April 30th!
Since its the final day of April, I guess we are about half way through this challenge already!
I read Chapter 18 of Mitsuboshi Colors, which made me realise that its been AGES since I’ve been to a museum and now I want to go!
Only one more chapter left in this volume now 
Then I read the next chapter of Teasing Master Takagi-san, which was a really sweet one.
Tanuki Den (aka Homepost): Date 20220430 
Tanuki Scroll XXX: 大蛇とお尻 
Read today’s hyakumonogatari, from Chiba prefecture!
About a traveller who is climbing a mountain and a giant snake appears and tries to eat him. In an attempt to stall he throws his belongings at the creature, then his clothing, but the snake just munches them all up until he is completely naked. It knocks him over and his trembling bum sticks into the air causing the snake to flee. Confused but happy to be alive the traveller runs away.
It turns out the snake mistook his shiny bum for a scary monster with a big mouth 
Japanese found in the tall grass
薄気味悪い「うすきみわるい」- Creepy; uncanny. Seen this before but completely forgot how to spell it.
褌「ふんどし」ー Loincloth
Meanings
人食い「ひとくい」- I knew this as “man-eating” like a man-eating lion or something, but it can also mean cannibal or cannibalistic.
Lumberjack-san sorta just appeared out of nowhere, and somehow knew about the boy’s past, I’m thinking perhaps it was step-mum in disguise 
perhaps I shouldn’t think this deeply over a minor detail in a folktale
Look for an old man with long white hair and a big beard in the mountains, it could be him! It seems crying out your woes in the mountains attracts him… not sure if it’d be a good idea to do this in practice though 
Happy birthday for yesterday, hope you had a nice day! 
april 30 home post
Finished up another Satori story (三途の川) today!
And since it’s the end of April and we’re halfway through this challenge, I’ve decided to do a little recap and think about my goals for May
) that’s not happeningObviously I’m not expecting to finish all those things in May, but I’d like to get through a big portion of them. And I might drop both 夜カフェ and ふらいんぐうぃっち b/c they’re not really holding my attention
I started reading about the Tokyo Train lines. This picture of people on the train at 5:00 AM makes me laugh. They look like I would at that hour!
New Vocabulary:
たくさん
沢山 many, a large number, a lot
の
乗る to get on ( a bus, train, etc.), to board
やまて
山の手 a hilly section of a city, Yamanote (a hilly part of Tokyo)
I ordered two more books from the “Learn Japanese with Stories” series last night. That will make the first four books of that series. I’ll try that series after I finish this set of Graded Readers. I’ll see which set
I like better.
Today I just played a video game in japanese with lots of text to read. No idea if that even counts but I just had no time to read books. I spent the time, I usually spend on reading books or manga, watching a movie in japanese. 
@potatonaught A late happy birthday to you!
Haha, that’s awesome.
It’s still weird to me how suddenly I just went “wait, reading is easier now.” Read 7000 characters today, though I was fighting off a headache and getting a little distracted by people. See, I’m making excuses after reading more than I did any time but my absolute best days in the last challenge, haha. It really works if you stick it out.
This route’s really episodic and goofy so far, but there are a couple amusing running jokes that are keeping me really entertained. Half of the route has just been schemes to get スイカバー (frozen watermelon ice bars).
This language sure is chaotic sometimes though, huh? ＋α (プラスアルファ) means something along the lines of “a little more than usual.” Japanese just incorporates anything it wants; I can dig it.
That aside, 布石 (ふせき) is kind of an interesting word I discovered today. It refers to the opening moves in Go, but is used more broadly (and was here) to just mean preparation/groundwork. Seems likely, with the stone association, that it emerged from the Go use, which is kinda neat.
April 30
Continued with 坊っちゃん (坊ちゃん is not the spelling on my book actually, even if the kanji guessing keyboard (can’t remember what it is called) thought it should be…).
I’m really liking this and the intrigue is deepening. No idea what will end up being the truth.
I’m finding that if I reread trouble sentences multiple times I can usually figure out what they are trying to say. Today I also used DeepL a couple of times to try and help me figure out meaning. Mostly to confirm my understanding. Only one sentence I couldn’t figure out for sure what it meant.
「いてくれと頼まれても、いるものか！」(Said by 坊っちゃん)
I think I might know what the rough meaning is, but I honestly don’t trust my understanding. And the answers I got from DeepL (and tried Apple’s Translate app) didn’t make sense. (If more context is needed to guess the meaning, let me know.)
Last day of April and I’ve read every day so far. Very slowly. Well, I haven’t spent much time each day. I need to speed up a little more if I wanna catch up to where I should be with my yearly goal, but at this rate I will at least keep up, if not catch up what I missed. (My goals are three books/manga volumes/similar per quarter. And I finished one in April, and read nothing before then.)
I’m also very, very slowly working through my review pile (I never use vacation mode *shrug*) and I’ve also started some lessons from previous levels (aka new items added since I did those levels/added any lessons). Might be caught up review-wise by my birthday next month. (Yes, I am part of the May birthday crew.)
I love all the cute figurines on the counter!
Haha nice puzzle! The tricky part is to understand which of the oh-so-many いる is meant here 
Luckily we know that it must be an ichidan verb because of its conjugation, so that restricts the choices somewhat. Looking through Jisho I decided on 癒る (to calm down) - if this doesn’t make sense in context, please bear with me 
The translation then would be “Although I was asked to calm down, I will definitely not do so!” I guess.
(BTW thanks for helping me prepare for JLPT by showing me all those N2 grammar points 
)
Yeah, my problem was definitely the いて because if I go with what was said before, that should be 行って… I’ll give some context and the sentence before that one.
So 坊っちゃん and 山嵐 are talking. 山嵐 is asking 坊っちゃん to leave the 下宿 that he introduced 坊っちゃん to because according to 山嵐 the 主人 is unhappy with 坊っちゃん. (There might be lies going on here, I actually don’t know.) So the sentence right before the one I have trouble with is 山嵐 saying this:
「とにかく、下宿の主人は君に困ってるんだ。出ていってくれ！」
And yeah, 坊っちゃん’s reply is confusing me. Like I understand the ものか since he keeps using that. 
I think he is saying something along the lines of “Like hell I’m gonna leave” ----> very, very, very rough “translation” (more like just very rough underlying meaning to what he said). But what he is actually saying? ¯\(ツ)/¯ (aka I don’t know)
I know nothing about the story, and second guess myself extremely hard when talking about this kind of thing, but does the following context seem like he’s staying? Because there is the いる as just, like, “to stay.” Which makes me read this the opposite way, as sort of a spiteful “I wouldn’t stay even if you asked me to.”
I believe he is (purposefully?) misunderstanding what the other person said. They asked him to leave, and he answered ‘as if I am)will be here just because I was asked to’ or something? I really thing this sentence needs context for sure.
Btw, I default to 居る for いる. If that doesn’t work, 要る. Very rarely have I encountered another meaning of いる in kana form, that also wasn’t obvious from context. If at all.
So, agree with @Daisoujou here. Which, on second thought, works all without the complicated misunderstanding situation I thought of.
@Daisoujou and @Belerith
Unfortunately, the story moves on right after (“saved” by the school bell signaling start of classes). So I won’t know what 坊っちゃん does about the situation until later.
But it would certainly fit his personality to go all
Especially considering the developments at the end of the previous chapter.
So thank you both. This makes more sense with the actual text there. Will report later what ends up happening about this thing.
Day (mumble) to day 29:
日本語: I read a lot of 冷たい密室と博士たち and finished it! Also a fair amount of TUGUMI and a fair amount of 三毛猫ホームズの推理.
Read-aloud: We read some of 蟲師. (And if I haven’t updated since before then, a different we read a chapter of ハイキュー.)
中国語: Every day I read an intermediate entry on Mandarin Bean and one page of 骑士幻想夜.
I’ve been reading はなにあらし all of April so decided to pick up やがて君になる as a change of pace today. The chapters in that are a lot longer than はなにあらし (はな only as like 12-15 pages a chapter while やがて君になる is closer to 40) so finishing a chapter takes a bit longer. I’ll probably switch between reading the two books throughout the month of May since I have a couple volumes left of はなにあらし.
Only read the first chapter of やがて君になる today but it was an interesting start to say the least. Nanami had quite the smug expression as she rejected a random guy in the opening pages 
Happy belated birthday and many returns of the day! @potatonaught
Day 30: April 30th
What did I read?: ダイロクセンス Vol 1
How much did I read?: 23 pages
How long did it take me?: 39 min
Second chapter off to an intriguing start 
As expected, Rui comes by to demand his camera, and…somehow ends up tagging along to a crime scene? (I’m still a little confused on exactly why/how this happens tbh but…it happens xD). In any case, he does his thing and has a vision of the crime again - this time we get a little more insight into how his power works, though it’s still pretty vague. Very psychic detective vibes~ Also I cannot get over how so many people know who Rui is. Like…??? I’m envisioning him as like a Tiktok celebrity or a Youtuber doing magic tricks or something idek Please show us what makes him famous, I want to see~
@potatonaught Happy belated birthday! :3
Day 30 / Calendar
Halfway there! (pretty much)
Today I’ve completed the last week of the ABBC book club, so now that’s 2 books finished under my belt. Kinda nice having only two to do on a given week for a bit, gives me more time to appreciate them better.
