yeah! After covering N5 and N4 grammar I’d say you could give it a shot! worst that can happen (as happened to me when I first tried to read it quite a while back) is that you decide that it’s too much of a struggle and then you can put it to one side and try again later. And it will feel cool when you do come back later and find that you can read it so that’s still not a bad outcome!
I’d say for me (it might be different for others) what stopped me my first time through was mainly that I had such low reading stamina for reading in Japanese that the first chapter took aaaaaaages. I then switched to reading manga for a while and at least partly due to the last of these challenges, I went from a a chapter of manga feeling like a lot to read, to being able to (depending on the manga ofc) being able to read a volume of manga in a day if I was in the mood to do so. Then when I switched back to trying to read novels I found that it felt a LOT more manageable because I was less tired out just by the experience of reading in Japanese. So what other reading you have done in Japanese might also be a factor in how you find it? good luck with it! I’d say definitely get the audiobook if you can as it’s really good.
日本語: I read some of 小川未明童話集, some of ミステリと言う勿れ, and a bit of パノラマ島綺譚. That last is a new book, and while both it and 乳と卵 are difficult, I can already tell that パノラマ島綺譚 is an easier kind of difficult for me.
中国語: I read 帮忙. I learned 着 as a ながら-type of auxiliary word.
I also edited in a read-aloud session on day 1 that I forgot about yesterday. We read two chapters of 7SEEDS.
I thought it would be more common, because it’s something I see often in other places on the Internet I actually triple-checked if the calendar weeks are starting on Monday when I copied mine because I do have a strong opinion about it - it makes no sense to start a week in a middle of the weekend
I absolutely adored these stories, later collections have more gripping narratives, but I still really enjoyed the factual nature of the early books which made them easy to understand. It was fun learning about soy beans and sakura =D
No Satori Reader today; tomorrow \o/ I had a long FFXIV session, I read some questlines that were honestly quite hard to grasp but I think I generally got what was going on also with all the visual cues. I was completely worn out afterwards though, had to change to English for a good while to let my brain cool down.
Day 3: September 3
What did I read?: ハイ☆スピード!
How much did I read?: 5 pages (whoa, gettin’ crazy here) - finished chapter 1!
How long did it take me?: 1 hour 43 min
Some good words today, including 負け惜しみ (まけおしみ - being a poor loser) and 掻き消す (かきけす - to erase; to drown out (e.g. a voice); to make disappear).
But hands down, my favorite word/expression of today was 大の字 (だいのじ) - shape of the “dai” kanji (esp. person with arms and legs outstretched); sprawling; lying spread-eagled
At first I was all, big letter, what…? And then I looked it up and laughed xD Clearly, describing things by comparing them to the shape of a kanji is a thing here, this is the second time that method of description has been used in this book (first was Makoto’s 八-shaped eyebrows) and I am here for it.
I love the image of Rin being a supremely dramatic 大の字 on the floor and Haru just looking over at him going “who the eff is that” hahaha that’s so them
Also OMG it’s Sousuke! Sousuke is there too, already! Ahhhhh, only for a second, but he was there (Sousuke does not enter the anime picture until the second season so I didn’t really expect to see him at all in this first novel for some reason - I don’t know that he will feature much in this first novel, but I will be curious to see if he comes back)
It feels like a lot is happening in a small number of pages - maybe it’s just this first part being speedy and throwing in flashbacks in order to introduce the characters and such, but I swear, even though I’m only able to read a few pages at a time, I still feel like I get whole “scenes,” which…is not a bad thing? But it also feels like there are quite a few moments where the scene or character of focus changes without much of a visual text break or written cue to tell me that that’s what’s going on. Kind of feels a little whiplashy to me at times. I can’t tell if it’s because I’m bad at reading (like maybe it would be more obvious/easier to follow if my grammar was better) or if it’s because it’s meant to be that way xD
I didn’t have much time to read yesterday I did a mock jlpt n5 test which took me around two hours. Nevertheless I still managed to read some more of the まいてつ visual novel. Why did I choose a visual novel which is that hard… I think I will be done reading it in two years.
Day 4
I didn’t manage to read anything on the first two days of the challenge… Yesterday I read one page of Kiki, and two pages today.
But now I have a lot more time to devote to reading, so I’ll aim for at least five pages a day. I’m happy to see my speed’s improved a lot from the start of the Summer challenge, when I found even one page exhausting!
September 4th.
Today I re-read over the prologue for 大海原と大海原 along with my breakdown notes in order to populate the vocab sheet for the ABBC starting on the 11th, I added 61 vocab entries and I think got pretty good coverage. I remember how much vocab sheets helped me when reading my first manga, so hopefully this goes towards paying that forward.
Then I read the first 3 pages of chapter 1 for 大海原と大海原 (and added 15 vocab entries for ch.1).
This manga having an actual plot is super interesting, I’m excited to see where it goes =D
Ah, I see… it’s one of those “extremely long titled law articles that are full of kanji” again.
This is revenge for not reading you yesterday, isn’t it Wiki?
The good part is, there wasn’t a kanji here that I didn’t recognise, and could work out the meanings.
The correct readings however… let’s not ask about that part.
Today I finally properly took the time to read and finished chapter 3
This chapter had some difficult grammer, but the vocabulary was pretty fine. This is my first experience having an author where I sometimes need to read a while before I understand what’s going on The sentences just go on and on without stopping! And he writes dialogue at times with and other times without the quotations.
Spent most of today doing my homework for my weekly class, which was mostly about using んじゃない. Started reading afterwards and what grammar do you think was on the first page?!?