Onto the final story of それいけズッコケ三人組. The previous story took yet another unexpected dark turn when they found a box of toys belonging to a family who’d been killed in WW2 bombing so I’m starting to think this is normal for these book/this author/Japanese children’s literature? The story I’ve just started is about a TV quiz show though so hopefully that’s going to be a bit cheerier, and at least not have quite so many synonyms for clusters of trees as the last story did.
:: TANUKIDATE 20211005 :: Day XXXV: ネズミの会議 
& 人にだまされたタヌキ 
Two pretty short stories today.
First one was on the home page and is a cute story about some mice holding a council on what to do about a cat.
Second one was today’s Japanese folktale, and it’s the well-known one about the mischievous tanuki and the tree, first time reading it in Japanese though!
Also, today is Timetable Day - 時刻表記念日 
Look how happy this little guy is to be doing some timetabling:
~ New Words & Meanings ~
ビクビク - Onomatopoeia for trembling (in fear)
賛成 (さんせい) - Agreement: It’s here on WK, but I didn’t know you could use it as a stand alone word like this - similar to how people say “aye!” when in favour of a vote on something.
ネズミ - Mouse: not a new word, but I wondered what the kanji is - 鼠.
達磨忌 (だるまき) - Daruma Doll, don’t think I’ve seen this in kanji before.
Thanks for mentioning this, I’ll check it out at some point soon!
Microsoft could definitely learn a lot from this thread, there’s a lot of scope for cute mascots in Outlook.
Day 34:
日本語: I read a lot of はめふら 11 (and finished it), as well as a bit of パノラマ島綺譚.
中国語
中国語: I read 男朋友, 老板, and 教做菜. I added 男朋友.
Day 25（10月 3日) 
What did I read:
雨と君と, only that, just about 10min before bed, I was soooo tired
Day 26（10月 4日)
What did I read:
Inspired by the ever constant stable in this reading journey, hakumusume site, one of the 百物語’s, from Yamagata Prefecture. this one, 嫁になった雪女
Honestly, I don’t even remember what I read, I was so tired and only read in order not to miss a day… I’m away from home this week, and only brought with my ヨナmanga for the bookclub sessions, so hakumusume and random net articles will be my staple 
Day 27（10月 5日)
What did I read:
山形県
•Prefecture’s emblem
taken after the shape of 
mountains, but also representing Mogami river. The three acute triangles are also supposed to symbolise Yamagata’s developement…
•Prefecture tree: サクランボ、the cherry 
I’m the Meiji era it was the first Rosacaea species to be introduced from America.
•Prefecture flower: べにばな(紅花), Safflower
Used as a dye and cosmetics raw material ingredient. The seeds can be used to make cooking oil. The weather conditions would be suitable in The Valley area, so it’s cultivation for its colouring properties has been going on since the beginning of Edo era, and had been prosperous.
•Prefecture bird: オシドリ(鴛鴦), the mandarin duck
The ones in the parks are used to human presence and you can even feed them, but the ones in the wild are always alert, so it’s actually unusual to see them from up close.
•Prefecture fish サクラマス(桜鱒), the cherry hybrid salmon (?? first time hearing this)
Kinda confused about the life and hatching circle, but anyways, females come back to rivers around spring time (to hatch? After hatching?) and so they are the harbringers of spring for the rivers and sea, since they enter river waters when the cherry blossoms bloom… that’s cute
•Prefecture animal: カモシカ, the serrow.
I’ve never seen this animal before, and again, I’m getting to sleepy to read up on it, so here is a humble picture of it! I will came back for it tomorrow!!
some vocab
改良種 かいりょうしゅ= improved strain, improved breed
熟す こなす = to ripen
導入 どうにゅう =introduce
二年草 にねんそう=biennial plant 
化粧品 けしょうひん =cosmetics
染料 せんりょう =dye
警戒心 けいかいしん =wariness
October 5th
Satori Reader: Secret, episode 53.
Random words
- 亭主 = ていしゅ household head, master, (often) husband.
- 配達 = はいたつ delivery → 新聞配達 .
- 整備工場 = せいびこうじょう repair shop, garage → 自動車整備工場 .
- しょっちゅう = always, constantly, frequently (J-J dictionary uses いつも and 常に to define it so probably just another synonym). Also interesting pitch accent pattern, I thought it would be ↓↑ but it’s actually ↑↓ .
- 気の毒 = きのどく interesting term, it means that your heart aches from something happening to another person, that you feel pity for them. → 気の毒だったよ。
- 内心 = ないしん real thoughts, inner intention, what you really think deep down.
Thank you! <3 
. I had a similar day today, but I remembered about yesterday and your messages and it was a bit easier to sit and do it.
Overall I’m not too engaged in this Satori Reader story, surprisingly after having worked through 53 episodes already. But I’m still learning quite a lot; I chose it mainly because it was one of the harder ones, and there is useful unknown vocabulary in every episode. But again, it has been a roller coaster of somewhat flat episodes and very exciting ones, over and over. I will finish it because I still want to know what happens, but summer’s challenge was easier in the sense that the two stories I was reading back then kept my interest much more. I also liked the voice acting of those two much more than this one, not because this one is bad, but it just doesn’t do it for me. The main objective is reading the stories, but listening to it afterwards is really nice, because the quality is great.
But luckily I have a couple games that keep my interest really high, so it’s good whenever I don’t feel like doing Satori Reader. I recently got NieR: Automata and I really, really want to play it. It is quite daunting, however, because there are dialogues that go by fast and there’s no time to read and process, but it helps that they are voice acted, and boy is it goooooooood. I’m not really into seiyuu, meaning that I don’t know the names of anybody pretty much, but the protagonist of NieR is apparently performed by Yui Ishikawa, the same seiyuu that did Mikasa from Attack on Titan and I always loved Mikasa’s voice acting so much. I thought that whenever I’m completely lost I can always watch a Let’s Play on YouTube of the parts I played and stop whenever I need.
Day 35: October 5
What did I read?: ハイ☆スピード!
How much did I read?: 5 pages
How long did it take me?: 1 hour 4 min
Rinrin returns 
He will never escape this nickname and I’m living for it
The saga of Rinrin continues
It’s the next day in class, and Aki starts talking to Haru about how happy she is that he decided to join the relay. Haru is sure Rin’s the one who told her he’d finally agreed to do it - Rin’s nearby, but he’s pretending like he’s not listening. Anyway, Aki’s like, oh, I’m sure your team will get number one, you guys are all so fast!
Haru, being deadpan savage as usual: “It’s not my team” raising his voice so literally everyone can hear “Rinrin’s the leader”
Cue laughter
Rin, embarrassed, comes over to them and starts spinning this story about how people at his old school used to call him “Rin-chan” to bully him so please don’t call me Rinrin or I’ll have to transfer again, which Aki takes seriously but Haru doesn’t buy for a second. (Honestly, I thought maybe he was serious for a sec too, but then he calls himself “shy” and I’m like…ok, I’m calling BS on this, you just don’t want your adorable new nickname catching on xD Poor baby)
Then, with epic comedic timing, Makoto comes into the classroom, blissfully unaware: “oh hey Haru, Aki, Rinrin” 
Aki, bless her heart, chides him for it and tells him what Rin just told her, which makes him laugh because it seems so unrealistic. But in the end, he kind of smooths things over and brings the conversation to an end without directly calling Rin out.
Cut to the four boys running to the swim club after school
Nagisa calls Rin Rinrin again, and Rin gets super annoyed
Turns out NAGISA REALLY THOUGHT THAT WAS HIS NAME He really thought that’s how the kanji read. Oh sweet baby angel
(Rin’s name in kanji is 凛 btw, which I really like. …Maybe partially because I associate it with him xD But it’s also a cool kanji imo)
Nagisa’s like, oh well, Rinrin’s fine. He turns and asks Haru, not Rin, if it’s ok.
Haru, without missing a beat - sure it’s fine
These two
(But Makoto steps in and manages to get Nagisa to shift to Rin-chan instead, I think he feels bad for Rin xD)
On a more serious note, we get a little window into the reasons Haru wasn’t super excited about the idea of joining the relay team - normally, he swims because it lets him feel free, but with the relay, all those social burdens and expectations he loathes are coming right into the water with him. No wonder he wasn’t/isn’t that into it. …Felt kind of bad for him, tbh, reading that - I totally get where he’s coming from.
Good words:
- 素知らぬ顔 (そしらぬかお) - pretending not to recognize (recognise); feigned ignorance
- お節介 (おせっかい) - meddling; meddlesomeness; nosiness; interference; officiousness
- しがらみ - bonds; fetters; ties of obligation (Did I put this one already, I can’t remember)
- 怒らせる (いからせる) - to square one’s shoulders (didn’t know this could read like that/mean that)
- 昂る (たかぶる) - to become aroused (of emotions, nerves, etc.); to become excited; to become stirred up; to become worked up
- ぶつける - to express; to vent (e.g. one’s anger)
- うさん臭い (うさんくさい) - suspicious-looking; shady; questionable; dubious; fishy
My turn to remember this advice, and just try to find my place where I left off and read a couple sentences, which turned into a whole page! Not a ton, but it only took a few minutes, and I got my reading done. 
Bonbon (switching to romaji for time-saving purposes) has been kidnapped by the fairy prince, who left a fake Bonbon to stay with Nako. Nako has a feeling something is wrong though, because this Bonbon has better manners and isn’t such a 食いしん坊 (doesn’t even ask Nako to share her cookies!) The last thing I read today was
「やっぱりあんたはボンボンじゃない」
Is that why they titled the anime Free? 
That’s an excellent vocab word! It reminded me of when I learned the word for appetite a few years back: 食欲.
Thank you for this!! Google image searching カモシカ was one of the best parts of my night. It’s like a cross between a goat and a wolf!
Ooh, that’s a good one. It has a nice rhyme and rhythm to it.
Day 35: Read 6 pages of よつば＆！Because a couple of the pages didn’t have much on them. 
Home post - October 6th
Sorry for the long post, I’ve tried to break it into sections so its easier to skip, just had a very exciting day and wanted to share parts of it.
Realising I'm very close to my reading-adjacent personal goal
Today I realised I’m close to something like a big personal milestone.
I’d tried and failed to learn Japanese a few times, textbooks and classes really didn’t work for me, and I kept struggling with Kanji - So when I restarted learning Japanese almost a year ago I wanted it to be different this time.
I decided to try Wanikani and to focus primarily on the goal of racing towards being able to read - particularly manga.
I sat down with general vocab lists (Genki, top 1k words, etc.) and specific manga vocab lists (よつばと！, しろくま, and a few others) and added all the words which seemed useful / common / re-occurring to Anki.
Since I’ve been adding to it from other manga (からかい上手の高木さん, 大海原と大海原) as well as things I came across (e.g. video games, overhearing in anime) and items I burn in wanikani.
Excluding wanikani-burned items from Anki, I only have 70 vocab items left to learn!
Through this process I’ve learned at least 789 vocab items, and actually a bunch more as many of the words I learned I later burned in wanikani. This isn’t including verbs which I track separately and are harder to get solid numbers on.
I only uncovered this because this morning I was vocab mining, and I asked myself “why are you trying to find new vocab? don’t you have plenty waiting to learn still? wait, how much do I have left?” - and then I realised that the majority remaining unlearned in anki are from burning in wanikani, and that I really did need to find more =p
So in that spirit I spent the majority of my non-work time today working on typing up most of chapter 2 for 王様ランキング.
王様ランキング
I’ve been working on typing up the first 2 chapters and mining unfamiliar but repeating vocab (within the context of the story), as well as any grammar patterns the leap out at me.
I haven’t ‘properly’ started reading it, but I’ve been breaking down sentences which leap out at me, skim reading to check I roughly understand moving pieces, and making character sheets showing important details (e.g. familiar relationships, tensions).
I think I might try also do this process for chapter 3 before I go back and ‘properly’ read it from the beginning. This will be my first manga outside of a WK book club.
Even though I have tried to not read everything, I think I’ve accidentally absorbed the majority so far just from my skim reading and typing.
Fun words from 王様ランキング
So far it’s mostly been learning medieval fantasy theme words and a few general words
騎士 きし knight
剣術 けんじゅつ kenjutsu (sword martial arts)
王冠 おうかん crown
死刑 しけい death penalty
身なり みなり appearance
裸 はだか nudity
I think today’s favourite word has to be 「ソードマスター」 meaning sword master。
Why I am so super excited for 王様ランキング (2nd personal goal?)
I am honestly so super excited to read 王様ランキング.
When I visited Japan I wanted to pick out some beginner friendly manga so I scoured all the lists I could find online and picked a good selection, and then on top of that I bought this book - something about it just spoke to me - it wasn’t on any lists, in fact googling for it gave me no results in English - I just really liked the look of it, it had furigana, sentences didn’t seem too long - my Japanese wasn’t good enough to actually assess difficulty but it seemed like a fun gamble.
I was really quite stumped about not being able to find anything about it online in English, once back in my hotel room I was able to work out the title and kanji used in the authors name and was able to find entries for it on the Japanese internet.
Since then they’ve announced an anime for it, and there are now plenty of English results, it turns out I’d picked it up ~7 months after they’d started publishing and it just hadn’t made its way across yet.
This book has been sitting on my shelf for nearly 2 years, it had seemed impenetrable, but thanks to recent reading with the ABBC when I picked it up this time for a look it seemed… tractable - which seems like I’m close to a 2nd personal goal =O
Looking at カラフル and 時をかける少女
I spent some time breaking down parts of the few few paragraphs for カラフル and 時をかける少女 to assess them for difficulty and usefulness of vocab.
時をかける少女 seemed to have a lot of school specific vocab and some strange verbs, I loved the movie of this when I was a teenager.
カラフル seemed more fun but does have a lot of death / afterlife specific terms and seemed still quite a bit beyond where I currently am in terms of grammar and vocab, but I collected ~60 words in a spreadsheet from it, still have to decide which subset are worth Anki-ing at this point - but I suspect I’ll slowly chip away at making a カラフル vocab specific Anki deck as I think I’m too intrigued to not try it at some point.
Starting a grading reader, but being too tired to finish
I started reading a graded reader 絵姿奥さん, but was too tired to make significant progress, so I’ll finish that tomorrow.
Read another chapter at lunchtime. I’m finding that the aspect of reading that I’m struggling with the most is adverbs. Not adverbs like 大きい becoming 大きく but the seemingly endless さすが, やがて etc that appear, often at the start of a sentence. I’m on the Minna no Nihongo intermediate books and I feel like they’re just starting to introduce a few of these each chapter, but the more I read, the more I’m just being hit by a wall of seemingly endless new ones.
Obviously this is good in that its giving me exposure to different words from my textbook, and they’re generally not difficult to look up because they’re nearly always in hiragana but there are so many of them! And without kanji, I don’t have any clue to what they might mean. Has anyone else found this?
I have a separate section for onomatopoeia in my flashcards, starting to wonder if I need to separate the adverbs out as well and just make a concerted effort to learn them, or whether I’ll pick them up the more I read, especially if I stick to one author (I have another 2 books in this series).
It’s mostly at the beginning, afterwards it’s mainly school/family setting.
And congratulations on (being close to) reaching personal goals! 
:: TANUKIDATE 20211006 :: Day XXXVI: 十二味のとうがらし 
You’ve probably heard of the classic Shichimi, the seven spices of tasty, but this is about the super secret illusive magical 12 spices of legend!
Plot twist: the secret magic illusive 12 spices is just shichimi (7 spices) and puntacular dust (trash) (ごみ → 五味 = 5 spices), I have been duped 
.
Today is International Cooperation Day! 国際協力の日
Jolly Cooperation! 
~ Tasty Words! ~
とうがらし (唐辛子) - Chilli Pepper
七味唐辛子 (しちみとうがらし) - Shichimi, that tasty seven spices, I’ve used this (the spice shaker thing) before (a lot) and never took note of the kanji or the hiragana… woops
赤とうがらし (あかとうがらし) - Red Pepper
アサの実 (あさのみ) - Hemp seed
青のり (あおのり) - Green Laver (Seaweed)
ちんぴ (陳皮) - Dried Citrus peel
さんしょ (山椒) - Japanese Pepper
ケシ (芥子) - Opium Poppy
すりゴマ (擂り胡麻) - Ground toasted sesame seeds
Mmmm, tasty
Whoooo! And don’t worry about the long post, it’s great to see how much progress you’ve made, all that hard work is paying off!
I started to read the No game no life manga, I read a little bit of パラサイト・イヴ book and a little bit of まいてつ visual novel.
保線 ほせん track maintenance
撫ぜる なぜる to brush gently; to stroke; to caress
上目 うわめ upward glance; upturned eyes
ためらう to hesitate; to waver N2
October 6 It’s too cold to read, must go hide under the blankets 
・Honzuki 6. (37% → 39%)
Day 35:
日本語: I read a lot of 伯爵と妖精 19.
中国語
中国語: I read 中外的不同, 一块钱, and 方仲永的故事. I added 爱心, 从前, 从此, and 知识.