Ah, so it’s the Chinese equivalent!
It can’t have been an encoding problem on my end though, as I saw it in a manga (so it was a pic) and I looked for it by radicals and handwriting. Who knows why the Chinese character was used in the manga. They’re very similar in any case.
7 Likes
Day 36 / Calendar
I’ve finished reading this weeks BBC book club. I’m getting through most sentences with ease, maybe because I’m coasting heavily on the context, maybe I actually got better, doesn’t really matter, both should work out in the end.
22 Likes
May 10 (Day 39)
I haven’t made a post for a while! I’ve just been checking my days off here and there.
I’m keeping up with the 佐賀のがばいばあちゃん book club, which makes me happy.
I read one very challenging page in 透明カメレオン since the last written update. It was talking about a really specific hobby around building transistor radios. I’m hoping if I can squeeze past this part it’ll get easier again 
Also, I’ve been reading Japanese for work! Headquarters hasn’t translated the latest internal magazine into English yet, and I want to highlight some of the material for our team in the UK. It’s pretty cool that Japanese is becoming practical!
Even if I’m not posting everyday, I’m scrolling through to see how you are all doing. You guys are the best.
My Home Post
24 Likes
I would suspect it’s just a font thing, maybe because it’s an older manga? I can’t find anything specifically saying when the form changed in Japanese but it’s possible it happened later. That’s just speculation though!
4 Likes
Or maybe the editors had an encoding issue on their end and never noticed 
(I’ll have to check if this edition was made in China)
5 Likes
May 10th!
I read Chapter 19 of Mitsuboshi Colors today, which means I’ve finished Volume 2 
I’m planning to keep reading with the offshoot club, so I’ll be starting Volume 3 in a week or so.
23 Likes
I’ll keep this shortish cause I have things to run off and do today, but reading was good! I pushed to a little over 7000 characters – since my soft goal is really just about pushing myself when feasible, and ok to miss, I think I’m going to bump from 6000 to 7000 each day to continue progressing. And hey, this means Nomiki’s stuff wasn’t really noticeably any harder to read 
.
And there she is, island rule enforcer with her water guns.
I’ll just leave you with this: I came across 地獄絵図 (じごくえず) today, “a picture of hell.” Most images you find searching that give me vibes of a slightly less weird Hieronymus Bosch
25 Likes
Day 39
- ジョジョの奇妙な冒険
164-end (~200?)
I finished the volume last night! 
It was a bit of a pain because Dio was back once again, but his grammar was a drag because it was difficult to read most of the time. It was nice to see him drawn beautifully though.
I had really hoped with this part to judge for myself if he makes a woman eat her own baby, since it’s a popular opinion/statement in fandom. Personally, I’m of the opinion that if a character is given a choice with dissimilar outcomes then that’s not them being made to pick A over B or B over A. I’m positive in this case that it is proposed dissimilar outcomes or at least ones where neither character were assured that the outcome would be the same - that is the mother had the choices of being turned into a zombie or being attacked by them. I don’t feel like it’s a given that she would be the one to kill her baby. I think the point of Dio even offering this choice was to see if the sacrifice of the mother would lead to harm to her baby just as his mother trying to shield him from Dario’s abuse lead to her own death and subsequently Dio receiving all of the abuse. Vampirism (Dio)(and zombiism (? Tarkus and Bluford)) do not lead to corruption of ideals in the case of strong willed people. If it was Harry Potter, then the lesson would be that a mother’s love and sacrifice can protect her child. But it’s JoJo. That’s why I don’t think that he made her kill her own baby. However, I can’t figure out what he’s saying in the situation with absolute certainty. 
I’ll probably need to come back to the scene after I make more progress Japanese-wise. I think I might watch the anime version of the scene later tonight to try to distinguish, although the anime changed more than I thought it did in general.
As for the next volume, I kind of want to binge it if I finish all my chores quickly tomorrow. Volume 5 changes from Part 1 to Part 2, and I have no intention of reading Part 2 any time soon. That means this’ll be a short volume for me, about 140 pages.
21 Likes
I’m not reading today. My 16-year-old dog died this morning.
19 Likes
My condolences. Take time to grieve. 
13 Likes
Day 40: May 10th
What did I read?: クマとカラス
How much did I read?: 10 pages
How long did it take me?: 16 min
A tiny read today. They made it to the volcano though :3
Look at the way the bear is sitting 
23 Likes
So sorry for your loss 
12 Likes
I’d never heard of this author so I googled his name. I just read the Wikipedia article and am amazed at how much writing he did and in so many languages!
9 Likes
24% → 30% of モテ薬. It’s mildly amusing, the voice acting remains good, but I’m honestly more bored by the constant interviews than all that intrigued by this business of a medicine that makes mice so horny they kill the poor soul injected with it. (content warning, not a spoiler)
I did have a fun moment where I read this sentence and it made perfect sense:
しかし、サイトカインが分泌されすぎると、「サイトカインストーム」＝免疫の暴風雨を起こす恐れがある。つまり免疫が異常に反応し、ウイルスや細菌だけでなく、自分の身体まで壊してしまうことがあるんです。
I think it’s the first medical rambling in this book I’ve just blithely taken in instead of struggling to remember what all the words mean at once (probably due to all the カタカナ英語 heh). Progress!
16 Likes
a nit pick
It is his real name though, he took the surname from his wife and then his new given name was also legally registered. Lafcadio Hearn is his birthname rather.
As a genderqueer person, this phrasing rubs me the wrong way because it implies that the newer name is somehow fake or less valid.
13 Likes
Nope, my shoulder got worse. I refuse to let it stop me entirely though. Oh, and SxF?? Originally was set to get here on the 27th at the earliest. It got here TODAY. It shipped YESTERDAY. From ŌSAKA. WTF. I thought the fastest something could get to the U.S. from Japan was 2-3 days, but this didn’t even take 36 hrs.
And it seems I’ll be going to Half Price Books tomorrow! If I end up buying any books, my mother can’t even complain, because she’s the one who invited me! I even found a couple books in English today that I wanna read, and they’re recent, but HPB does carry some recent releases, so with any luck they’ll have at least one of them.
I finally got around to reading the Bookwalker preview of 魔女が恋する５秒前. It looks good, and also it’s by an author I’m familiar with (which I hadn’t realized), so it’s definitely one I’ll be getting eventually. I also read the preview for アキはハルとごはんを食べたい, a gay cooking manga. It looks so cuuute, and the art’s pretty adorable too.
I read the 描き下ろし ch 15 of クールドジ男子.
Shun gets confessed to!
A first-year gives him a confession letter but he doesn’t understand what it is lmao. The poor girl runs off, and he tries to ask his friends (who were spying) what that was about, but they tell him he should read it alone. So he does and reports back, “I was confessed to.” That was the first time they had ever met, so he was gonna go turn her down, and since he has a tendency to be blunt (like when he asked the poor girl to her face what that letter was! この手紙、なに), his friends stop him and try to get him to turn her down gently asdfghjkl he’s like, “Then what should I say,「無理でございます。付き合えませんでござる」?!”
Since he’s so hopeless, his friends get him to write her a rejection letter since that way he can think more about what to say and won’t turn into a samurai, and he ends up texting Hayate for advice at lunch. Hayate went to an all-boys school though and has never been confessed to.
He’d also asked Mima. Aw, Mima and Hayate both had the same reaction: thinking, “青春だなぁ…” ♡ (And it’s funny because Hayate isn’t even all that much older than Shun lmao) It seems he has experience (at least with getting confessed to; no idea if he’s ever dated), but his school days were so long ago that he doesn’t remember, and he just says, “「ごめんなさい」じゃ駄目ですか？” so Shun writes that down and is like, this woulda been quicker to just tell her. Souma, whom he’d also asked, says then that he should try dating her or starting as friends first. Finally, he asks his sister, and he gets some actual advice. Though his only takeaway from it is to, underneath the “ごめんなさい。” write “でも 好きになってくれてありがとう。” and draw a cat (which at least looks better than his dog lol). The girl’s happy though and thinks he’s kind, so I guess it worked out?
Also, when he went to give her the letter, he first dropped by the wrong classroom and was greeted by one of his kouhai in the handball club, and of course as usual he played it off as intentional.
This time, he actually came off as smooth, though, when usually the other person can tell he’s bullshitting. You’re gonna make him fall for you!
I read ch 5-6 of 夜カフェ, which came out to 24 pages of text. I’m really thinking I coulda just jumped into the Intermediate club, because even though there are still a few things I don’t 100% understand reading this book, it’s kinda clear that the Beginners club is below my level. I am planning on continuing 夜カフェ though since I like it so far, I’m just not sure yet if I’ll keep reading along with the club after this volume or just read ahead on my own and check in with the club threads.
Some vocab of note:
和蘭撫子 (オランダナデシコ) [noun] carnation. ねこあつめ’s daily password.
無愛想 (ぶあいそう) [noun, な-adjective] unsociable; unfriendly; blunt; surly; cold; brusque
I wouldn’t be surprised if part of it too is that Souseki is a less common name than Natsume. Dazai is a less common name than Osamu. “This story by Osamu—” “Who?” “Ah, Dazai.” “Ah, got it.” (Not that I know any other authors named Natsume or Osamu, but I’m not exactly well-read.)
21 Likes
May 10th (Calendar Post)
ハロー、メランコリック！ => 68 pages (101 min)
Some fun panels from today:
ハロー
よね～
やったー！
はーー
#shocked
にひ～
this manga has too many fun panels…
25 Likes
More shinymas reading today. In the aftermath of the previous fight, the girls have devised a plan to attack Rinze and sent her a 果たし状 (a letter of challenge to a duel). As the story progresses, there was a flashback scene on how things came to be with her, and it seems like her emotions have her wavering a bit.
Next chapter should be the answer to challenge, it should be interesting.
22 Likes
May 10 
Home Post
Super brief reading day today, just a couple of pages of ラストゲーム for the sake of it. After tomorrow I’ll be done with finals though! 
Soon
24 Likes
I’m so sorry for your loss. 
13 Likes