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

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. :blush:

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」

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Is that why they titled the anime Free? :thinking:

That’s an excellent vocab word! It reminded me of when I learned the word for appetite a few years back: 食欲.

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Thank you for this!! Google image searching カモシカ was one of the best parts of my night. :blush: 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. :relaxed:

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Summary post

Day 35: Read 6 pages of よつば&!Because a couple of the pages didn’t have much on them. :sweat_smile:

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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
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 姿すがたおくさん, but was too tired to make significant progress, so I’ll finish that tomorrow.

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Home Post

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).

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It’s mostly at the beginning, afterwards it’s mainly school/family setting.

And congratulations on (being close to) reaching personal goals! :tada:

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:fallen_leaf: :raccoon: :new_moon: :: TANUKIDATE 20211006 :: :new_moon: :raccoon: :fallen_leaf:


Day XXXVI: 十二味のとうがらし :hot_pepper:

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! :hot_pepper: :hot_pepper:

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 :slightly_frowning_face:.

Today is International Cooperation Day! 国際協力の日
Jolly Cooperation! :pray: :sunny:

~ 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!

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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

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:jack_o_lantern: My tiny summary post :ghost:

October 6 It’s too cold to read, must go hide under the blankets :cold_face: :snowman:
・Honzuki 6. (37% → 39%)

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Home post

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.

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Summary Post

October 6th
Final Fantasy XIV

Random words
  • 指示 = しじ indications, instructions, directions.
  • 庭師 = にわし gardener.
  • 志す = こころざす to aspire to, to set aims, to intend.
  • 再現 = さいげん reappearance, reemergence, return.
  • 執り行う = とりおこなう to hold a ceremony.
  • 催し = もよおし event, festivities, social gathering.
  • 再会 = さいかい meeting again, reunion.
  • 再生 = さいせい resucitation, rebirth; also playback or reproduction (music, video, etc). Generally just making something come back again, literally and figuratively, at least that’s how I understand it. The context for this one was to resurrect someone, to make someone come back from the dead → 再生させる。
  • 行方 = ゆくえ whereabouts, destination, where one is headed. Apparently also an outcome or course of events.

I really like vocabulary with 再 , it’s so easy to understand. It’s basically ‘second kanji + again’, so far at least, so every new word I come accross with this kanji is really easy to infer. I also thought about all the words with 込む and how they gave me a lot of trouble at first, and now somehow I developed a feel for those compound words that contain it and can often (though not always) tell the difference with their non-込む counterparts. However if you ask me to explain what 込む means I literally can’t tell, but somehow understand it without translating. Crazy.

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Summary post

Day 36: October 6
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 14 min

You guys - as I was finishing my reading today, I was like, hm, the amount of the book on the left side seems to have gotten a lot smaller, am I…close to halfway? And I was - as of now, I’m exactly halfway through the book?? It’s gone so fast :o

Rin had An Idea for the team today, and as usual, Haru was Not About It

Basically Rin announces that he thinks they should all focus on practicing for the relay only - no practicing for or competing in any of their individual events. That’s his plan, to only compete in the relay, and he wants them all to join him in that. He says that if they don’t focus on the relay, they won’t win. BIG clash of philosophies ensues between Haruka “I don’t give an eff about winning or times” Nanase and Rin “My only goal in life is to win this medley relay” Matsuoka. As usual, Makoto mediates a bit, getting Rin to give them time to think about this idea for now. Nagisa, sweet little puppy, goes along with Rin’s plan right away - there’s a very cute moment where Rin snaps his goggle strap (that’s his Thing :tm:) and Nagisa copies it, he clearly looks up to him as much as he looks up to Haru. He’s gonna do it Just Like Rin. <3 But poor Haru feels like he’s just being pushed into stuff he doesn’t want all the time, and he’s not happy about it. He just wants to run away into the water, and I don’t blame him.

Good words

一本 (いっぽん) - single-minded focus on (…​after a noun, usu. as 〜一本で, 〜 一本に, etc.)
間髪を入れず (かんぱつをいれず) - immediately; instantly; with nary a pause; without a moment’s delay (what a fun word - literally like, a space so small a hair can’t enter)
願ったり叶ったり (ねがったりかなったり) - everything working out as desired
戸惑う (とまどう) - to be bewildered; to be perplexed (the door to confusion has been opened~ oooo)
やり合う (やりあう) - to argue with; to quarrel​
引き摺り込む (ひきずりこむ) - to drag in; to pull in
毅然として (きぜんとして) - with resolution
無理強い (むりじい) - forcing; compulsion; coercion; pushing (to do)
優勝候補 (ゆうしょうこうほ) - favorite (top choice) for the championship (favourite); best bet for the title
顔がほころぶ (かおがほころぶ) - to break into a smile; to smile broadly; to beam
迷い込む (まよいこむ) - to stray into; to lose one’s way (and enter); to wander into

I’m guessing so :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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Summary post

Day 36: Today I read 5 pages of よつば&!

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wow you’re smashing your challenge!

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(Predictive) Welcome back @Axazel !

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image

Hehehehe Thank you!! :notes: (Gonna make a proper post a little later!) How’s your recovery going??

It’s so heart warming to see you and everyone making progress each day here! (I’m happy to be back :kissing_smiling_eyes:)

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Home post October 7th today I spent a bunch more time typing up and capturing words for 王様ランキン and then to round it all off I read 2 pages of チーズスイートホーム to finish chapter 9.

Oh I’d completely forgotten to mention that, really great actually, much better than the matching surgery I had previously on my other arm. I can bend it and use it in ways which last time took me many more weeks to regain. Thanks for asking and remembering =D

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How do you capture them? I imagine you don’t use pokeballs :stuck_out_tongue: .

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Hmmm it seems I have to pick how seriously to interpret the question… yet I am very tired…

less serious interpretation

Sadly I haven’t been able to source a reliable supplier of pokeballs since the start of the pandemic, so I rely primarily on more old school methods

It is mostly a combination of being very sneaky and shotgun cocking noise
image

more serious interpretation

I type up all the non-trivial dialogue into a Google doc, do lookups with Yomichan, and words that I don’t know which seem possibly useful make their way into a Google spreadsheet (one tab/sheet per manga), and if they’re lucky eventually end up in Anki.

Sometimes words are reoccurring within a story but don’t seem useful more generally and so possibly aren’t worth really learning, in which case I’ll make an Anki recognition only deck for a specific manga / game to contain these, but most words end up in my general vocab deck.

Later on when I start reading properly I’ll often re-use that same Google doc and add breakdowns below each of the non-trivial sentences.

I’ve been toying around with writing some programs to do some more of this distillation for me, I have started automating some of it (e.g. verb inflection lookup, jlpt lookup, etc.), but so far doing the word foraging by hand isn’t very time consuming and I end up learning a bunch from it.

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