📚📚 Read every day challenge - Spring 2022 🌸 🌱

[wangqiwen]

Home Post

Day 24
Apr 24
My reading speed was slow this week. Sometimes, I only read a couple pages of 黒猫亭事件 (~5mins), because I was in the middle of something else or there was something I don’t understand. But I made some progress today, and finished Chapter 7, in which 金田一 was introduced and connected to the case.
There was a lot of words and weird expression that I didn’t know.

• When I used the internal dictionary, it looks like words like 小紫, 雲助, 権八 have classic allusions. I don’t fully understand their meanings, so I decided to skip this part.
• Another weird expression is “感謝キュー”. I can’t find the word on Google, and I’m guessing it’s 感謝＋Thank you. But why does 金田一 say like that.
• 金田一 used rare カタカナ expressions like キッキュージョ(鞠躬如), 静シュク（静粛). Then he himeself said “漢字制限のおりから”, these expressions will trouble the note-taker. From my understanding, 漢字制限 eliminates the rare 漢字 in Japan. Some Japanese also had trouble understand what he was talking about (「キッキュージョとしてレイジョーを極めた」とは何ぞや？).

Words of the day:
呼吸を弾ませる：いきをはずませる。out of breath. はげしい息づかいをする
中国へ高跳びした: たかとび。 Criminals escape to a distant land.
はさにあらず: そうではない
懇意：こんい。仲良し

[dunlewy]

@Natsuha

After over two years and three months learning japanese I finally finished my first book in japanese.

Isn’t that the greatest feeling in the world to do something so new? It’s an accomplishment! Good for you!

[windupbird]

Summary Post

Day 24: April 24th
What did I read?: クマとたぬき
How much did I read?: 18 pages
How long did it take me?: 27 min

Why did it feel like today’s pages suddenly leveled up in difficulty? So many words I couldn’t remember spelled with kanji I couldn’t remember how to read. Man, the crane and the heron are cute but I don’t know what is going on 90% of the time when they’re involved lol, I tried not to spend too much time worrying about it because it seems like they don’t exactly converse logically (like their conversations are kind of hard to follow on purpose)? I hope so anyway because

Look at these cute monkeys though

This page killed me xD

Good words

• 崖っぷち (がけっぷち) - cliff edge; edge of a precipice; perilous position; critical moment; brink
• 仲むつまじい (なかむつまじい) - harmonious; intimate
• 激論 (げきろん) - heated argument; heated discussion; heated debate
• 剥製 (はくせい) - stuffed animal (as in taxidermy)

@pyororon

The ten-ten became fish.

Just wanted to say that’s the cutest thing ever
I really want to order this manga

[natarin]

@MissDagger

Is it something along the lines of: Somehow she looks so very small. ?

Yeah that seems right to me! Kind of lamenting their parting and how far away she is already, that kind of vibe (assuming that makes sense in context )

[potatonaught]

April 24

Whoops, conference fatigue caught up to me and I hadn’t posted in couple days. Kept reading through.

• Haikyuu chp 64 for book club
• Spy x Family chp 3
• Kaguya-sama wants to cause a confession chp 1 (no furigana, still too high level)
• various dictionary entries. I bought two dictionaries from that sale @basilsauce mentioned a couple of weeks ago. excited by the collocation one

Now that the conference is over and I have some downtime at work, I hope I can read more (and finally finish this essay).

Progress on Tadoku graded readers
44 / 44 level-zeros
12 / 12 level-ones
3 /10 level-twos
x / 18 level-threes

happy belated birthday @daikirai

[polv]

April 25, Mon home post

Week 5 of Spring 2022’s planning

Last week, I did everything at the last minute, yet I managed to read Death Note Ch.9-10, Yoru Cafe Ch.3, Yuru Camp Ch.70-71, JoJo Part 2 Vol.2 Ch.3; though, re-reading must be considered. (And, yeah, I haven’t touched YouTube or any listening yet.)

• Committed, and paced - for the sake of discussion
  • Night Cafe Ch.4
  • Dash through Yuru Camp Ch.72-74, to catch up with the discussion
    • For this series, if I can keep up, I might consider buying other volumes, for the sake of traveling.
• Rereading
  • Death Note Vol.3 Ch.10
• Self-paced, but setting some minimals.
  • JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Part 2 - A few more chapters
  • Wanted - Eiichiro Oda - will try to finish the whole book.
  • Some easy listening… will report what I choose later.

[2OC3aOdKgwSGlxfz]

April 24th (Calendar Post)

もし、恋が見えたなら => 74 pages (52 minutes)
私の拳をうけとめて! => 36 pages (51 minutes)

Completed もし、恋が見えたなら yey~

Started my next manga, 私の拳をうけとめて! It’s always refreshing to have a manga with a primarily adult cast - I don’t mind the ones with younger protagonists but I feel the adult ones have their own charm, probably because they are less common and usually more serious.

Some fun manga panels from today:

#wakuwaku

Some interesting vocabulary:

[enbyboiwonder]

Home

I got a $5 coupon today from Manga Republic to celebrate my first purchase. I got the first volume of Haikyuu!! with it as that’s the only one Amazon doesn’t have in stock. It ended up only being $6, which is pretty good!

I read ch 4 of 星だけ. Today was kind of a lazy day because I was tired, so I didn’t get much done, of either studying or reading.

Summary

In this chapter, we learn that Sora’s name comes not from 空 but the 宙 in 宇宙. And it’s the same as in 宙(そら)羊羹(ようかん), which he buys for Kengo as a token of his appreciation.

It’s the end of December now, with New Years soon approaching. Sora’s starting to realize how much he enjoys being near Kengo. He comes into the café at a different time than usual since he’s switched shifts with somebody, and as it’s busy, there are no seats open at the counter where he usually sits and he’s placed at a table, and he catches himself wishing that he could sit at the counter (where Kengo works) and kinda freaks out a bit.

Oh man. Sora overhears a couple of women talking at the table next to him. One of them wishes she could have sat at the counter too since she has her sights set on Kengo, but it seems he and Shiori are dating. Hearing that, even though he knows his coffee is delicious as usual, he can’t taste it. That evening, he gets totally smashed at the drinking party he goes to with some former coworkers from his previous job at the izakaya (possibly at least in part because of Kengo? We only pick up afterward with his friend Takayama supporting him and taking him home), and then they run into Kengo who starts carrying him to his place—Sora’s fallen asleep by the time they run into each other, so Kengo carries him on his back. Shortly after he wakes up, they bump into Shiori, and after she leaves, he asks to be set down and then asks Kengo if he and Shiori are dating. They are. And then Sora runs off and the chapter ends there with him wanting to throw up. And I’m too tired to read on, augh!

I also read the few preview pages of 雪の妖精 that Amazon has, which was probably more of a pain than the Bookwalker preview woulda been. Anyway, it seems like it’ll be a good one, so I added it to my list.

Some vocab of note:

海鼠 (なまこ) sea cucumber. “Sea rat.” Huh. I can’t say I really see it. I learned this one from straycatj. The reading I listed is its primary, which is gikun of course, but it also has the outdated gikun reading こ. So this is one that used to have a longer reading than spelling!
羊羹 (ようかん) This was my first time seeing it in kanji. I don’t think I ever wanna write the second one by hand lmao
雪解け (ゆきどけ) snow thaw; thawing

[natarin]

April 24 Home Post

More Zero Escape of course; Zero Time Dilemma is um… wild I’m starting to get a little more of a grasp of how it works but it’s all far from clear for sure. We’re back to puzzles though so that’s always fun! It’s still been really nice language-wise as well; people say weird stuff sometimes of course, but mostly I’m able to comfortably follow along at dialogue speed which feels pretty good!

ZTD stuff

This is maybe the most messed up Zero Escape, or maybe it just wasted no time getting to that point? And having cutscenes of some of these things… oof man, there’s a lot. 淳平(じゅんぺい)'s frozen head on a shelf? Axe suicide? A whole serial killer?? And some of the choices it has you make, like I’m controlling a whole child and the question is “who are you going to kill?” Absolutely brutal, ZTD pulls zero punches.

On a lighter note, it’s cool seeing some of the previous characters again! シグマ gets to have a voice this time, good for him. 淳平(じゅんぺい) seems to have been through some stuff since the first game which like, idk what would make him so much edgier when the nonary game didn’t seem to so a mystery man for now. Some of the “new” characters I’m less than convinced about how new they actually are but we shall see!

I’d heard about the flowchart in this game being wild and yeah they weren’t wrong It seems like time is generally kind of weird and non-linear within the story so I suppose it’s appropriate, but it’s sure something. Maybe it’ll make more sense over time, or maybe it won’t! I really wouldn’t be surprised either way lmao

But yeah I think I’ve technically finished two main endings already? One of them was a total fluke like two seconds in so that barely counts really, but hey progress is progress. Many mysteries await

@Natsuha

After over two years and three months learning japanese I finally finished my first book in japanese.

Congrats, that’s such an exciting accomplishment!!

@Daisoujou

I guess my only observation is there’s a young child character who is pretending to be a ninja and she ends every single sentence with なり.

I can’t make any real claims without context but I feel like it’d make sense to be an archaic thing? It’s an old copula apparently: verbs - なり as an archaic 'to be'? - Japanese Language Stack Exchange. From your description I just get like “oh I’m using samurai speech for style points” vibes, so that’s my wild guess

[AzusaChan]

I finished reading volume 6 of はなにあらし today. This (and the last volume) had some more drama in it compared to the beginning of the series but by the end I think everything concluded pretty well. Some plot beats aren’t finished yet, so I’ll look forward to seeing how that goes when I start the next volume tomorrow.
Poor Nanoha having a breakdown while eating her ice cream

[MissDagger]

It does indeed. Thanks!

It is so weird when I have a whole sentence where I know every word and I don’t think I’m missing any grammar points and yet I feel like I’m unsure of the meaning.

[omk3]

Day 24

Candy and Cigarettes ~55 pages

(and with another 23 pages this morning I finished the first volume)

I already have the next two volumes from when it was free on Bookwalker, and I definitely plan to continue the story.

Our girl dressed up for the opera:

Opera and a car chase shootout - all in all, a good night out.

Fun words

道を開ける - to make way for, to get out of the way, to pave the way
主食 - staple food
発信機 - transmitter, homing device (発信器 in the manga)
貧乏性 - tendency to be frugal, also tendency to worry over trivial things
物乞い - beggar
可及的速やかに - asap
お役所言葉 - bureaucratic jargon
猫糞 - embezzlement
着包み - cartoon-character costume
工作員 - spy, covert operative
法定速度 - national speed limit
命拾い - narrow escape from death
内部告発 - whistleblowing
女女しい - effeminate, unmanly, cowardly

---

The ABBC Tagagi-san book club started on the 1st of May, a year ago, and it marked the start of my Japanese reading journey. I started reading a little before that, as I was very worried I wouldn’t be able to keep up, so at some point this week it will be exactly one year of reading native Japanese content for me. During this time, I have completed 6 manga volumes (からかい上手の高木さん (1 and 2), 三ツ星カラーズ (1), デスノート (1), ハピネス (1) and Candy and Cigarettes (1)) and 4 books (3 novels and one short story collection: コーヒーが冷めないうちに, 小川未明童話集, 地球星人 and 三毛猫ホームズの推理). When I look at this list now it doesn’t seem like a lot, but when I remember myself a year ago, unsure of being able to read and comprehend even a single manga chapter, I guess I’ve come a long way.

[Belerith]

@MissDagger

坊ちゃん～

@MissDagger

Makes it SUPER close that he cried.

Yes, that’s it. He didn’t cry, but it was a very near thing, As for your conjecture - possible, but can’t be read from this sentence.

@MissDagger

そんなことができたら、こんな田舎に月四十円の給料でくるものか！

I’m not sure what you mean about the contrasting - the first half of the sentence is plain ‘if …’. ‘If I could do such a thing’. The second half of the sentence details what would be ‘if’ - ooh, I see the contrasting now I think. Do you mean the contrast from the ものか? The contrast doesn’t extend to the if clause before the comma, it is just about the statement after. ‘As if I would come for such a low salary!’
Combined, ‘As if I would come to the boondocks for such a low salary if I could do that!’ So basically what you thought it meant.

@MissDagger

そんなによくわかっているなら、始めから言わなければいいのに。

I agree with your take one 言えばいい - I’m not sure I ever consciously made that differentiation between the two use cases. Criticizing someone’s behavior is pretty to close to being disappointed about things not happening as wished - in this case the desired behavios would be ‘the principal not saying’ what he said. (言わなければいい - it would have been good not to say)
Protag doesn’t want the principal to say this earlier, protag wants the principal to not say it at all to begin with if he (the principal) understands it’s not possible for protag to do anyway.

Trying to find something online about this use of 初めから言わない, I found this blog about stuff it might be better not to say at all - if you ctrl+f search for はじめ its’s the second result.
About halfway down this site

「でも…」「まっ いいや」

話の最後にこう言われると、まだ何か不満があることを相手に気づかせてしまいます。言いかけてやめるぐらいなら、はじめから言わないようにしましょう。

Happy late birthday to everyone~

[Belerith]

19.-24.4.
It’s been almost a week since my last update. It didn’t feel like it during it, but looking back at it in numbers, I actually read a lot!

Notable: I finished the questions/quizzes at the end of Le petit Nicolas. There were a couple excerpt from other books about and for children, of which I read one of. But they all seem to be translations into French, so I decided I’m not interested in actually reading the rest and am now completey finished with the book.

Yesterday (the 24th) I somehow completely forgot to read anything in French. When I noticed in the evening, I didn’t have the brain capacity left for anything actually difficult (like La quête d’ewilan definitely is for me), so I quickly read a short story from my graded reader and even stared brain-dead-ly at the vocab spreadsheet that follows each story for a minute or two. I’ll make an effort to read La quête d’ewilan earlier in the day today, haha.

My progress since last time

Le petit Nicolas (163→169/148p)
La quête d’ewilan: d’un monde à l’autre (79→108/334m) (21→32%)
A1 5 Minuten-Lektüren Où est le thym (2→3/20 stories)

[Yuru]

Weekly update~
Short daily updates are in my home post.

@Yuru

I should be able to finish this book in the upcoming week

I lied. I didn’t finish the book. I managed to fit only short reading sessions last week and 探偵チームＫＺ事件ノート wasn’t a huge part of it.

Other than book clubs, I read two short stories in ５分後に以外な結末 ①赤い悪夢: 「父の時給」 and 「幸せグラフ」.

Some no spoiler thoughts on 父の時給

I’ve seen this story in English being circulated around social media before, albeit a shorter version of it. Now I wonder if the story originated from this book or?

But anyway, I knew that twist was coming but it still made me tear a little bit, ugh. Hit a little bit differently reading it in Japanese too.

Some no spoiler thoughts on 幸せグラフ

I honestly had no idea what I read. Had a lot of difficulty comprehending this story for some reason so I’d probably have to reread it.

[NicoleIsEnough]

@Daisoujou

Today I read… 12,000 characters! In total that took 3 hours but there was definitely downtime so let’s call it 2 and a half or something, who knows. I’m still in that beginner (to this sort of task) reading speed zone I think

Ok let me translate that for you. A “standard” page in a Japanese book is said to have 400 characters. So even if it took you 3 hours, that would mean 10 pages per hour. As you said, there likely was some downtime, so maybe you’re more at 12 - 15 pages here.

I incidentally timed my reading speed in Flesh&Blood yesterday, and I read 8 pages in one hour. No downtime, no distractions, just me and the book and Jisho.
The fastest I’ve measured myself at was with the Saikawa&Moe series, at about 12 pages per hour.

Just sayin’

[eoame]

25th of April
Day 25

I didn’t read yesterday. But today I spent half an hour reading pages 28 and 29 of かがみの孤城。 Not so much reading but deciphering lol

Surprisingly I’m finding it’s my grammar knowledge more so than my vocabulary that holds me back in this book. Though there’s still a fair number of words I don’t know on each page.

[chrisosaurus]

Sorry for not making a formal post this challenge, still trying to minimise computer time so my wrists recover and been on holiday to that end.

Despite that I am still reading along with the challenge… well an earlier challenge as I’ve managed to keep reading a tiny bit each day for about 235 days or so.

Not reading much, some days very very little, but it’s better than nothing and it’s all been despite my health being all over the place.

Maybe next challenge I’ll even make a formal tracking post.

Either way I’m rooting for you all and will be loosely following along!

[eefara]

@NicoleIsEnough

Over the past few days I read Flesh&Blood, the pirate story.

Aaah, this has been on my list for a while. Hope you enjoy it!

[MissDagger]

@Belerith

坊ちゃん

Thanks!

About たら and contrasting, the correct phrasing is that たら can be used for counterfactual sentences. The example in aDoBJG is お金があったらこんなうちにはいない。And I thought maybe this would be something similar to that because 坊ちゃん clearly didn’t think this job was all that. But it turns out it was all in the ものか.

The smallest thing in a sentence can really change the whole thing so easily. I love it, and I’m sure that is true (at least sometimes) in Swedish and English, but I don’t remember anything like this when I was learning English (native language acquisition is so different so can’t really compare).

@Belerith

I agree with your take one 言えばいい[…]

Thanks for deepening my understanding here. So it is more: If you understood so well that that kind of behavior standard is hard to do, then don’t even talk about it to begin with.

I hadn’t even considered that 始めから言わない could be a thing in itself.

---

April 25
GUYS! I managed to read three pages of this story without even one sentence stumping me. Feels like such a victory for this story.

Apparently introducing the cast of characters and their nicknames results in relatively simple sentences. Also, now that the pace of the story have slowed a bit (chapter 1 covered the important points of his childhood and chapter 2 is the actual start of the story trying to be told), it is easier to follow along—well, sometimes.

Some story observations from chapter 1 and 2—yes, I finished chapter 2 today!—below, it will contain spoilers for both chapters but anyone who has read the sentences/grammar breakdowns (thanks so much for all the help so far @Belerith, @NicoleIsEnough, and @natarin; I think that is everyone who has helped if I forgot someone O_O I’m sorry. m(_ _)m )

Ch 1 + 2 observations

The protagonist, our 坊ちゃん, portrays himself not in a very nice light. 思ったことはすぐにやる is how he describes himself on the character page. Also, if his friends tells him to jump a cliff, he would. O_O (It was a two story window in the actual story!!!)

The only one he seems to love is the maid 清, and she seems to love him too. (Although it is a bit hard to tell about his mom, since we learned almost nothing about that.) This become clear from him almost crying when leaving her to go to his teacher job in the boondocks and he then wrote her a letter after arriving despite hating to write. He’s not the type of guy to do what he hates.

But he also has quite a bit of humor, which really shows from his nickname of everyone working at the school. Although he forms very quick opinions of people, so… Will see how that goes.

I’m enjoying the story so far. Honestly, while the voice is taking some getting used to, it is shaping up to be something interesting. (Even if I don’t actually know what the story is about, I have not met the Macguffin yet.)

And from a learning perspective, it is excellent. If annoying. I like easy rides.

But it is helping with taking my grammar knowledge from “this kinda means something along these lines” to “this is what it means”, so I will have more exact understanding going forward. So more clear, less rough understanding. And this is while not making it overwhelming. I guess because the author/character voice isn’t unambiguous. 坊ちゃん has very strong and clear opinions.