📚📚 Read every day challenge - Spring 2022 🌸 🌱

Yeah, I think it’s interviews for the more obscure or changed names, like Hol Horse being from Hall and Oates. Some are still unconfirmed I believe, like Holly, but I’m pretty sure hers is from The Hollies, since they’re old enough and a rock band. Others are written the exact same way as their namesake or in a way that matches either the spelling or pronunciation better (like ヴァニラアイス instead of バニラアイス).

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I just finished “Hikoichi and the Living Umbrella”. I am laughing. After making “living umbrellas” to make some money, Hikoichi sells one to the Lord. Telling everyone the umbrella would open when it rains and close when it was not raining, Hikoichi fooled the Lord, because, of course, the umbrella didn’t do that! When it rained and the umbrella didn’t open by itself, the Lord complained. Hikoichi said, “Let me see that umbrella. Why, it hasn’t eaten for a long time. It has died.” My FAVORITE Hikoichi story so far!

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Summary Post

Day 47: May 17th
What did I read?: クマとたぬき Vol 2
How much did I read?: 13 pages
How long did it take me?: 16 min

More soft animals! A whole pack of soft animals :o

My weird lighting and my editing combined to make it look like they’re running at sunset lol - it wasn’t intentional but I love it

Look at the tanuki putting its little feeties in the water :pleading_face:

A couple good words
  • 突風 (とっぷう) - gust (of wind); blast
  • 間引く (まびく) - to thin out (plants, seedlings, crops, etc.); to cull (apparently in the old days it could also mean “to kill a newborn child due to financial difficulties” :fearful:)
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May 18th (Calendar Post)

ハロー、メランコリック! => 30 pages (35 min)
隣の席の佐藤さん => 26 pages (28 min)

Completed ハロー、メランコリック! yey~

And started a new manga, 隣の席の佐藤さん. Author seems to really like going for some quite rare kanji with no furigana - hopefully that’d be good practice for my kanji.

Some fun panels from today’s reading:

#lendMeYourFace

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はん⁉

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はあぁ…?

And the award for world’s cutest band-aid goes to… :trophy:

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Also, interesting vocab I ran into:

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Day 47 :heavy_check_mark: :milk_glass:

告白 ~ 80-90%

Read a big chunk yesterday, and hope to do so today too. As with most books, I get impatient when I see the end approaching. I talked before about how I almost sympathize with the current narrator - well, not really any more. It’s really hard to side with anyone in this book. Usually as long as a story is told from someone’s point of view, that’s more than enough for me to get in their shoes and be on board with their motivations. Not so here. I do get to understand them and even feel for them up to a point (some more than others), but then they lose me. And this is where the various cruel twists and turns of this story even get humorous for me. Not sure if it’s intentional, but I did actually chuckle at several points as this drama unfolded, even while my heart broke at others.

I ran into a proverb yesterday: 窮鼠猫を噛む (a cornered rat will bite a cat)
窮鼠 is a cornered rat, or cornered animal in general.

ゾンビ! :smiley: I too ran into this word in my book, soon after our zombie/vampire discussion! Fun seeing it in katakana.

:scream: :cry: Poor umbrella! :rofl:

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May 17 :cherry_blossom: Home Post

Well I was busy today and my physical manga aren’t currently easily accessible so I decided to read a tiny bit on bookwalker just to check off today, and I ended up reading like 70 pages of 妖怪(ようかい)アパートの幽雅(ゆうが)日常(にちじょう) accidentally :joy: so that was fun, but now it’s time to sleep for sure.

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Oh cool, is that the manga or the novel? I have the first three volumes of the manga from another time they were free (they still are, I see), and plan to get around to reading it at some point. Judging by how many pages you read, I assume you liked it? :smile:

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:blossom: May 17th :blossom: :house:
Finished 悪魔のパズル two days ago, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would it was a pretty cute story, might read the second one at some point. Books around this level feel pretty comfortable to read now, although there was a lot of more fantasy related vocab I had to look up in this one.
Then today and yesterday I started reading 真夜中のパン屋さん 午前0時のレシピ which I found when I was browsing kids books on bookwalker. Turns out it’s probably one of those cases where it’s just a normal novel with more furigana added in the kids version, although I think this one’s aimed at slightly older kids because only some words have furigana. Way more difficult than the other books I’ve read but It’s really interesting so far, apparently it was adapted into a drama at some point too. So far it’s about a kind of prickly girl who due to some circumstances ends up staying at this bread shop that’s only open throughout the night that tends to attract customers with interesting circumstances. (Man would I love it if a bread shop like this was in my neighborhood, I’d buy bread every night )

Story thoughts so far

The book started out by describing the bread shop “Boulangerie Kurebayashi,” which is run by these two guys and only open at night. Late at night on April Fools, in an unusual occurrence a high school girl suddenly visits the shop, holding a luggage bag. She asks for Kurebayashi Miyako, and the man running the store is really surprised and reveals that’s his wife and asks what’s up. The girl then says that Miyako is her older half sister and asks if he’s heard anything about her, which really shocks the guys at the bread shop, and that’s where the prologue ends. The first chapter opens with a focus on the girl, Nozomi who’s describes as いつも腹が立ている。Which is understandable reading the next part, after this her life so far is described and her mother abandoned her with her grandparents until she was six, then took her back with her to Tokyo and started leaving her with a bunch of random people (some of which apparently weren’t the nicest) for anywhere from a half day to ten days at a time. This continued until she was in high school when it stopped and she assumed that maybe her mother was finally trying harder, until she wakes up on April fools and all of her mother’s stuff is gone from the house, leaving behind only two letters, one of which said that she’s going on a trip and It’ll probably be long so she canceled the rent for the room and Nozomi needs to leave before the next day, as well as that she found her a place to stay with her much older half sister. Nozomi is pretty sure that her mother must have lied to the person by saying they were sisters since she researched herself about her dad and he refused to meet her and has a wife and sons. There it goes back to the events of the prologue and she asks if she can meet Mariko only for the husband to tell her that she passed away about half a year ago. And that’s where I had to stop :sob: I really can’t wait to see what happens after this

Vocab (lots of bread related words)

焼きたて (やきたて)fresh made; freshly baked; freshly roasted
調理パン (ちょうりぱん)dressed bread; bread to which something has been added (sandwich, pirogi, etc.); stuffed bread (rolls, buns, etc.)
捏ね上げる (こねあげる)to knead thoroughly; to work up
クープ coupe, that line cut in the middle of bread before baking (I think)
バタール bâtard, type of bread
托卵 (たくらん)brood parasitism (planting one’s eggs in another bird’s nest, as demonstrated by the cuckoo, etc.)
もぬけの殻 (もぬけのから)completely empty (of a residence, etc.); vacant; deserted​
万年床 (まんねんどこ)bedding that is never put away during the day; permanently laid-out futon

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Home

I planned to go to bed early both yesterday and today, but yesterday I ended up passing out even earlier lol. Ugh, my staying up late playing Heroes is catching up to me already, it makes me feel old.

I read the preview for the first volume of both the とんでもスキルで異世界放浪メシ manga and LN (although I didn’t finish that one yet as it’s unexpectedly long), as well as the spin-off manga スイの大冒険. I don’t normally go for isekais, but I came across a post reccing some on tumblr, and that was one of the few that sounded interesting, so I may give it a go at some point. Never thought I’d make a wishlist for isekais, but here we are lol

Also the good thing about this one is there’s a lot of the same vocab as in DQ Heroes since it’s set in the same type of world, so I’ve already come across at least some of it so far. Which would definitely help with the novels since they have little furigana, while both the manga have full furigana. Also I haven’t read a single fantasy since I started reading in Japanese. I literally grew up on the sword and sorcery genre!

The first thing I did though was play DQ Heroes. I recruited Jessica and Yangus, and made it to the dwarven city (or at least, to what I think is the last stage outside of it). I think the next one might be the farthest I made it to playing on Steam (and in less time), but I’ll find out today. Even though the reading is a lot (and I mean a lot) more slow-going, the gameplay is much easier since this is actually made for the Switch, whereas the one on Steam is just the PlayStation port, so while I think you can map the buttons onto your keyboard however you want, the screen still just shows the PS buttons, and it’s difficult for me to keep track even with a key taped up above my laptop screen, and I often end up pressing the wrong keys. I’ve only failed a mission once this time around, versus… a lot on the PC.

Oh yeah, and it’s easier than I thought to keep everyone at a similar level. When I mentioned it before, it was while my only playable character was still Luc, and I’d forgotten that everyone in your party gets the same amount of EXP from stages, even if you don’t play as them. Everyone back at Patty’s Party Planning Place (a.k.a. Luida’s Tavern) also gets EXP, though I’m not sure what percentage.

Also, there are getting to be fewer words that I gotta look up. That I gotta re look up, sure, but I’m guessing I’ve gotten to a big portion of the words that show up more often in this game. I mean, undoubtedly there’ll be more, since I’m still near the beginning, but.

Some vocab of note:

胡散臭い (うさんくさい) [い-adjective] suspicious; shady; questionable; dubious; fishy
贅沢三昧 (ぜいたくざんまい) [四字熟語, noun] indulging in every possible luxury
古 (いにしえ) [noun] antiquity; ancient times. The longest reading for a single kanji I remember seeing. Also, this came up in Heroes the day before(?) but in kana, so when I came across it in とんでもスキル in kanji (and one of the few with furigana, to boot), I decided I may as well add it.
洞くつ (どうくつ) [noun] cavern; cave; cave system; grotto. Though it appears as written in DQH, it seems it’s usually written 洞窟.

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Now, I realized that spoiler prevention is as easy as, searching in Japanese vocabulary + " JoJo". Not a completely perfect avoidance of spoilers, though, but at least hundred times safer than Wiki.

I wonder what kind of device people here use to read on Bookwalker (or Kindle)? Smartphone? Tablet?

Please round up the number, btw.
  • Smartphones (5-inch or lower)
  • 7-inch tablets
  • 10-inch or larger tablets
  • Something else electronic
0 voters

Personally, I also read on working shifts, but I might not be holding a tablet. As for now, I would read JoJo on a Smartphone, and regularly switching to dictionary apps (Akebi, Kotobank) and web browser. Tablet feels more productive and more like learning, though.

Kotobank is better, but I still use Akebi to send to Anki. Also, Akebi, like most other JE dictionaries, can parse conjugations.

Death Note might be possible, but won’t work well (for me) with novels like Yoru Cafe (mainly because - too long a section); and perhaps not yet Yuru Camp.


May 18, Wed :cherry_blossom: calendar post

Week 8 of Spring 2022’s progress

This week, I have energy to post like several days straight, lol.

I also look a little more into Netflix, and reach a conclusion of, I am not ready to listen on Netflix. Though, I might make reading club’s watching along, an exception. ()(かん) isn’t it? Somehow, JoJo likes to use 遺憾.

But now I have an additional reading goals, but not yet the grammar (i.e. maybe later).

  • 3 freestyle articles / blog posts, to be read seriously (one of them is already selected JoJo’s)
    • Probably will be 5 per week, starting next week.

Interesting vocabularies

Same reading (and pitch) for 児戯(じぎ) (child's play) and perhaps a few other words

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  • (しん)() mysterious (seems like doings of god)
  • ひと(つき) also written 一月 and means 一ヶ月
  • ()(れん) trial, ordeal - I guess it works for trial of courage too.
  • (この)みはうるさい difficult to please. An alternate meaning of うるさい.

More spoiler’ish, but I want to show it anyway

First third of JoJo part 2's training

Now JoJo and Caesar fell into HellClimb Pillar (yes, there is only ・ between Climb and Pillar)

And, also young JoJo’s personal history… at おまけ!

Persons and places

  • ジャン・ギャビン JoJo’s fav actor - Jean Gabin seems to be a famous and influential French actor from 1940s on.
  • Fictional names
    • ジョセフ・ジョースター Josef Joestar (I can’t correctly spell this in English before.)
  • Fictional places
    • エア・サピレーナ(とう) Air Supplena Island - supposedly can be reached from Venice, Italy. / ref = Air Supply. I think I have heard their songs before.
    • 地獄昇柱 Furigana’d HellClimb Pillar , but I assume it can also be read ()(ごく)(しょう)(ちゅう)

Vocabularies

  • (かん)(しん) admiration
  • (きょう)(せい) correction
  • ()(しょう) restriction, hindrance - Lisa want to correct JoJo’s breath with restrictions :rofl:
  • (とう)(ごく) imprisonment (who do you think this JoJo really is?)
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Day 46

  • shark field guide

How to read this guide and What are sharks

Something like 5-6 pages? It’s very cute and I’m quite glad I already know about sharks otherwise 軟骨魚 would have been a pain to look up

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Still reading shiba manga, but my order of books just arrived today. Bought it in advance before we’re camping again this june. So I thought it would be nice to share a pic of that in between updates.

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:tiger2: :books: Tanuki Den (aka Homepost): Date 20220518 :cherry_blossom: :raccoon:

Tanuki Scroll XLVIII: 薬王寺(やくおうじ)の上り竜と下り竜 :dragon:

Read today’s folktale, from Gifu prefecture!
About a dragon that makes it rain (and stops the rain too) to help a village.

Today is also 国際親善デー「こくさいしんぜん」
International Friendship day!

Go forth, make friends :raccoon:


:seedling: Japanese found in the tall grass :seedling:

New Things

帷子「かたびら」ー light, thin single-layer kimono
高梁「こうりょう」ー a variety of sorghum (a plant, aka great millet), that is sometimes used to decorate woodcarvings
(can also be the name:「たかはし」like 高橋川 - Takahashi river)

Places
薬王寺「やくおうじ」ー Yakuoji Temple


such cute tanuk :pleading_face:

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Summary post :bookmark:

May 18th :seedling:

・薬屋のひとりごと 2 (25% → 30%)

Finished chapter 5. Came across a kanji that couldn’t be picked up by search function on bookwalker app. Couldn’t find it on Takoboto or Jisho through radical search either, so probably a hanzi, I guess. Good thing there was furigana on top so the meaning wasn’t lost.

Snippet of sentence with mysterious letter

Edit: oh, found it with Chinese dictionary: 焊
[insert joke about wanikani not teaching all the characters]

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May 18th!

I read 2 chapters of Shirokuma Cafe today. One was about Panda visiting Adventure World, and had some cute photos of the real pandas that live there :blush:

(Home Post)

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May 18

Can happily report that the story did in fact become less boring when one of the main characters was no longer asleep. Imagine that. :stuck_out_tongue:

I feel like I’m flying through this. Because:

  1. It isn’t at all hard. 坊っちゃん actually used far more complicated sentences than this is doing. And the vocabulary so far have either been in my wheel house or almost always super easy to guess from context.
  2. I want to finish it so I can move on to something better/different.

The sooner I finish this, the sooner I can dig my teeth back into native content. ^^

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Day 48 :heavy_check_mark: :milk_glass:

告白 ~ 90-100% :tada:

And, done! The ending was… :joy: . I have no words. It was just brutal fun, a huge dose of Schadenfreude shoved into one book. There were many deeper themes that were explored or hinted at, but what remained after I finished was the questionable pleasure that comes from watching the world burn. :fire:

I’ll only add that in terms of difficulty it was really uneven. The voice of different narrators is done very well, vocabulary and sentence structure varied a lot depending on who was “speaking” at the time. There were harder parts (the first chapter was indeed the hardest), and there were very easy parts. The difficulty was also due to the fact that the book is basically a collection of related monologues, and it’s sometimes hard to keep track of what they’re referring to as they jump from one thought to another. And there are also a lot of parts where the narrators reflect on abstract themes such as family, justice, moral code, etc, and these are a little harder to follow.

In terms of sensitive themes, the one I was worried about, because it did get a mention early on, animal abuse, came to nothing after all. So @pocketcat , if you want to read the book, don’t let this stop you :smiley:

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To keep this quick – I read about 11,000 characters today and that’s great! What isn’t great is wearing a hand brace all day cause my wrist, as I mentioned yesterday, is remaining quite bad. Might not be checking in for a few days because of that, we’ll see what happens. I’ll do my best to keep reading though; I like your all’s updates. Might need to go look into that anki mode addon for Wanikani for the moment, hmm…

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Summary Post

Day 48: May 18th
What did I read?: クマとたぬき Vol 2
How much did I read?: 20 pages
How long did it take me?: 15 min

I have a headache today so I didn’t read much :disappointed:

But look at how pleased the tanuk looks when he finds this piece of wood :laughing:

Please also enjoy the bear…doing a little dance while crossing a log? xD

A couple good words and THE CUTEST THING EVER (you will not regret opening this)
  • しびれ - numbness; going to sleep (of a limb); pins and needles
  • 途切れ (とぎれ) - break; pause; interruption; intermission
  • モモンガ - Japanese flying squirrel (Pteromys momonga); small Japanese flying squirrel; Japanese dwarf flying squirrel

LOOK AT THIS BABY

WHAT IS THIS

usgeh8us50031

SMOL :pleading_face:

Sameeee, where can I find this late-night bread shop
Actually it’s probably good that this doesn’t exist :x
Honestly this sounds good, I’m gonna add this to my 読みたい list :+1:

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When are you planning to read コンビニ人気? I started reading it with the book club a year or two ago, but it was above my level and I fell behind. Thinking of giving it another try soon.

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