader. I just hope it’s not some kind of split personality / body or any other overly convoluted explanation or asspull, which I’ve come to really dislike in a lot of fantasy storytelling.
Yes, I am still reading but I think the book I have now Is boring so I think I’ll start reading more things I want to.
I do love times at work like today where everyone is being lazy and I get to read about horse races in Japanese hehe.
Isnt the whole point of immersion getting comprehensible input?
オトメン is giving me trouble. The dialogue uses longer sentence structures which I have trouble parsing because it involves monologues and soliloquies so the pictures don’t really give a sense of plot. So I am finding myself lost on the plot. I did read a translation of オトメン years ago but I don’t really remember all the plot points. Also, shoujo manga seems to use quite a lot of fancy fonts and decorations which distorts the words a bit so I can’t understand the writing sometimes. For example, the highlighted panel in the picture below. I can’t figure out what is written there.
I believe that says あっ りょーちゃーん. Is there a character named りょー?
There’s a userscript called Jitai that lets you do your WK reviews in a variety of fonts (with the ability to see the plain font by mousing over). I’ve found it super helpful for learning to read unusual fonts!
Thanks for that. Yes, there is a character called Ryou.
I’m still reading every day just less than during the challenge. Either way I am super busy the whole month so there won’t be much time for reading. Right now I’m reading [老後に備えて異世界で8万枚の金貨を貯めます and playing the newest mystery horror game in japanese.
Getting pretty close to my goal of 100 days, lately I’ve mostly been reading Demon Slayer the manga and dabbling in the game and anime when I’ve unlocked enough of them by reading ahead in the manga.
This puts me at 94 days, so only 6 to go including today (haven’t counted yet as I haven’t finished reading).
It’s been really fun tracking the number of pages I’ve read as I can see a very clear growth, and the number of grammar points I encounter which I have no idea about has decreased a lot (many of them I won’t be 100% on, but any improvement above 0% is really big).
Sometimes I can go entire days without having to crank open the grammar dictionary, whereas I used to be using it multiple times a page. Still lots and lots of vocab to look up, but still counting this a huge win.
