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

Japanese Language Reading
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:fallen_leaf: :raccoon: :new_moon: :: TANUKIDATE 20211007 :: :new_moon: :raccoon: :fallen_leaf:

Day XXXVII: あこや姫 :evergreen_tree: & pages 1-17 of この音とまれ！ :sound:

The day I decide to start on この音とまれ！ (which has a koto!) is also the same day that the folktale involves a koto, this is obviously a sign that I need to buy a koto (I wish, those things are expensive and the postage costs… :scream: ).

I managed 17 pages of この音とまれ！ (though about 10 of which were wordless intro pages), it was quite hard going, I’m not really used to reading conversational Japanese, it was pretty kanji heavy too (thankfully, furigana), and I also can’t be lazy and just copy-paste anything I don’t understand into Jisho :sweat_smile:
Thanks again @Redglare! :+1:

Today is Anti-Theft day, 盗難防止の日!
So you guys better not be stealing anything today :eyes: :eyes:
The reason for it being today is a pun 「１０（トー）７（ナン）」= とうなん → 盗難 : theft.

~ New Words ~
[Mountain Name]山の麓 (やまのふもと) - At the foot of [Mountain Name], new kanji too! 麓. The singular meaning of the kanji is “foot of a mountain” as well.
惚れる (ほれる) - To fall in love with / to be charmed with
老松 (ろうしょう) - Old pine tree

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It was mostly curiosity, as I haven’t really thought about how I would go about it myself. I think I do prefer it over just grabbing a common deck someone else made. Eventually you’ll still go through a lot of common words and you can add references to reading material. On the another hand it is probably nice to have the more rare/series specific vocab as well.

Of course capturing words made me associate it with pokemon as well.

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Hope everyone is doing well, and is enjoying all their reading time!

My streak is completely broken, and I fell off the reading wagon the last couple of days, but that’s okay right now. My wife and I are on a mini vacation after work craziness, so I’m just enjoying that.

Buuuuuuuuuut, look what 完全版 I found for €9:

20211007_183415
20211007_183415866×1154 181 KB

My wife and I have another week off after this, but she hopes to be finishing her doctoral thesis in that time. So I’ll likely be back to my regular schedule come Monday.

Have a great day, everyone!

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:ballot_box_with_check: Day 29 - Day 37

I read 130 pages in the past week, bringing me to Section 5, Chapter 4 in 手紙.

I have just a couple days to read the rest (about 50 pages), since I need to return the book before moving to England! Because I’m now focused on speed, it’s about getting the info quick and moving on. I am barely looking up words–which means I’m finally understanding the book?! This feels like a HUGE improvement to me.

Thoughts on the story (spoilers are blurred, so don't worry about looking here)

This book has given me so much stress. I just want everything to be fine for Naoki and his brother, but I know that if things always go well there won’t be a story to tell.
Where it’s good is how things do or don’t go well is usually hard to guess. Like, it was really easy to predict that Naoki would somehow lose his restaurant job, or the band, even if I had no idea on what way that would happen.
Lately there’s a character that feels a little too unrealistic to me. There are always these philosophical lectures the character gives Naoki. It feels a little strange because they’re supposed to be the CEO of a giant company, but they will go to meet with Naoki specifically. Then, they give Naoki the most mysterious and edgy advice. It’s like some Jedi talk from Star Wars.
The ending so far is really heartfelt. I’m still scared for what happens next. At the same time, it’s all so emotional and kind of sweet.

:raccoon: :raccoon: Main Post :raccoon: :raccoon:

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Very Interested! (With spoilers)

YOU WERE RIGHT! I didn’t want to give it away at the start but was so impressed! You knowing so quickly made me wonder how I didn’t until later in the book :flushed:

Yeah, I agree with you that probably PuraPura, the guardian, wanted him to make his own conclusions. I also got the feeling that guardian wanted to kind of set Makoto’s standard from the beginning. Like a, “this didn’t all happen for no reason” kind of warning. Where Makoto having low expectations can help keep him from being let down again.

That type of phrasing is really cheesy, haha. I’m not sure, but I imagine the author is trying to address how some people who are having thoughts of suicide feel like there’s no other future or option for them? Knowing that we all have options and that life can change is sometimes all it takes to make someone think twice about continuing to live! …now I’m seriously curious as to waht you’ll think of the very end :thinking::rofl:

This book is surprisingly heavy, isn’t it?? :flushed: As cheesy and predictable as it can be, I can’t believe how some of the story lines can also be so mature.

Bahaha I just love this. Beautiful way of thinking :raccoon: :paw_prints:

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Home post

Day 36:

日本語: I read a lot of 伯爵と妖精 19.

中国語

中国語: I read 爱 and 确保安全.

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my daily duty to わにかに … that I have been slacking on :caught_durtling:
日 7 :bookmark:
今日の日本の本: Bunpro [N5] leason ( ._.)

Imma get my life together ya’ll wait for me… I can do this Q(`⌒´Q)

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Today I just read a page of パラサイト・イヴ. I like the book but it will still take a long time until I finish it.

混雑 こんざつ congestion; crush; crowding; jam N3
引き起こす ひきおこす to cause; to induce; to bring about; to provoke N1
苛立つ いらだつ to be irritated; to get annoyed; to lose one’s patience
クラクション car horn
直進 ちょくしん going straight on; going straight ahead

外来患者 がいらいかんじゃ outpatients

outpatients definition

A patient whose treatment does not require an overnight stay in a hospital or clinic.

I never heard the word in english yet so I added the definition.

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:jack_o_lantern: My tiny summary post :ghost:

October 7 I was called a machine by a classmate for studying all day on campus (10h+) :robot: Time well spent, I’d say :eyes: :fire:
・Honzuki 6. (39% → 41%)

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Summary Post

October 7th
Final Fantasy XIV

Random words
  • 気配 = けはい sign, indication.
  • 異様 = いよう bizarre, strange, odd.
  • 怯える = おびえる to be scared of, to become frightened.
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Summary post

Day 37: October 7
What did I read?: ハイ☆スピード!
How much did I read?: 7.5 pages
How long did it take me?: 1 hour 47 min

I did not intend to read this much, but I just wanted to finish the scene xD My brain is dead :upside_down_face: But some good food for thought in this little scene. You can really see how much thought Rin puts into swimming, from the way he analyzes the reason behind Nagisa’s slipping times to the way he thinks about his own swimming and tries to improve his own performance. He’s constantly thinking about his form and rhythm while he swims, trying to find the form/rhythm that fits him the best and makes him faster. And although Nagisa’s technically his teammate, he’s basically coaching Nagisa, in a way - he’s able to note Nagisa’s weak points even while he’s swimming alongside him, and he figures out how to bring out Nagisa’s best performance so that they can cultivate that and hopefully make him more consistently fast. Interestingly, Nagisa is basically his opposite when it comes to that, he doesn’t think about what he’s doing or how he’s doing it at all :joy: That feels…right xD I like the way the author juxtaposes them here. There are some more interesting things happening here, but I think I need to digest those a little more.

Good words
  • 浮上 (ふじょう) - surfacing; rising to the surface
  • 違和感 (いわかん) - uncomfortable feeling; feeling out of place; sense of discomfort; malaise; physical unease
  • 途切れ途切れ (とぎれとぎれ) - broken; intermittent; disconnected
  • しゃがむ - to squat; to crouch
  • 恥じる (はじる) - to feel ashamed
  • 思い込み (おもいこみ) - wrong impression; subjective impression; assumption; prejudice
  • 持論 (じろん) - one’s cherished opinion; pet theory
  • 肩口 (かたぐち) - top of the shoulders; tip of the shoulder; collar​ (this word makes me laugh for some reason xD shoulder mouth)
  • コンマ - decimal point (also means comma)
  • 得体の知れない (えたいのしれない) - strange; unfamiliar; mysterious; suspicious; of an unknown nature
  • 試行錯誤 (しこうさくご) - trial and error​
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Summary post

Day 37: Read another 6 pages of よつば＆！

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:ballot_box_with_check: Day 38

I finished 手紙 today. 50 pages in a single day is a major record for me :flushed:
Maybe I can join 多読?!?

Final thoughts: 手紙 is immediately interesting, as it gives you drama and a new perspective from the very beginning. As with a lot of authors, you’ll see a lot of the same vocabulary used again and again (so many ways to say someone looked at something or furrowed their brow! Oo!) so that’s also great for learning too! Lots of kanji! The only drawback for me was that is got a little… Not unbelievable, not cheesy… a little on-the-nose at the end? Characters started giving a lot of strong life advice at the end, and the main character would sit and listen and take their opinions very seriously. Felt like less of a story for a second, and more like lesson time! The veeeery veery end is pretty interesting though. Gives you a lot to think about. I wonder if I were Naoki, what I would do differently…

:raccoon: :raccoon: Main Post :raccoon: :raccoon:

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As if that’s a bad thing! D:<

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Main Post

I think it’s a good time for another update post, before the weekend kicks off. Over the past few days I read 3 stories and a poem from 10分で読める物語 二年生. Some stories are easier or more enjoyable than others.

I didn’t really have much expectations before reading 夏休み、ぼくはおばちゃんちに行った, but it was much far more enjoyable than I thought it would be. It’s about a kid that comes from a pretty neat and organized city that goes to visit his grandma for the summer break. At first he doesn’t like going all the way out to the boonies to stay there. No one can blame him, there’s not much to do out there and the place is a mess. However the local kids invite him to play at the river and he changes his point of view. It’s kinda sweet and kinda funny story with a little bit of silliness to it.

空がある is a little poem about the sky and I liked it. Then there’s 三月の風, a story about the wind pulling pranks on people. Quite a good read as well. I didn’t really like みどり色の宝石, which is a shame because I like green and the artwork was pretty good.

There’s a haiku and two stories left for the weekend. I already put an order in for more manga to read after that, so stay tuned. :eyes:

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Home post October 8th - restarted & finished graded reader 絵え姿すがた奥おくさん, wrote up the remainder of chapter 3 for 王様ランキング, and worked with a friend to breakdown some sentences from them reading やがて君になる.

Not sure when is the right time to start 王様ランキング, although I still have quite a bit of vocab harvesting to do from it.
In the meantime I still have a few unread graded readers I should try read soon before they’re no longer useful to me, amd I’m party way through チーズスイートホーム (1).
I could resume reading 大海原と大海原 but I’m still quite a while ahead of the book club.

Oh awesome, didn’t want to risk blabbering if you were just making a joke =D

I hope this is interesting/useful rather than TMI, happy to answer any questions if you have them.

I’ve found it much more useful (and motivating) to make decks myself, although I have got good mileage from the core anime vocab deck, and I’ve started a Tango N5 deck for more listening practice (but I sometimes find it is like pulling teeth).

Yeah exactly, my Anki cards have a field for example sentences which I’ll add either from WK or from the manga I harvested them from.

When started out I also looked over some more conventional vocab lists (all vocab from Genki, Japanese top 1k words, etc) and combined that with a few beginner friendly manga. Between them that seems to have got decent coverage, at least for a beginner (although I didn’t include every word any from those lists).

Yeah, the amount of rare/specific vocab to learn is a tradeoff you have to consider.

In my case since I’m quite early into reading and Japanese, I’ve decided that in general it makes the most sense to focus my time on words which I’m likely to see often (and thus which will be reinforced often) - so I’m okay with rare-ish words if they also happen to be common in media I want to consume, but if its not common in media I want to consume then it’ll take a lot of time in Anki to commit that word to memory which may be better spent in other words.

Once I’m further along this tradeoff will change, sometimes even now I’ll add rarer words to Anki and just suspend them so they don;'t appear in my reviews, with the expectation that I’ll unsuspend them at a future date when I run out of more common words to learn. Even if those words don’t make it into Anki, they are still just waiting in my Google sheets vocab lists.

Only natural =D

Sorry for being so verbose,1:30am so not the best time for copy editing my words down.

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:fallen_leaf: :raccoon: :new_moon: :: TANUKIDATE 20211008 :: :new_moon: :raccoon: :fallen_leaf:

Day XXXVIII: この音とまれ！ pg. 17-23 & 山女 :hotsprings:

Read 6 pages of この音とまれ！ and I am really tripping up over the grammar and slangy words, there’s only about 1/4 in length here than the other story but it took me probably more than twice as long to read.

And read today’s 百物語, about a one-eye ghost lady who haunts a mountain onsen. It originates from Gunma prefecture, didn’t read the prefecture page but had a quick glimpse and the Gunma prefecture symbol is really cool:

Gunma

~ New Words! ~
同然 (どうぜん) - just like [something] / virtually the same as [something]
草津地方 (くさつちほう) - Kusatsu Region (Gunma Prefecture)
山小屋 (やまごや) - A hut or shack, especially one on a mountain
湯滝 - Yudaki Falls
月明かり (つきあかり) - Moonlight
今頃 (いまごろ) - About this time / Around this time
木こり (きこり) - Woodcutter / Lumberjack

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Waves from England

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Home post

Day 37:

日本語: I read a lot of 伯爵と妖精 19.
Read-aloud: We read a chapter of ふしぎの国のバード.

中国語

中国語: I read 盘子 and 谁知道得多. I added 总, 发明, 启发, 骂, and 父亲.

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I learn English in this thread :cowboy_hat_face:

Yeah, is a non-bad!
This classmate is a good person tho, said it with a tone that implied “I can’t believe how you’re able to do this, that’s crazy (and amazing)”. What they don’t know is that that day was one of my most productive days, not an average one. I have too many days where I’m distracted most of the time. Today was one of them ;u;

stays tuned :eyes: :eyes:

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