📚📚 Read every day challenge - Spring 2022 🌸 🌱

[polv]

@polv

I am a little sorry that I looked up … It’s basically a spoiler without scrolling .

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.

@natarin

read a tiny bit on bookwalker just to check off today

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

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 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. 遺(い)憾(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

• 真(ま)蜱(だに) tick - the second Kanji seems specific to tick / mite - see also 姫(ひめ)蜱(だに) (this one is from 呪術廻戦 EP.1)
• パープリン - バカ・アホ・気違い - 漫画東大一直線に出てくる用語で、「(頭が)パーなのでまるで脳がプリン」を意味する。 - par (on the level of Tokyo Uni), but pudding (プリン) brain
• 館(やかた) mansion, much bigger than 屋(や)敷(しき)
• 断(だん)末(まつ)魔(ま) death agony (painful death), can also be written 断末摩 (last Kanji is for rubbing)
• 事(じ)務(む)的(てき) of business (like business talk)
• お辞儀(じぎ) bowing for politeness. Typing お in front makes JE dictionary smarter.

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

• 神(しん)秘(ぴ) mysterious (seems like doings of god)
• ひと月(つき) also written 一月 and means 一ヶ月
• 試(し)練(れん) trial, ordeal - I guess it works for trial of courage too.
• 好(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

• 昇柱器 (しょうちゅうき, ツヨロン) - https://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q1139239036 - pole climbing equipment, I think

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・サピレーナ島(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 地(じ)獄(ごく)昇(しょう)柱(ちゅう)

Vocabularies

• 感(かん)心(しん) admiration
• 矯(きょう)正(せい) correction
• 支(し)障(しょう) restriction, hindrance - Lisa want to correct JoJo’s breath with restrictions
• 投(とう)獄(ごく) imprisonment (who do you think this JoJo really is?)

[DIO-Berry]

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

[Thud]

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.

[Zakarius]

Tanuki Den (aka Homepost): Date 20220518

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

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

---

Japanese found in the tall grass

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

---

@windupbird

A whole pack of soft animals // Look at the tanuki putting its little feeties in the water

such cute tanuk

[Redglare]

Summary post

May 18th

・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]

[lucylavelle]

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

(Home Post)

[MissDagger]

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.

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. ^^

[omk3]

Day 48

告白 ~ 90-100%

And, done! The ending was… . 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.

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

[Daisoujou]

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…

[windupbird]

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

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

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

SMOL

@pyororon

(Man would I love it if a bread shop like this was in my neighborhood, I’d buy bread every night )

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

[Cathm2]

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.

[enbyboiwonder]

Home

I keep trying to read more, and it’s a fraction of what I can read in English in a day, but I can’t. It’s frustrating. ほんとに活字中毒ですね……。

I finished reading the Bookwalker preview for とんでもスキル (it was a full 22 pages long, dang. I only read like 8 yesterday). It seems like it glosses over Mukouda’s arrival and first day in the new world more than the manga does (though it does explain how the currency works and gives an approximation of its value in yen), but I’m hoping it’ll go into more detail/take its time more when the story actually gets started, which of course seems to be right around when the preview ends lol. Anyway, when I start buying the series, getting more than one volume of the manga is a definite possibility, but I’m only gonna start out with one volume of the novels in case it turns out I don’t like it after all.

I think my limit for novel pages I can read in a day (at least, for N3-level and thereabouts; I did read 20+ pages of 夜カフェ the other day no problem and felt I could do more) has increased. A while back, I read 10 or so pages of 2.43 and then decided that, hey, there are only 6 pages left in this chapter, I can go ahead and just finish it right now! That’s not that much! That was a mistake. I made it, but it was exhausting. But what I had left of the とんでもスキル preview today was about that much, and I had more problems with the format than the length.

I also read the preview for 探偵事務所の飼い主さま. I might give it a shot, might not, we’ll see. And for ダンジョン飯, which I’m also not sure about. Sometimes the previews just aren’t long enough lol. And for とんがり帽子のアトリエ, which is definitely going on my to-read list. And I am tired now.

I played some Heroes today, though it wasn’t much, and I didn’t look up any of the words I didn’t know.

Some party talk with Terry:

Terry, you’ve already died once, against that star chimera and boss troll. You wanna fight even stronger monsters? Do you wanna die?? Well, tough. We gotta level up some first.

Some vocab of note:

白金 (はっきん) I thought this would be white gold, but it’s actually platinum. With the reading しろがね, it’s also an old word for silver.
云々 (うんぬん) [expression] and so on; and so forth; etcetera; and such; and the like. Mostly I picked this one because I think the reading’s interesting. First time I’ve seen a word where the 々 isn’t read the same as kanji it repeats, barring rendaku. I know sometimes あ-column sounds will shift to the corresponding な-column sound when following an ん in compounds (like 反応, 天王星), but this is the first time I’ve seen it in a word like this.
心血 (しんけつ) [noun] heart and soul; all one’s heart; putting all one’s energy into something
乗合馬車 (のりあいばしゃ) [noun] stagecoach; horse-drawn carriage
背に腹は代えられない (せにはらはかえられない) [proverb] you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs; you can’t solve a problem without making some sacrifice. Interestingly, this spelling, which is what was used in とんでもスキル, is listed third on imiwa, but it’s the only suggestion that came up while I was typing it using my laptop’s IME. I made a note then that this one’s probably the most common.

[DIO-Berry]

Day 47

• ジョジョの奇妙な冒険

Start-30

I really wanted to read a lot more, like to page fifty but figured I should go to bed.

It’s so bizarre to go from Part 1 to Part 3. The tonal shift is huge! I was not expecting it. I really wanted to read more like I said and there was no Dio, so maybe characters from my top 10 are enough to sustain my interest and attention.

[2OC3aOdKgwSGlxfz]

May 18th (Calendar Post)

隣の席の佐藤さん => 98 pages (107 min)

Fun panels from today’s reading:

え

[dunlewy]

My complete set of Graded Readers, Level 1, came in today, and I started reading the first story,
“女の子”. I read six pages and it seems like a weird story. It really has my interest in high gear. I would read more if I’d gotten home sooner. Anyway, it still is easy reading, so that’s good. I like these books because they are written like any Japanese book, starting from the back and read from top to bottom.

[polv]

@polv

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

There are some obvious devices that I forgot, like PC or laptop. I am curious otherwise on what something else mean? Perhaps something specialized like Kindle Paperwhite or 3DS?

In any case, please list only ones that you read on sufficiently frequently. For example, I don’t count myself as a reader on laptop.

• PC
• Laptop
• Kindle Paperwhite
• Handheld consoles, like 3DS
• Yet others

[natarin]

May 18 Home Post

I spent like eight hours of today driving sooo not the most reading time but I played some Story of Seasons! It was a delight as always

@omk3

is that the manga or the novel?

Yeah it’s the manga! I really didn’t expect to read as much then as I did so yeah I’d say I enjoyed it! I kept being curious about what was gonna happen and before I knew it I just finished the chapter pretty good mileage for free haha.

[omk3]

@windupbird

LOOK AT THIS BABY

How is this even real?!? Why didn’t I know about it?

(Are we sure it didn’t just escape from an anime studio?)

[Axazel]

@omk3

Are we sure it didn’t just escape from an anime studio?)

we’re not sure

[MissDagger]

May 19

And today I finished Roman Holiday booklet. The story picked up considerably from the boring part early on. Note for authors: when half your main characters (and there are exactly two) are asleep, interesting/fun conflict is hard to do.

(Side note: if you want to read some more commentary from me about graded readers, I did a post over in that book club.

Tomorrow, or today maybe if I have time, I will dig into native content. So I guess it is time to check on the poll and close it. /be right back

---

Poll results and my reflections on it

Thanks everyone for your votes and comments. It honestly helped me pick what I am going to read next and feel confident in my choice. Before then, I was pretty wishy-washy about what to pick, so your votes made a difference.

Lets go from the bottom up, shall we?

結婚しても got the short stick for sure. But perhaps you all agreed that I should try and revive the off-shoot book club and therefore voting for me reading it alone, made no sense. ^^ That is my interpretation of the no votes anyway.

Something else was the suggestion of Fruits Basket, and it is high-ish on my list, so I made it fairly easily accessible too when I re-arranged my boxes of books. Aria got almost no love, haha. Poor Aria.

I’m not sure exactly when I will pick Aria, but for some reason I’m feeling pretty hype about it? Maybe because despite seeing it mentioned a lot around the forum (when it was an active club and for some time after), I actually don’t really know what happens in it at all. I know it is slice-of-life-ish, but how much? How much overarching plot is there? It does have an end, so supposedly something gets finished/changed (I hope anyway). But options higher in the poll is definitely higher on my reading list for now.

Sailor V was about as popular as the other low ones. Make me think that maybe I’ll just read it after Sailor Moon, like I originally planned. (Of course, I didn’t know that it was a prequel (I think) and started before Sailor Moon, when I started Sailor Moon.)

I’m skipping discussing Orange for a bit, and instead sticking with Sailor Moon. I found it interesting how many voted for me to continue that despite my somewhat negative commentary on it. Not sure what it means. Maybe we’re all just a bunch of completionists?

Just to be clear, I’m not putting anyone down for picking that. I would have left it off the poll if it truly didn’t interest me. ^^

Edit: I realized I forgot to get back to Orange, it has been covered pretty well in replies to the poll. It is high in my priority because it is one long story, but also only 6 volumes long. So not a super long time commitment while also giving the satisfaction of reading a proper story (instead of slice of life). And would hopefully have more even difficulty than Sailor Moon which always gets harder towards the end of an arch when the enemies are more present.

When it comes to manga, I think my plan looks like this:

1. Read volume 1 of Yotsubato.
2. Continue with volume 2 directly, or finish of the current arc in Sailor Moon (or possibly both)
3. Profit?!?!?!
4. Keep reading Sailor Moon or switch to Orange, while possibly reading Yotsubato on the side.
5. I don’t plan this far in advance.

As for Zenitendou… I honestly don’t know where I wanna slot that in. It got enough votes that clearly I should try to get to it sooner rather than later (it gained second place!). I’ll probably check in how I feel when I’ve finished the current arc of Sailor Moon. So maybe I won’t read more Sailor Moon or start Orange at that time, but slot Zenitendou there (so step 3 4).

So later today or tomorrow, Yotsubato is on the menu. /nom nom nom

---

On a slightly unrelated note, considering the difficulty of 坊っちゃん, would that be considered hard enough for Intermediate book club? I’m just kinda curious where I kinda fall in my current reading ability. ^^ I’ll probably be looking to join BBC for the next pick.

(Even if I can deal with IBC’s difficulty, its weekly volume might be more of a hindrance right now. I want to have time to read my own picks. :3 )

Edit: PS, I leveled up today. <3