📚📚 Read every day challenge - Spring 2022 🌸 🌱

Thank you, that was actually an oversight on my part.

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oh gosh, more birthdays. Happy birthday @Memoria ! Hoping again I didn’t miss anyone

Last night:
I finished Case 0 (鬼熊) of 戦前昭和の猟奇事件. Honestly my comprehension felt way lower than I’m comfortable with. I know people were sympathizing with and almost kind of rallying around 熊次郎 but I didn’t totally get why. It also started to talk about the rising militarization of Japan in the prewar period and at one point referenced a headline stating 「マルクス主義は鬼熊より怖い」(Marxism is more frightening than Demon Bear (serial killer))* and I feel like the author was trying for a point that I just straight up missed in my tangle of new words. I have a truly pathetic vocabulary around anything politics and I think there was something about political corruption that just flew right past me.

Debating rereading the chapter now that I have more of a hang of how to read it and see how much my comprehension picks up. It won’t be as exciting as new content, but if I understand it more fully that would be satisfying.

I also wrapped up the 3rd volume of ミステリと言う勿れ. I admit I wasn’t really feeling this case but once it finally got to the bit about curly haired ‘demon descendants’ being murdered I got drawn in.

*I’m not sure how to translate that into English so I just went literal. They took the 鬼 from 殺人鬼 and smashed it into the first part of his name, 熊次郎

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Happy birthday @Memoria! :birthday:

Yesterday: I didn’t get to Japanese reading all day, so right before I went to bed, I read 1 page. Feels kinda cheaty to count it…

Hopefully I can plan better in the future.

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Home

I got very tired very early yesterday, so I didn’t do much reading, just Seed 14-15 of GREEN, finishing vol 3. Just 5 more chapters to go!

Some vocab of note:

亡者 (もうじゃ) [noun, usu. ~の亡者] obsessed person (money, power, etc.)
百年目 (ひゃくねんめ) [noun] out of luck; at the end of one’s rope. rare chance; unusually good fortune. I’m not sure which it was in context since it could be either depending on who Wako-chan was referring to (which I couldn’t figure out), so I just put both.
借金 (しゃっきん) [noun] debt. I learned this on WK and then encountered it not an hour later in GREEN lol
世知辛い (せちがらい) [い-adjective] hard (life); tough (world)

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A happy birthday to you :tada::tada::tada: hope it’s a lovely day!

I made sure to do some reading early in the day yesterday, which was good for my reading (I’m now 95% through すべてがfになる, just the epilogue left!) but maybe not an amazing idea over all as it meant that I ended up having to work until 1am to finish my deadlines :sleeping::sleeping::sleeping::sleeping::sleeping: will probably finish the book today and then will get back to 三毛猫ホームズ :cat2:… or get diverted to something else lol.

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:tiger2: :books: Tanuki Den (aka Homepost): Date 20220419 :cherry_blossom: :raccoon:

Tanuki Scroll XIX: 峠の一本足 :leg:

Read today’s Hyakumonogatari, from Nara Prefecture!

About a one-legged monster that attacks people on a mountain pass. A hunter manages to strike a deal with the monster - the monster won’t eat him provided that it can hunt on the mountains on the 20th of December each year.

Even nowadays many in the Nara area won’t go out into the mountains on December 20th. The day is known as: 果ての二十日「はてのはつか」.


:seedling: Japanese found in the tall grass :seedling:

New Things

Kanji
or ー The kanji for やぶ: thicket; grove; bush

Onomatopoeia
ズドーン! ー Sound of a rifle being fired, but can be for explosions, collisions, dropping of heavy things.

Places
十津川「とつかわ」ー Totsukawa, Yoshino district
伯母子岳「おばこだけ」ー Mt. Obako


Happy birthday!! :birthday:

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15.-18.4.
What a busy weekend! I worked pretty much all day on the 15th and 16th (13 and almost 15h respectively), then had a social thing that took up all of Sunday. I barely managed to read a tiny bit of La quête d’ewilan on those days. Yesterday I had a bit more free time and tackled some more of the questions at the end of Le petit Nicolas with my family. :joy: Sadly none of us knew terribly much about sports or French fables. I also finished the last bit missing of the chapter of La quête d’ewilan I’d been dragging out over the weekend.

Today hasn’t seen me read more than a duolingo story in French so far, so I’ll keep this day for next time. :slight_smile:

My progress since last time

Le petit Nicolas (157→163/148p)
La quête d’ewilan: d’un monde à l’autre :headphones: (53→79/334m) :open_book: (17→21%)
A1 5 Minuten-Lektüren Où est le thym (2→NA/20 stories)

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Oh yeah, that sounds tough. I haven’t touched anything political at all yet but I’m going to have to work on that one day – there are so many fascinating Japanese New Wave movies (that being post-war, but still) I want to watch, but most of those are really overtly political. You never really think about just how segmented vocabulary for certain fields is until you start doing this.

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For those of you who are interested in Mori Ougai and who can understand German, there is a talk about him on 2022-04-21T16:00:00Z that will also be streamed on Youtube:

It’s not very clear from that page but the stream will show up here.

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Thank you so much for all the birthday wishes, everyone! It genuinely means a lot to me :heartbeat:

I haven’t been able to read anything today (yet!) but I’ve decided to buy Zero Escape for myself with some of the money I got from my parents. I’m really excited to start playing next week when I return from my trip :partying_face:

Now, I’ve got a few hours left before the day ends, so I’m gonna hurry up and read!

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So the current booklet is called 日本の食卓 in Ask Graded Reader level 4, volume 3. So it talks about Japanese food and have pictures of food that make me hungry. WANT JAPANESE FOOD. :sob: (No Japanese restaurants in town except maybe sushi and that is probably my least favorite Japanese food.)

Read about half of it. It went through traditional Japanese food and both reminded me of some cooking vocab I knew before, plus teaching me some new.

Food/cooking vocab goodness

食卓 = dining table
一汁三菜 = a type of typical Japanese meal: rice, one soup (miso soup for example), plus 3 side dishes (often fish, veggies and tofu)
銘々膳 = individual dining table
栄養 = nutrition (double checked I remembered this one correctly)
大豆 = soy bean
調味料 = seasoning
タンパク = protein
小麦 = wheat (reminder)
塩辛い = saltiness/salty taste, since I learned 辛い as spicy (as in hot spicy), I found this a fun word
成分 = ingredient/component
煮る = to shimmer/stew/boil (but with more than water/other than water; since ゆでる is for boiling water or possibly boiling in water; not 100% sure on these differences)
食材 = the book helpfully gave the definition as 料理の材料, ingredient

A couple of interesting sentences, the second one I could use a double check from someone that I got it right.

肉や油を使わず、濃い味をつけなくても日本食がおいしいのは、しょう油や鰹節、昆布などに「うま味」があるからです。I thought this was a great way to explain the difference with Japanese food (#notallJapanesefood)

できるだけ食材そのままのおいしさを楽しむというのが、日本食の考え方です。The philosophy/way of thinking behind Japanese cooking is to enjoy the original flavor/taste of the ingredients. (Implied: Rather than changing them with a lot of spices and cooking methods). Have I missed something?

This booklet have been fun so far, especially since I’m feeling pretty confident I’m understanding the more complex sentences. Perhaps most of the complexity comes from using context from not only the previous sentence but things they talked about a couple of pages ago; and I’m getting that. Feels like a real step forward in Japanese understanding for me.

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Sounds rock-solid to me :+1:
You could mayyybeee tuck on “as much as possible” (i.e. できるだけ)but that counts as nuance, I think.

Yeah, I guess if you can read sentences like these without too much issue, then you should hurry and get your favorite light novel or novel and start reading native material :joy_cat:

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Day 19 / Calendar

Read 3 or so pages of 夜カフェ, currently I’m about 65% through the chapter. Reading started to feel less cumbersome, it’s much easier to guess the meaning of a sentence, even if I go and analyse it after just to make sure.

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Summary post :bookmark:

April 19th :cherry_blossom:

・薬屋のひとりごと (33% → 37%)

Finished chapter 14 and a bit of 15. Thoughts: Shaoran (Xiao Lan) shares a rumor about a curse. Maomao is one scientific lady, she doesn’t believe in curses being the cause of weirdly colored flame and rashes. Also, Jinshi trying to find other people with rashes around the place. Gotta get to the bottom of mysterious curse. (How does he seemingly appear out of nowhere all the time??) I like how he’s affected by Maomao’s reaction being different from other ladies’ reaction to him. Now we know she definitely thinks he’s pretty but that it is super wasted on him because his personality is annoying, hehe.

Word of the day: 行李(こうり) = wicker trunk, wicker luggage
because, y’know, when you’re going somewhere you gotta bring all the plums/fruits with you???

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Day 17 :dress: 女子会-edition
Ayy @Memoria :birthday: Happy Cake Day! :sparkling_heart: And I think there are enough people here for a nice birthday paradox.

Today I finally got round to setting up the OCR, and oh boy it’s a godsend, reading is so much smoother now, I hope it won’t spoil me too much. Also, it should substantially increase my throughput, we’ll see about that.

While reading fukaboku I stumbled upon kanji that made my brain do a hard reboot 伺う similar to a lot of things yet so different. Also a really hilarious panel out of context:
image

A bit of vocab

もやがかかった to be misty
つまらないものですが phrase for giving out small presents

:pleading_face::point_right: :point_left:

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Another 14 pages of デスノート ・ Death Note 📓 Vol. 2. Finished the second chapter of this volume and Light is really quite evil by now. I hope to catch up with the club next week. First I have to read some more かがみ this week!

TIL:
無線 wireless (of course!)
人質 hostage (apparently 質 has something like ‘collateral’ as a minor meaning)

Oh yes, 伺 is one of those great confusing kanji… :smile:

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April 19th!

I read Chapter 53 of Yotsuba today. Jumbo is so sweet to Yotsuba, I always love chapters where he is featured.
I’m looking forward to the next chapter, but its a long one (52 pages!) and I have family coming to visit for the next two days so I’ll probably need to read something shorter while they are here!

(Home Post)


Happy birthday @Memoria :birthday: :tada:

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Yay!
Welcome, newest member of the Zero Escape c̶u̶l̶t̶ squad. :eyes:

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Heh yeah, I’ve mentioned before that I assess my abilities (passive and production) to be in the ~B1 range and while my production skills will surely lag, I think if I push hard I can get my reading/listening into B2 this year. Reading harder and more diverse material and making sure I understand I think will be a decent chunk of that.
For me that means more politics and more business and probably a scattering of more mundane things like cooking/cleaning/household-y words that I’m just not exposed to in everyday life nor read about in books.
If anyone has a suggestion for listening or reading content that is both interesting and covers those topics I’d be grateful :bowing_woman:

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@Memoria Happy birthday!

Oh yeah it’s that kanji that I go “yep, I learned that one already” every single time I see it and then get really confused.


Summary post

This again might just be a function of being in a bit of a better mood in general lately, but I’m moving back into feeling good about things. I’ve definitely somewhat let “get better at Japanese” as its own separate goal run away from me a bit. I have to expend quite a bit of effort but I’m here reading a visual novel so that’s cool. Need to relax and enjoy that more.

All the same, at times it didn’t want to let me relax today, heh. I made it through 6000 characters, but it snuck in some tricky bits to keep me on my toes.

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen っちゃ as a contraction of といえば before, but it was in places much more easier to intuit, heh. This is my second time coming across this sort of repetition use and I feel hazy, but it seems to mostly be an emphasis type thing? Overall I’m pretty sure I get what the sentence is saying, but it was one to work through. Then there’s this:

こんなときなのに、そんなことを考えている。集中しているようでしてないのか、していないようでしているのか。

I thought this language featured kanji! What am I doing on WK? :wink: Parsing is easy enough but the content fried my brain a little. Truly brings me back to those full decoding days. Not concentrating as if I am? Concentrating as if I’m not? Sure, something like that.

Still, things are pretty good. Reading スマホを落としただけなのに has indeed been quite doable, thanks again @pocketcat . I’m through 3 sections of the 60. Even in the first pass of the listening (don’t tell anyone I’m talking about listening in the reading thread :shushing_face:), despite missing somewhat important details, I’ve followed what people were doing and the general point every time so far, which I guess is proof I do have SOME listening ability now when spoken clearly and not about anything too out there. So that’s all nice. And on the reading side there’s plenty to look up in vocab but I pretty much know the grammar, and nothing has really left me stumped so far :slightly_smiling_face:

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