📚📚 Read every day challenge - Fall/Autumn 2021 🍁🍂🦝

oooh, I just had a little Google of this book and it looks really cool! Would you recommend it? Would quite like to know a bit more about history and had been thinking about getting one of the ねこねこ日本史 books but this also looks like a good option. (Not that I need to add more to my to read pile haha)

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Summary Post

October 23rd
Final Fantasy XIV

Random words
  • 周囲 = しゅうい surroundings, environs.
  • 範囲 = はんい extent, scope, range.
  • 防ぐ = ふせぐ to protect against, to prevent.
  • 幻想 = げんそう illusion, fantasy, vision.

It’s getting much easier to consult J-J dictionaries. I have vague memories of opening the definition of many words and almost having a stroke barely understanding anything. And for some (or many) words, it is still like that, but for many others not anymore; either I can read the whole definition if it’s short, or just miss one or two words. And well, it’s a day and night difference, consulting translations of a Japanese word to an English estimation, and actually checking what exactly it means. I’m very happy about that.

Yuuuuup. Definitely, I get the same feeling. It’s crazy that this challenge is (for most (all?) of us) coming to an end already. The beginning was hard for me this time around, getting used to the daily schedule again and the updates and all, but once I was established it hasn’t been a burden at all. I guess reading things that you’re genuinely interested in is a massive help. I will need to find more things for the Winter one :relaxed: . But honestly, no wonder you guys have converted many people with all your updates with cute stories and pictures. I’m sure it won’t be an issue to find more stuff to read. This is developing into a very casual book club at this rate :joy: . And I love it.

Dammit, sneaky and traitor little cake emoji !!!
Thank you guys :heart:

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Summary post

Day 53: Today I only read 4 pages of よつば&!I was sleep deprived and didn’t have the brainpower for ツバサ Reservoir Chronicle, lol

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Oct 20th: Started Demon Slayer vol. 2, but I was too lazy to read with a dictionary, and so I did not get everything and need to re-read. (Also because I want to collect ALL THE WORDS)

Oct 21st: Was too busy to read :cry:

Oct 22nd: Read the week’s 小川未明 children’s story (Beginner club).

Oct 23rd: Read the prologue and a bit of the first chapter of 横浜買い出し紀行 (Intermediate club).


Aww, come ON! :rofl:

Wow, that’s excellent news!
And great you managed to get voice recognition software to be helpful for you! (Also for programming - wow!)
BTW do you know LipSurf - WaniKani Voice Dictation. Review while you eat, do chores, etc ? Haven’t used it myself but maybe it helps you get more up to speed with hiragana typing?

:tada: It was an extremely long chapter as well, so this is nothing to sneeze at, really.

Well, that’s not that simple actually - of course the sentences sound a bit more like child-talk than what you’d expect from a real book, but you have many of the elements of “real” Japanese sentences already. Is this level 2?
(Also, funny how katakana still does me in Every. Single. Time. :rofl: “Why is he getting 20 figurines for his work?” - “Oh no, it’s not figurines, it’s dollars” :woman_facepalming:

:grin:

They are part of my big Anki deck, so I can export them and put them into a Google sheet, no biggie. The only drawback is that I still need to complete the cards for about 40 words, but I’ll do that as fast as I can. (Also, I capture example sentences only rarely, so I hope you’re not expecting too much here…)

EDIT: @chrisosaurus I managed to clean up the cards faster than I had imagined, so here is the link to the deck. Enjoy (and if you have any questions, feel free ofc)!

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I’ll write a longer reply / update later, just been avoiding the computer all day to try give my hands a break - read 6 pages of DS chapter 2 and visited Kinokuniya to pick up the 2nd volume =p

Awesome!
I’d only been hoping for the list of Japanese words, maybe with furigana if I was very lucky - even that wasn’t expected - anything extra is bonus on top of bonus - I’d only suggested exporting to csv as that was likely the least effort.
In Australian / New Zealand English we’d say “legend” - as in “you’ve been a legend” (meaning you’ve been awesome, thanks so much, etc.).
Thanks, the meaning and position information are great.

Really hope I didn’t make you do that cleanup work sooner than you would have otherwise, I asked for the words as it might save me some typing =p
And I can tell that already it will, as a bunch of these are words I’d come across but hadn’t typed up yet.

(I have cobbled together some half assed Anki plugins, so once I get the data into Anki it can fill in the rest from Jisho.org without needing much typing from me, and I’ve taught my voice control how to trigger my plugins =D)

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:fallen_leaf: :raccoon: :waning_gibbous_moon: :: TANUKIDATE 20211024 :: :waning_gibbous_moon: :raccoon: :fallen_leaf:


Day LIV: 弘法井戸 :dragon:

No pages today (of この音とまれ!) , still having a lot of difficulty with this one and don’t feel like any heavy reading today.

Read today’s Japanese folktale, from Mie Prefecture, about a white dragon that brings luck.

~ New Words ~
イチジク (無花果) - Common fig
白龍 (はくりゅう) - White Dragon
神棚 (かみだな) - A household shrine
ペッペッ - Spitting (Onomatopoeia)
杖 (つえ) - Cane, walking stick, staff

Historic Figure: 弘法大師 (こうぼうだいし), also known as 空海 (くうかい) - a Buddhist monk.


I was so confused with this, that moral seemed to come out of nowhere!

(and everything else you said but otherwise I’d have ended up with a massive quote)

This is the reason why I love these threads, I like that everyone can read what they feel they can and at their own pace (and the Tanuki, we can never forget the Tanuki). Before these threads I’d been thinking about joining a bookclub but they all felt pretty daunting, I know it’s not a competition, but when everyone’s reading the same thing it felt like it’d end up me struggling on page 2 and everyone else would have made it onto page 20 :rofl:
Going at a steadier, less goal focused pace has really helped me, in these past 3 (or so?) months I feel like I’ve learnt loads. There’s a lot of words now that I can just read, like that, it’s an amazing feeling!

These threads are the best :raccoon:

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Oooh, glad to see it picked your interest! And yes, I would absolutely recommend the book, all the more so if you like history!
I got mine in April, and I have a bit of a backlog from August bc I couldn’t keep up daily, but honestly, these books are perfect for a bit of daily reading. It’s one of my intensive reading materials, meaning I spend time looking up words, but that’s okay for me, bc the stories are short, and once you get the gist of some history-related terms (vocab like: crown prince, abdicate, exile, treaty etc), it’s smooth sailing from then on!

Adding two random pages for you to check!


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Also, @rikaiwisdom I’m so sorry, I guess I must have missed it somewhere in the threads, but even belatedly, happy birthday!!! :partying_face: hope you had a lovely one!

Oh! This one comes around often in the ヨナmanga…. One of the main charas is The Great 白龍様!You got me curious, I will read today’s folktale as well!

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Home post

Day 53:

日本語: I read a bit of パノラマ島綺譚, a fair amount of 伯爵と妖精 21, this week’s reading for ヨコハマ買い出し紀行, and some of 魔王城でおやすみ.

中国語

中国語: I read 白板.

And woohoo, another full week! I’m about halfway through the beginner category on Mandarin Bean, so I’m considering trying to keep this going through the end of the year. That should be enough to read all of them if I keep up with at least one per day.

O C T
:books:
:fire:
:fire:
:fire:
:fire:
:round_pushpin:
:round_pushpin:
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:jack_o_lantern: My tiny summary post :ghost:

October 24
・Honzuki 6. (80% → 81%).

I found word with reading discrepancy, a so-called jukujikun? or just an irregular reading.
生業・なりわい - occupation, calling, livelihood

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Summary post

Day 54: Read another 4 pages of よつば&!

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Summary Post

October 24th
Final Fantasy XIV

Random words
  • 属性 = ぞくせい attribute, property.

No I totally get what you mean. It’s similar for me, I had the underlying pressure of having to keep up with the schedule almost flawlessly, otherwise if I missed a week and everyone else was ahead I’d lose a ton of motivation, and naturally I dropped out of all the ones I’ve tried. Not that book clubs are a bad thing, not at all, quite on the contrary. I just couldn’t adapt to them personally, at least yet. And yes, people are beasts, they usually read ahead of the schedule and indirectly feeds my procrastination loop :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: . I just wish I could find a shared book that I’m passionate about and never miss a day, but so far no luck.

I would like to think that it is working very well for me too. Learning words in a context you care about definitely helps a lot, they’re much easier to learn. I hope that underneath all the occasional internal screaming and whining, I’m moving forward :joy: . If learning feels like going two steps backwards every now and again, I’m on the good track.

Thank you so much! I definitely had a nice celebration, went for some tasty lunch with a couple of friends and grabbed a coffee with a piece of good cheesecake afterwards. And as it’s commonly known, you can’t not be good when eating cheesecake!

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In the office today but it’s pretty chilly so, rather than stop off in a park on the walk to work, I tried reading on the train this morning. Pre-covid, reading on the train always made me fall asleep. Update: it still makes me fall asleep. So back to reading in the park for me.

The previous volume of these books that I read was all individual stories, so I expected this one to be the same. I’m 4 pages from the end of the first chapter and thought the story was going to have to come to a very quick conclusion, so I sneaked a peek ahead and it’s clear from the pictures that this book is actually one long story divided into chapters. It’s a very odd story about the boys being captured by a group of people living in a cave where they’re still all living like it’s the ?19th century and as a result there’s lots of good vocabulary for me to pick up like:
いろり - sunken hearth
松明 (たいまつ) bamboo torch
which are the kind of words I can imagine coming in useful for playing some computer games.

Happy birthday @rikaiwisdom !

:partying_face: Feeling you on this, the daily reading practice is definitely paying off for me too. God bless the book clubs but I’ve never managed to get on with them either.

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:fallen_leaf: :raccoon: :waning_gibbous_moon: :: TANUKIDATE 20211025 :: :waning_gibbous_moon: :raccoon: :fallen_leaf:


Day LV: この音とまれ! pg.107-117 & 大ムカデ退治 :bug:

10 pages today! Though most of the pages didn’t have much dialogue.

And read today’s 百物語 tale from Shiga prefecture, about a legendary samurai ( 藤原秀郷 / Fujiwara no Hidesato) sent on a quest to destroy the giant centipede that has infested dragon palace!

I enjoyed this one a lot and kinda forgot I was supposed to be learning from it. I mean it ticks all the boxes: dragons? check, awesome samurai? check, huge demon monster? check.

~ New Words ~
ランラン (爛々) - Glaring; flaming; blazing the full part was: 赤い目をランラン @Redglare, it you
よろしい (宜しい) - This is on WaniKani, but I don’t think I ever understood the nuance of it properly, I just thought it was just another word to mean “good” as in, “that is good”. But here it’s used to mean “All right/very well [I agree to this/will do this - sort of thing]”. Also states on Jisho that it’s honorific/respectful language.
御殿 (ごてん) - Palace, court
竜王 (りゅうおう) - Dragon King (very, very cool)
つば (唾) - Saliva, spit (demon monsters are weak to human spit apparently - good to know)

Places:
琵琶湖 (びわこ) - Lake Biwa. It’s nice to find the kanji for Biwa (the instrument) as well (don’t think I’ve seen either 琵 or 琶 before).
三上山 (みかみやま) - Mt. Mikami


I know that feeling :rofl:
When you spend a week or more trying to learn a specific grammar point or such and you just can’t, and you flail on the floor thinking that your Japanese learning journey is over… then you wake up one day and the Knowining has happened in your sleep and you suddenly just know. Only to repeat the whole process again with the next thing… progress!

Looks like the games are working well for you though! I tried playing one awhile back in Japanese but pretty much everything was in katakana and it scared me away. I should probably try again sometime.

Also, cheesecake on your birthday? That’s the best birthday right there.

Whoo! Glad to hear! :sparkles:

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:jack_o_lantern: My tiny summary post :ghost:

October 25 Nothing interesting to report. Though it feels a bit weird that this will be my last week this challenge. "Already 0: ", kinda.
・Honzuki 6. (81% → 82%).


oho, it me :eyes:

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Home post

Day 54:

日本語: I read a bit of 伯爵と妖精 21 right before bed, just to have read something. (Thanks, read every day challenge!)

中国語

中国語: I read 忘了带书.

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I am reading every day it’s just that I didn’t have time to even post the last few days. Right now I am reading the second volume of エデンの檻. It’s not that interesting but I still want to know what happens next.

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Summary post

Day 55: Today I read 5 pages of よつば&!(Some of which didn’t have tons of dialogue in them, but that was probably good because I have about 3 working braincells today)

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:house_with_garden: home post

What did I read:

:heavy_check_mark: Day 46 (10月 24日) :sparkles:
10分でよめるこわい話、第3話ー「空をまう首」
wow that was an interesting read :sweat_smile: ~36min.
弘法大師, day’s folktale, 6min.

:heavy_check_mark: Day 47 (10月 25日) :sparkles:
10分でよめるこわい話、第4話ー「魔界鏡」, 24min

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I need to know … what happened??

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