Day 56: May 26th
What did I read?: しろくまにっき
How much did I read?: 16 pages
How long did it take me?: 12 min
This seemed like a good “read a couple pages” book for today xD I’ve been a little busy packing for my trip. On a related note, I’ve decided that I’m going to end my personal challenge today - I’m just…not feeling motivated to try and maintain it while I’m away, if I’m being honest. I think I’m ready for a little break. But of course, I’ll be sticking around to follow you all to the end! ^^
Didn’t you read the Ogawa Mimei short stories with the club? That was of significant length as well. Or are you saying that you didn’t finish that one because you didn’t read the final stories?
I read act 2 of ボーイミーツマリア. Taiga’s gone from 身の程知らずくん in ch 1 to 身の程知らずのホモキャラ男子. His nickname didn’t just get worse, it got longer too lmao. He’s so stupid, I love him. My most favorite characters always tend to fall into one of two categories, “asshole who does actually care” or “well-intentioned dumbass sweetheart,” and Taiga is 100% the latter.
Taiga accepts the change in his perception of his sexuality super easily and decides that he doesn’t have to worry too much about whether Arima is a guy or gal and that since Arima still makes his heart go ドキドキ then he must like him even as a guy. Tetsu’s like, “Uh, no, wait, it’s not that simple,” but to Taiga, apparently, it is. 単細胞やで.
(Tetsu: “Why did become friends with this idiot?”) No but his comment last chapter about Fukumaru being Taiga’s dad is totally accurate. Fukumaru’s totally the dad friend (“Eh, just let him do whatever, he’s gotta learn his own lessons”) while Tetsu’s over here being a total mother hen, worrying about everything. They’re both great.
Some vocab of note:
悪化 (あっか) [noun, する verb] (suffer) deterioration; growing worse; aggravation; degeneration; corruption
虜 (とりこ) [noun] captive; prisoner. victim (of love, etc.); slave (to one’s lust, etc.). I’d actually seen this one recently in lyrics (don’t remember what song though) and I actually remembered how to read it, but I didn’t know what it meant.
寒い (さむい) [い-adjective] uninteresting (esp. of a joke); lame; dull; weak; corny
I read another chapter of マリア様がみてる today. The story takes place in an all-girls catholic school and a lot of the girls have an お嬢様 feeling to them so some of the language isn’t what I’m used to from the more casual slice of life stuff I’ve read but it has been interesting so far. The series is famous for its drama and character development so I’m looking forward to the later chapters.
I liked this panel where Yumi was saying Shimako gives off the image of someone who’d like Waffles and croissants. Just seems like a funny thing to say to someone to me
More AI: The Somnium Files! Things are starting to get wild; 伊達 saw イリス’s apartment in his dream? And… her mom murdered? Oof, don’t think that flower’s bringing the good fortune and happiness she wants and parting on terms like “oh I’m with the police so if you see me again it’ll be a bad time” yeah… yeah I’m sure it will
On a lighter note some dumb jokes are universal it seems:
tl;dr It’s the whole joke of like “How do you put a giraffe in the fridge? Open the door, put in the giraffe, close the door. Alright, how do you put an elephant in the fridge? The same way? No, silly, you have to take out the giraffe first” Some things transcend linguistic borders, huh.
I’ve mostly been reading every day, but I adjusted the difficulty and missed a day because I traveled to a wedding last weekend. I put 少年H on hold because it’s too hard to read during a busy time (heaps of vocab), and switched to 吸血鬼はお年ごろ by 赤川次郎. The vampire light novel was much easier but also boring. I was glad to be done with it. 三毛猫ホームズ was fun to read so I was surprised his vampire series is so dull.
I just started ナミヤ雑貨店の奇蹟 by 東野圭吾。 If the first section is any indication, this should be enjoyable. (I hope)
I guess I should have said ‘novel of significant length’, then? But I also think the stories don’t quite add up to the same length. I also read 地球星人 with the book club in the meantime but I also consider that to be more a ‘short novel’.
In the end, it doesn’t matter much, of course, but for me it felt like an achievement because a book of almost 600 pages (a 28 week book club) seemed quite daunting when I started it.
The page count discrepancy between Japanese books and their English translations is surprising to me. I know length can vary a lot in Japanese depending on kana/kanji ratio, but I’d expect most
contemporary novels for adults to not differ too much in kanji usage.
I’ve also been surprised by how many Japanese novels come in two volumes (上 and 下), yet some of these I remember from when I read them in English as not especially long (Murakami for example, excluding 1Q84).
かがみの孤城 is 633 pages in Japanese, 353 in translation.
海辺のカフカ is 899 pages in Japanese, 480 in translation.
So far the English translation seems to be about half the length of the Japanese original.
But then we have:
地球星人 is 288 pages in Japanese, 240 in translation (barely any difference).
or
三毛猫ホームズの推理 at 368 pages in Japanese, 246 in (Spanish) translation. (1.5 ratio)
コーヒーが冷めないうちに at 323 pages in Japanese, 227 in translation (1.4)
Page counts are a little fuzzy as they vary depending on edition (digital, hardcover, paperback) and font size tends to vary somewhat in English translations, but it’s still hard for me to wrap my head around it.
This might be partly a reply to @saidahgilbert, but I’m also expounding on adult birthdays (or maybe mostly my situation with them…). You’ve been warned. xD
I told you it would be a novel.................
For me, I usually do like celebrating and can feel pretty giddy about it. (In fact, now I wonder why I felt so little of that this year. I will have to think on that later.)
But I always feel weird about inviting friends to celebrate my birthday with me, maybe because of three things:
Swedish culture do have a bit of “don’t look at me” kinda culture (look up Jante’s law if you are interested in kinda what it is about, but it isn’t as absolute as that)
My family stopped celebrating birthdays after me and my brothers became adults (mostly). Only the bigger ones tends to be celebrated.
Few of my friends have celebrated their birthdays much, or maybe I just haven’t been invited
So when I invite for my birthday, I’ve usually felt a bit weird about it. Not that I’ve let that stop me most of the time. For example, the year I turned 30 was the same year I was going to Japan in early April (for a year of study), so I invited family and friends for celebrations in March (aka 2 months early). Of course, it was also an excuse to see them before I left.
Maybe, my reluctance come from how few people in my life actually celebrate birthdays. I’m with you, @saidahgilbert about being happy to be in my 30s. (33 this year if anyone is interested.) Not until my 30s did I realize how much I didn’t know, even having been someone in my 20s who knew that I didn’t know much at all. (And turned out I knew even less than I could imagine.)
They say you are a productive of the 10 (20?) people you spend the most time with. I’m not sure that is all, also the person I spend the most time with (by a huuuuuuge %) is myself. I wonder what that says about me.
Birthday parties are so often framed as a thing we do for children. Although celebrating the x0 birthdays are an accepted practice. But then it is also huge parties instead. And those kinda parties can get expensive, especially if you insist on inviting all relatives and every friend you’ve had in the past couple of decades.
Maybe for me now also, I’ve moved far away from all my family, and while I moved close to one friend, another is back where I grew up. (I don’t have a lot of friends that stick around for long times. (although I do have a few more than 2, but the rest live in other countries so even harder to invite them to come to a local party. )) So there is just like a couple of people to invite to celebrate with me.
And this year my birthday was on a Monday. Kinda awkward time. And as an adult there is much else to do that also organizing a party (even a small one) for yourself, is work. I think this will change a lot more of I find a partner, because I’ll want to establish traditions of arranging each other birthdays (or at least the partner takes care of food, cooking, that kinda thing), basically a ritual of showing appreciation for each other and making sure anyone close to us gets to celebrate with us.
Honestly, I feel like I had a point with this digress way back on Monday, and now I feel like I’ve just rambled for a long time and I’m not sure what the point ultimately become. Celebrate your birthdays? If nothing else, use it as an excuse to see your friends/family? I don’t know.
Hello everyone!! I’ve gotten so lazy with updating here, but I HAVEN’T gotten too lazy with reading everyday. I did miss one day. Also, I haven’t been reading a lot each day at all, just a page here or there.
The challenge is going to be winding down next week, but I’m going to try and keep the habit of reading even just a little bit each day! At least, I’m going to make up for the two days I missed so far.
So, instead of reading anything from my growing pile of books, I found a crazy manga on pixiv. I had the tab open since I was checking the 悪食令嬢 manga the other day and, as I was about to close it, one of the recommendations at the bottom caught my eye.
It’s a manga titled “絶対BLになる世界VS絶対BLになりたくない男”. The details of how it happened are unclear, but the main character, your average cis straight dude, realized one day that he was in a BL world. Half the dudes around are insanely good looking and, regardless of initial sexual orientation, always end up in gay relationships. The other half are straight (thus preventing depopulation) and recognizable by the fact that they have basically no facial features (neither do women; the main character doesn’t mind though). Sadly for him, he isn’t in the “faceless” category. Interestingly, his reason to avoid getting in a gay relationship is that he wants kids, which feels like kind of a flag, since he can have kids regardless?
Anyway, he then buys a ton of BL manga to learn all the potential flags and how to avoid them. The series basically goes through all the BL tropes and shows him avoiding them in hilarious ways. He can even avoid completely unrealistic events thrown at him by the universe by being crazy prepared.
It’s too bad that it’s just a gag manga with no real plot… a lot of chapters are skipped on pixiv and I didn’t even notice It is hilarious though, so I’ll make a bookmark I guess.
… But I can’t watch it. It’s only available on a streaming service I’ve never heard of
Well, maybe I can rent the DVD at Tsutaya?
Edit: oof reviews aren’t that good, though. Maybe I’ll just stick to the manga.
Maybe? I have no idea how the distribution industry (?) works. If I can watch it with my current set of subscriptions, I probably will anyway, but I won’t get out of my way to do so, I guess
Thanks for letting me know, though
Still reading spy x family every day. I finally made that review on Arceus I wanted to for a while. Glad to have some closure and move on to Persona 4 Golden, which I have been playing here and there for a bit. Today, I’d like to share something about that and dump all these screenshots I took somewhere.
I first played it back on the vita, got really hooked on it and have since played a bunch of persona and other atlus games. I always thought it would be a long while still before I would touch a game of theirs in Japanese, because of some region restrictions and also difficulty, but I did jump right in when I had the ability to play it on the steam deck. I’ve been enjoying myself again on this JP replay. I’ve just done the introduction and it took about 5 hours. Yeah, this game is pretty slow. I don’t mind at all as there are plenty of opportunities to save and I’m mostly interested in learning from the dialogue. This game can be pretty funny:
Game is also a lot more approachable than I thought, having a good font and supporting dialogue with voice acting goes a long way. I’m still getting used to that idea. Being able to replay the line to practice my listening skills. The game also has plenty of unvoiced text in between dialogue, it’s still a rpg after all. So I get to practice my reading skills both combined and seperately. Additionally there are animated cutscenes, but for some reason they’re dubbed in English and I haven’t figured out how to fix it. They’re also less impressive than I remember them, with some exceptions such as awakening of the protag’s persona. Either way it’s a bit funny hearing English and then seeing Japanese subs in this game.
It’s on Viki which last I knew let people watch free with ads or for a subscription fee without ads. They haven’t blocked VPNs like Netflix. I watched both seasons and thought they were a riot. Very, very silly and meta humor. It doesn’t sound like it’s faithful to the manga though which is maybe why people didn’t review it well.
I discovered the series through the show (well, gifs of the show on tumblr, and then I went to watch it. I haven’t watched s2 yet though), and I loved it. So it’s good on its own, regardless of how well it follows the source. I’m planning on getting the manga (and possibly drama CDs) sometime
Today is the anniversary of the 百人一首「ひゃくにんいっしゅ」(also known as 小倉百人一首「おぐらひゃくにんいっしゅ」) a collection of 100 poems by 100 poets (specifically waka poems). So I read a bit about it, and also read a few of the poems.
You can find all 100 poems here: 小倉百人一首の全首を見る
It also gives a little information about the poets and other info too.
Japanese found in the tall grass
Learnthings
代表的「だいひょうてき」ー Exemplary; typical model (of something) 屏風「びょうぶ」ー Folding screen 書き写す「かきうつす」ー To transcribe/copy 二枚貝「にまいがい」ー Bivalve (molluscs) 馴染み「なじみ」ー intimacy; familiarity; friendship
New Usages
首 is used as a counter for songs and poems, uses the しゅ reading
Replies
Have a nice holiday/break!
(I couldn’t really find a direct quote, so I just quoted you saying birthday a few times )
I would like to celebrate more, but I don’t really know anyone, so nothing ends up happening
And that no one was really that interested either, I used to have really cool parties as a kid though, I’ve always wanted to have a similar party as an adult but no one ever seems interested, even more older kid-stuff like going go-karting or something cool like axe throwing, just something fun were you don’t have to worry about life for a bit. After 21 people only seemed to want to have “drink - pub - drink - club - drink - being sick on the pavement at 3am - drink - pain” parties… which I had zero interest in doing, then after 25 everyone is suddenly married with children and then it’s impossible to coax them out of their schedule.
Perhaps this year I should hire out one of those play centres for my birthday like I used to have as a kid, and fill it with human-sized beanbags to represent friends and slowly go insane as they develop their own personalities.
Mostly, birthdays now are just an excuse to make a chocolate cake with 200% chocolate and not feel guilty about it until the morning after.
I watched both seasons and thought they were a riot. Very, very silly and meta humor. It doesn’t sound like it’s faithful to the manga though which is maybe why people didn’t review it well.
Japanese found in the tall grass 
