Oh no, my heart goes out to you and yours 
Take good care of yourself @dunlewy
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Thank you. I’m taking a couple of days off to just do nothing.
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Thanks to everyone. I’ll be scouring the closest animal shelter in a few weeks to find an abused or neglected dog to adopt.
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May 11th 
・薬屋のひとりごと 2 (0% → 5%)
Started the second book. There were pretty (colored) illustrations of the characters inside the book covers. (E-book covers? 
)
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May 11th.
Chapter 60 of Yotsuba today. Lots of cute moments, I especially loved her dad discovering that shes been accidentally spilling all of the coffee that she’s been taking next door, and nobody has actually managed to taste it yet 
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May 10th-11th 
(Days ?)
Well, long time no update… I haven’t read anything since my last update almost two weeks ago. At first, I had a deadline which I scrambled to meet, and then I just felt like I needed a day or two off. But after the day or two passed, I couldn’t bring myself to it again. And then the days just kept piling on, and it became harder and harder to return.
I am only here now because I was bored on my commute yesterday and found that the only book I had with me was the collection of short stories in Japanese. So I gave it a shot, and ended up feeling quite refreshed. It made me think about how I’ve gone about this challenge in April, and I realized that I was too busy trying to meet the daily reading goal to have fun. Not a good approach.
Anyways, I am back and I want to give this challenge another shot. Haven’t read anything today (title is just for continuity’s sake). But I guess that’s fine. I’ll try my best tomorrow and will be back with another update (hopefully).
Also, I’ll be trying to catch up with everyone’s posts - ah, there are so many things I missed
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I have started reading “Hikoichi and the Flower Viewing” and read the first three pages. The lord
told everyone to carry something–brushes and ink for poetry writing, tools for making tea, rugs on which to sit, etc. The vassels thought they would only carry the lighter items. Hikoichi could carry the food.
New Grammar and Vocabulary:
みんな
皆 の もの An old-fashioned way high-authority figures would call peoples’ attention
ぞ adds force or command
など
等 etc., and so on, and so forth
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Day 41 
告白 ~ 50-55%, end of chapter 3
Another chapter ended, more “confessions” were made. Little details are constantly being added to what we thought was the truth, tweaking and distorting it. I wonder who the next narrator will be, and if any narrators are going to have a second go.
Language-wise, this chapter was definitely the easiest. With each new narrator, the writing style changes, so who knows what the next chapter will bring. So far the hardest was by far the first one though.
Words:
正当防衛 - legitimate self-defence
手取り足取り - attentively, patiently, step-by-step (eg teaching)
開き直る - to become defiant, to fight back
頭文字 - first letter of a word, initials
奈落の底 - depths of Hell, abyss, inescapable situation
片っ端から - everything from A to Z, one after another, systematically
手あたり次第 - using anything you can lay your hands on, haphazardly
はばかりながら - with all due respect…, I venture to say… (from 憚る - to be afraid of what others may think, to hesitate)
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So far so good on bumping up my characters read – actually hit 8000 today! It took a pretty long time, but more reading is more reading. And rarely particularly taxing reading, despite all the new words.
Nothing crazy in this screenshotted sentence, but as I’ve posted in the past, it was another case where I just thought “oh I can read this, that’s neat.” It’s nice to occasionally stop and recognize that. Definitely evidence I’ve learned something, when a year ago this would have been a scary line of scribbles. This is unassisted as well – 最大限 is new to me, but I was able to intuit it (helps that I have seen 最小限), and more or less straight away read and understand this. The best part is, however slowly, seeing the moments increase where I straight up read in the traditional sense instead of looking things up and solving sentence puzzles.
My favorite new word is 紅葉 (こうよう), referring to the changing autumn colors. It’s cool that there’s a word for that.
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Day 40
- 都道府県のおはなし
I read the first 3 pages in their entirety. Due to some evening events, I was low on motivation and just wanted to go to bed. I might end up getting far ahead of the reading schedule on this one…
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Day 41: May 11th
What did I read?: クマとカラス
How much did I read?: 6 pages
How long did it take me?: 16 min
Honestly I didn’t really feel like reading at all today :x I had to work late so I was sort of just in the mood to not do things. But I did do a tiny read. Today they met a boar who coincidentally also loves volcanos xD
A word and a grammar
- 竹藪 (たけやぶ) - bamboo grove
- どちらかと言うと - if anything; if pushed I’d say; if I had to say
Oof, I know this feeling toooo well lol. Welcome back 
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May 11
Oops, it’s been a minute.
I’ve been a little stressed this week working on the medical exam portion of the MEXT application. It’s all going to be fine in the end. I planned for unexpected circumstances, so I should still have plenty of time to submit the application.
But enough about that, the fun thing to talk about is I visited Kinokuniya today! I asked my friend to take me to the Japanese market in the suburbs as a belated birthday gift. We went shopping for groceries and stopped by the bookstore. I had a list, but didn’t have time to write furigana for author’s names. Despite that, I managed to snag some of the books I was looking for!
Here’s my haul (clockwise from left):
- What turned out to be a recipe book for people with diabetes (which is not me, oops!). It was the first book I grabbed when I walked in. I like food, I want to learn more food vocab, and how to follow recipes in Japanese, so hey, still good practice.
- A Dictionary of Japanese Particles published by Kodansha (because why not have more reference books)
- せつない動物図鑑 (Sad Animal Facts illustrated book) (perfect timing with the recent Tofugu article on ehon)
- 魔女の宅急便 (Kiki’s Delivery Service) (will be checking out the previous repeat book club, よろしく)
- ハイキュ−！！ショ−セツバン！！ (Haikyuu!! short stories) (novelization)
I started reading the zukan. I liked that the ワニ and カニ pages were right next to each other
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Read 30% → 36% of モテ薬 today. Forgot to mention last night that one of the amusing bits of this book was a doctor saying he was all in for the sexual attraction amping drug cause after his wife had a baby he stopped being attracted to her (Madonna Complex) and he’d found his wife in a Facebook group for sexless marriages, いいね！ing posts by men talking about “outsourcing” sex. (actual, albeit minor and not plot related spoiler) I mean, kinda sad, but the way it was talked about had me amused.
Today’s chapter largely about sexism in STEM, which they’ve previously touched on before.
I still don’t get why I’m not more into this book. Something about it just isn’t working for me.
Unrelated to that book:
I also have a cultural question that maybe fits more in the extensive listening thread but it feels silly to make a post there when it’s far less discussion heavy and much too small to warrant it’s own post I think. I don’t understand the social meaning of using 彼 (or I suppose 彼女) in the presence of the person you’re talking about.
Two examples:
押井刑事:
A pissed off lady detective refers to 押井 as 彼 in a group discussion, which he reacts to angrily (asking why she’s calling him that). I took it as ‘ah, this is disrespectful’.
三毛猫ホームズの推理 (TV show):
A potential love interest of 片山’s meets his sister & co and she calls him 彼 which, by reactions, is like her calling him that to mean 彼氏.
I’m having trouble googling this up because pretty much all talk about the second case (can be interpreted to mean 彼氏) but don’t clear up the former. Did I just totally misread the first situation? Is it just context and both are correct?
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A couple weeks ago when I was feeling frustrated with my progress I ordered some books which I hoped would be good for me to read when I didn’t have a lot of brain capacity. This morning between all the things I had to get done I didn’t have any time to read 夜カフェ (or anything else) – then my package with the easier books came while I was at work, so tonight after I got home I read one chapter of 動物と話せる少女リリアーネ しあわせの黒いねこ. First impressions: extremely cute. Incidentally, I found this series by investigating other people’s bookmeter history. Squarefairy-san, who are you? And thank you!
@dunlewy I’m so sorry for your loss. 
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I think it’s like 彼女 where it’s like, “Why are you referring to them like that if both you the speaker know their name and the listeners know their name?” It’s implying a different sort of relationship than expected between colleagues like that.
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Thank you. Today I put a fence around and planted marigolds on the grave.
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HPB had a full third of 君に届け! Vol 1… and 3-11. So it’ll be a while before I can read them. I also found 掟上今日子の遺言書. It’s the 4th in a series, but the series sounds interesting, so I got it anyway. Apparently it also has a manga and a TV drama, so there’s even more to look forward to if I enjoy it! Annoyingly, Amazon JP doesn’t have most of them (including the first 3) available to ship internationally, but at least Kinokuniya has my back (and I’m planning on making my way through at least some of the novels I already have before getting them anyway).
I also bought Café con Lychee by Emery Lee, which is kind of another gay cooking story (there’s not much actual cooking going on, but it is food-related, and it’s definitely gay. Also “rivals to allies/sort-of friends to ‘wait are we actually friends now’ to ‘oh no I have a crush on him’ to lovers,” which is great), and I ended up reading all 311 pages of it today, which didn’t leave all that much time for anything else this afternoon. It’s so good, I was actually annoyed when I had to put it down for dinner. We’ll see if I actually have the patience to wait 3.5 months to get eir other book for my birthday.
I read ch 16 of クールドジ男子.
Everyone's forgetting things today lol
It’s raining off and on today, and Hayate’s misplaced his umbrella while out shopping. A couple schoolgirls see him staring out at the rain unconcernedly and think he’s cool lmao. When he’s not busy being so embarrassed he could die, he does generally look pretty unaffected by everything.
The girls were speculating that Hayate was waiting for his girlfriend, and then Souma shows up and offers to share his umbrella, and the girls think he was waiting for his date after all, just not a girlfriend!
(It’s too bad I don’t ship these two at all lol)
They go back to the bookstore so Hayate can look for his umbrella and Souma con continue his own shopping. Hayate runs into Mima and gets distracted from his search.
W-Why is “憧れの” in parentheses… And he does this twice, getting blushy while being pleased that he’s got another thing in common with Mima. (And he hasn’t blushed around Mima before, even while thinking he’s cool. I’ve been paying attention.) You’re gonna make me think it’s the “crush” sense, not just the “admire/look up to” sense!
Aw, and when Hayate asks for a book recommendation and Mima recs Igarashi-sensei’s latest work, Hayate reveals that he’s a fan and starts gushing (info-dumping or… wait, is there a separate word for the ADHD equivalent, or am I just thinking of special interest and hyperfixation? But anyway it doesn’t seem very neurotypical, so) about his writing before getting embarrassed and trailing off, but Mima likes seeing him animated like that and tries to get him to continue ♡ although to no avail.
Maybe he’d join Mima reading under the beach umbrella lol. At any rate, he does definitely strike me as the type to be content just staying on the beach itself, maybe get his feet wet a little at most. You’d have to practically drag him out to get him to actually go in the water.
Souma catches up to him after making his purchase to see how Hayate’s search went, but he forgot his purchase at the counter and a clerk chases after him lmao
lol and Mima forgot his umbrella at work, so he’s borrowing Ricchan’s, a cutesy purple, white, and pink bear one—the same one Hayate saw a young girl using earlier and which he’d thought Souma was pointing out to him as a suggestion to replace his easily misplaced clear one (Souma was actually pointing out the dark blue plaid one of the man walking in front of her), so he kind of admires Mima for being able to use it so nonchalantly, when he’d thought it would be way too cute for him himself to use as a 20-y.o. guy. Mima, however, doesn’t care what his umbrella looks like, as long as it keeps him dry.
Some vocab of note:
眼福 (がんぷく) [noun] a sight for sore eyes; seeing something beautiful or precious
Yeah, 彼 and 彼女 do technically mean “he” and “she,” but irl they’re mainly used to mean “boyfriend” (which is also 彼氏) and “girlfriend.” But, when you know someone’s name, it’s considered polite to use it rather than a pronoun, or else to use a title (like 先生) or, like, この人 or おばさん or whatever. Pronouns seem to be rather familiar language, and even though there are different respect levels among them, it can still come off as rude depending on the context. Like say even though こいつ and この人 mean the same thing, if you’re not close enough to the person to use こいつ and you do, they’ll get mad, like Oshii was when the detective referred to him as 彼. They don’t have that kind of relationship, so she should have called him like 押井さん or maybe 刑事さん or 押井刑事 or something, depending on the situation. Which is something textbooks ignore, even though I feel like they really shouldn’t.
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May 11th (Calendar Post)
ハロー、メランコリック！ => 91 pages (124 min)
There’s something about the facial expressions in this manga that just fascinates me… so here’s my next endless dump of fun panels from today’s reading!
わい～
何コレ ワニ？カニ？
あ？
パア
うわ～
こわ～！
#watIsHappening
ニャッ
にや
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I’m not sure about the social hierarchy between the two (if he’s 目上 it’s impolite either way) but this makes me wonder if he considered it rude because she used 彼 for him, or because she used it while he’s present. I’m probably immediately going to catch someone doing otherwise while procrastinating on my flashcards by watching Netflix, but somehow it feels a bit like using あの男 while he’s standing next to you? 
(Would love some feedback from some of you I actually know some Japanese-people 
)
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