Thank you so much for all the birthday wishes, everyone! It genuinely means a lot to me 
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 
Now, I’ve got a few hours left before the day ends, so I’m gonna hurry up and read!
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. 
(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.
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.
Sounds rock-solid to me 
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 
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.
April 19th 
・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 = wicker trunk, wicker luggage
because, y’know, when you’re going somewhere you gotta bring all the plums/fruits with you???
Day 17 
女子会-edition
Ayy @Memoria 
Happy Cake Day! 
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:
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
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… 
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!
Happy birthday @Memoria 
Yay!
Welcome, newest member of the Zero Escape c̶u̶l̶t̶ squad. 
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 
@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.
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? 
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 
), 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 
Day 19
Did minimal reading with a free Tadoku story about red color. Learned about うんめいの赤い糸 (red thread of fate) which I found to be a poetic concept.
If you haven’t watched 君の名は。yet, that film is basically all about that concept 
I read nine pages and finished the book. I didn’t realize how many different New Year’s customs there were in Japan.
New Vocabulary:
てらかね
寺の鐘 temple bells
明けましておめでとうございます
Happy New Year
ねんがじょう
年賀状 New Year’s card
あそ
遊ぶ to play games
Day 18:
日本語: I read a fair amount of 冷たい密室と博士たち. Reminder to self that in order to finish the goal volume of manga you have to read the goal volume of manga.
中国語: I read an intermediate entry on Mandarin Bean and three pages of 骑士幻想夜.
I’ll do a proper update tomorrow, as I still haven’t finished my reading for the day (the day ends when we fall asleep, right?), but I just wanted to say that I suddenly feel certain about the killer’s identity 
. I don’t know the how or why, but I feel confident about the who. (now watch as the rest of the book proves me wrong…)
Thanks!
I have read some native manga, and the only reason I’m not reading that now (or one of the few novels/light novels I own) is because I want to finish off the graded readers I have so that when I—in a distant future when Japan open up for tourists again—can sell them to Bookoff while I’m there. 
But nice to know that these sentences are complex enough to make the jump hopefully less arduous.
#truth
Its been over 2 weeks now and I can already feel my reading getting faster and my Japanese improving when I daydream random conversations 
I agree. I’m noticing the same thing. I am seeing more how the grammar works, too. I am so happy I joined this challenge! I’m going to have to get the Level 1 sets of Graded Readers soon. 
Yer the grammar for me too👍🏻 Such a great challenge
