Unless you’re reading graded readers, the first few books you try are going to be tough so whatever helps you get through! I sometimes use it with sentences with multiple negatives…Also that book looks v cute, which would be enough to keep me motivated
My aim when I’m reading is to follow the story enough that I can re-tell it to someone aftewards. I might not always understand the details or why something happened or how a character felt but as long as at the end I could give a short summary of the plot to someone then I feel like it was a success. And you can then go back to it in 6 months or a year’s time and see much how much you’ve improved.
三毛猫ホームズの推理 ~3% to 6%, from the middle of chapter 1 to about halfway of chapter 2.
I’ll definitely read some more before bed, but I won’t have the energy to update then, so now is good enough. So yesterday I reread the prologue and half of part 1 of chapter 1 (or is it chapter 1 of part 1?) of 三毛猫ホームズの推理. I decided it to read it properly, as if for the first time, and I’m glad I did. It was funnier than I remembered and I think I could appreciate some parts more. Even though I’ve read several things since the last time I read it, I can’t say the improvement in how fluently I read was especially striking. I could now more naturally understand parts that I remember struggling with before, but I still looked up a lot that I had previously looked up (well, just adding cards to Anki is probably not enough for memorization. I guess I will also have to review them at some point). Anyway, my plan for today was to reach the end of chapter (or part?) 2, which was the furthest I had read before. I may still manage to do that later, not sure.
Interesting words and expressions:
知る人ぞ知る - well-known only to those in the know
口と腹とは違う - to say one thing and mean/think another
空き巣 - empty nest, but also burglar who robs empty houses
眼中にない - taking no notice, disregarding
気に食わない - unable to stomach, displeased with
Started booklet two of the Ask graded reader I’m on (level 4, volume 2). So nice to read something fairly easy, and I remembered it often gives definitions of unusual phrases if I just remember to read the next sentence (I don’t know how many times I’ve looked something up only to have the next sentence explain what it was, ).
I only read a little despite the story already pulling me in because two days ago, the start of this challenge went from difficult because I have no habit of reading to also be super busy at the start. Aka boss level difficulty. So I’m tired and I want to get to bed at a good time, and if I had kept reading, I would have read until the end and that would probably have been an hour of reading or so.
Well, success on day one, but I suspect the next week is gonna be challenging.
皆の教えてくれた言葉頂きー！I won’t do this everyday, but I just wanted to take a second to thank anyone who takes time to post new vocabulary
That is really cool! While I didn’t read everyday after the first challenge, it did make it so I picked up a book more often and with more confidence. I’d love to get to where you’re at sometime!
Then it’s gotta be good! Looking forward to hearing more as you keep reading.
I laughed out loud at this haha. I feel this way every time a dialogue page comes up
Soooooo cuuute
I’m thinking of doing something like this too! (I guess that’s the point of a bookmeter though, isn’t it? )
Any progress is good progress! Honestly, even three pages a day for two months would add up
Woah!! I hadn’t thought of training like this. It sounds really challenging in a whole other way.
I love this book series!! Feel welcome to share which story is your favourite. Also welcome to the challenge
I rely so much on kanji I can’t imagine. The lack of kanji was one of the reasons I found the N4 so much more challenging than the N3! But if it’s a good story, I’d be curious to try…
Read 5 pages of 佐賀のがばいばあちゃん 👵🏼 (Intermediate Book Club), finishing the part for the first week of the book club. A thought-provoking prologue with a little history lesson on Japan in the 20th century and a poignant first chapter. Looks to be good read.
And read chapters 23 and 24 of 🐉🐉🐉 極主夫道 3巻 • The Way of the House Husband, Volume 3. I bought the first three volumes of this manga when the book club started because they were discounted, but the humor is still not quite my cup of tea so I’m mostly reading it for practice now.
命中 = めいちゅう a hit (e.g. when you shoot a gun, etc) → 命中率 = accuracy rate.
アジト = secret base of operations, hideout.
供給 = きょうきゅう supply, provision.
First day! I’ve started with Final Fantasy VII, and so far so good. The difficulty seems about right, not overwhelming at all so far, and I’m able to follow virtually everything. It’s also good that the text windows stay open until you click a button, save for two or three dialogues that happened very fast and couldn’t read them properly, but I’m fine with that. I haven’t played this in like forever so I barely remember anything, which is also another positive. Good feelings!
I will most likely be cycling through different resources this challenge, meaning, I won’t be playing anything I don’t feel like playing just because I started it. Or, more precisely, I will be playing whatever I feel like playing that day. I will most likely play Zelda: Breath of the Wild concurrently, and possibly something else. We’ll see!
Ugh mine is long as well That’s the best/most dangerous part of this challenge, is hearing about all of the good books that are out there.
I’ll keep posting updates, and will warn if there’s any major spoilers! It’s still early, so I’m hopeful it’ll get even better from here
Came back home later than expected so I’m glad I read a bit before getting up this morning. I’m three quarters into the book, hoping I’ll finish it soon so I can continue reading the book club books I’ve started.
Side note: I tried to read as fast as I could for one hour last night, but it only amounted to 6%. Idk what I was expecting but at the very least 10% or something? So yeah, much room for improvement.
(In other numbers: 1% of book is 6.5 phone screen pages with my current settings, and takes me 10 min to read)
Edit: tiny font did not want to compute today
Edit2: first tiny box!
Off to a good start on day 1. Finished up my last chapter needed this week for 薬屋のひとりごと. I’ve been really enjoying reading this book, and am super excited to read past the first volume (which I’ve already read the equivalent manga volumes of in English). I’ve been grabbing faaaar too many new vocab words as I read, so I probably won’t list interesting ones here unless they really knock me over.
In addition to my book club reading, I also want to read through some of my manga I’ve got piled up. First one I’ve picked up today is volume one of HALF FANTASIA. Only read about ~10 pages or so before supper (Friday is pizza night), but I’m enjoying it so far. One of our protagonists seems to be one of those ‘too pure for this world’ protagonists, which I’m a sucker for, so I’m looking forward to seeing how the story develops. I’m curious if the mangaka will be able to swing our other protag somehow turning into a devil rather than an angel, haha.
I will pull interesting vocab from my manga readings, so here’s the first batch:
付きっ切り (つきっきり) - constant attendance, uninterrupted supervision
優等生 (ゆうとうせい) - honor student
Oh that’s super cool! I love that game, played it a ton when I was young. It would be cool to revisit in Japanese and have it be… coherent, hahaha. That kinda came out before game localization started becoming a priority and I recall the English being super messy.
It’s here! As I was for half of the last challenge, I’m reading the visual novel Summer Pockets, and digging it a lot. I’m tempted to say so far the emotional parts don’t seem truly heartwrenching, but I’ve found pretty much everyone in the game likeable, and it nails those feelings of playing around in summer back when that meant something.
When I started in the last thread I posted the title image, so here’s an update. With every fully completed route, the character vanishes to mark your progress. That gap on the right half used to have Shizuku and Tsumugi. I’m making progress but… it would very much not surprise me if I’m reading this through this whole challenge. Might even be in the next season, heh.
On that note, I watched the time and my characters and I totaled ~6100 characters and ~490 lines over close to 2 hours. Did seem to be a pretty evenly distributed 3000 characters per hour. This includes a little bit of minor distraction and time spent on cleaning up mined cards and whatnot, but it’s mostly reading. Loads of room for improvement there, but in the last challenge I think there were sub 3000 character days so it’s progress.
I’ll save what’s going on for later, but I do like Ao’s route so far! Today had a lot of colorful words, but maybe the most interesting to me was just 此方人等 (こちとら), a colloquial I or we. I’m always interested when I come across another pronoun I didn’t know. With some searching I found a quick reference to it being somewhat vulgar? But that was all I managed in terms of the context.
Honestly, judging by the level of what you usually post, I’m sure you’d do completely fine when you decide to jump on it . And yes, I remember the Spanish localisation being absolutely terrible. I’m not entirely sure, but it feels like it was a localisation from the English version, and if you say the English one was already bad, then twice as terrible then.
The trick there is I’m exclusively reading things in formats where I can get instant lookups though, haha.
Nah I could possibly fumble through and understand enough – I recently dipped my toes into playing another PS1 RPG I loved in my youth, Star Ocean: The Second Story (the PSP remake cause I liked the idea of added Japanese voices). And in the first couple hours I was doing pretty decently, though I do remember it pretty well. It had a similarly awkward translation originally, though I think the PSP version fixed it up a bit. I’ve gotten started on far, far too many Japanese projects I need to follow through on some day…
I was actually reading a little on the Spanish localization just now and yeah, wow, that’s on a whole other level. The English gets clowned on for lines like “this guy are sick” but it’s mostly just very unnatural and stilted. Though there’s an instance with an early boss where there was no care for text parsing or helpful conjunction so you get two lines sequentially that tell you to do the opposite of what you should:
“Attack when it’s tail’s up”
“It’s gonna counterattack with it’s laser”
Which is meant to be, like “IF you attack when it’s tail is up…” but most people end up parsing that as a direction to attack when the tail is up, because of the counterattack.
Ah, it’s good to be back! I translated one page of よつばと！ today Thats about what I’ll be able to do most days, due to uni being a priority. I’ll go all in on reading for the summer challenge tho
I read Volume 5, Chapter 8 of Teasing Master Takagi-san today. It was a really sweet chapter - possibly my favourite one so far in this volume.
There were only a handful of words I didn’t know, and most of those I could work out from the context, though I checked a dictionary just to make sure.
Today I spent more time book hunting than actually reading
This is technically mostly unrelated to Japanese but there’s a speculative fiction book bingo challenge going on that I want to take part in for fun/the heck of it (kind of a community event - the idea is that everyone reads a bunch of books that fit specific prompts picked by the bingo master and then you get to talk about all the cool books you found and if you complete a bingo card you win )
I want to attempt filling a few of the fields with Japanese books (just because; also 2 birds one stone and all) so I searched a bit for things that I would like to read that also fit a category.
What I’ve come up with so far:
死神の精度 by 伊坂 幸太郎
This seems to be a bunch of (loosely connected?) short stories about a Death God visiting some humans that are marked for death to then decide if they should actually die. Synopsis is a bit vague but it has good reviews & according to some I skimmed this is mostly light hearted with a lot of humor and heart. I’m pretty intrigued.
かがみの孤城
Everyone is apparently reading (and loving) this, and there’s still a book club going on…
ナミヤ雑貨店の奇蹟 by 東野 圭吾
I’ve had this one my list for a while.
Seems to be a really heartfelt and mystical story about humanity and connections between people. Plot seems to be a bunch of delinquents giving other people advice through time travel shenanigans (?). Unfortunately no audiobook though (my poor listening skills)
Decisions
… then it became too late for me to want to actually start anything new so I gave up for today and just continued my current series NO. 6 for a bit. Might still play some 999 if my brain is awake enough. Haven’t done that in a couple of days and I kinda miss it
I started on 夜カフェ today! I know I’m a bit behind the club, but I wanted to wait until the beginning of the challenge so I could start with something new. So far this book seems to be just the right level for me, which is nice b/c this is my first non-manga book and I was a little worried it would be too difficult. Although I’m not very far into it, so hopefully I’m not underestimating the difficulty too much based on just the beginning which i have done several times in the past
Also, with all the talk of Bookmeter earlier I decided to make an account (that was my reading practice for yesterday lol). I’ll probably still primarily use Natively for now but I’m giving Bookmeter a try for this challenge
DAY 1- APRIL 1
Completely ignoring what I was considering reading originally, I started volume one of 異世界食堂 (manga not light novels) because I really love that anime too.
I was going to say that and then I googled ‘subvocalization’. I was under the impression that people were reading aloud but in an inaudible voice but Wikipedia says that it’s an internal voice that people hear when reading.
I do this too except when I watch visual media based on books before or after reading the books. Then the voice may change to that of the actors’.
I had to look up this kanji and saw that one of its forms is テキトー. Thanks to you, I’ve finally found the meaning of that word (テキトー) I kept seeing in Japanese media and couldn’t find no matter how I searched.
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That’s the best/most dangerous part of this challenge, is hearing about all of the good books that are out there.
Finished up my last chapter needed this week for 薬屋のひとりごと. I’ve been really enjoying reading this book, and am super excited to read past the first volume (which I’ve already read the equivalent manga volumes of in English). I’ve been grabbing faaaar too many new vocab words as I read, so I probably won’t list interesting ones here unless they really knock me over.
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Thats about what I’ll be able to do most days, due to uni being a priority. I’ll go all in on reading for the summer challenge tho 
home post 
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officer, I would like to file a report