Done reading early today - I finished the last chapter! First non-manga in Japanese and it was not excessively painful! Took me less than an hour to get through the last chapter - lots of more familiar vocabulary that was used in the first chapter, and in the first/last chapters of the previous story.
Also took about 30 minutes and finished Vol 3 of Chi’s Sweet Home.
DHL claims that my order will arrive today, so I’m hoping to go into tomorrow armed with new books!
The books are here! Books!!!
In all seriousness, Mandrake had the ‘Love so Life’ set marked as ‘damaged’ - I paid 1700 yen for the whole set - I do not know what is damaged about them - I was a little nervous about it, but figured even if they weren’t in great shape, I was fine with that. I have looked through them, they don’t even really look used - like, maybe someone has read them, but nothing that I would term ‘damaged’ - no complaints here!
Day 3 complete. The newsletter arrived but it was way out my league so I opted for NHK News Easy today. It’s very weird reading it and knowing most of the words but not fully being able to understand the meaning of the sentence. I have a general idea of what is being talked about but can’t quite get it yet.
I did read yesterday but forgot to do an update so today is 2 days worth. Anyway, I read another chapter of ボ−イズ and ナルト yesterday.
Some thoughts on differences in manga difficulty:
Reading on a daily basis does make it a lot more apparent to me the difference in difficulty (at least as far as I find it) between different things that I’m reading. For example, the chapter of ボ−イズ was only 33 pages but it took me almost an hour, whereas the chapter of ナルト felt a lot easier. I’m guessing it’s the difference between a manga written for kids/young teens and one for older teens. I feel like (as discussed a little before) ナルト reinforces vocab a lot, whereas ボ−イズ does just tend to throw a lot at you. That said, ボ−イズ continues to be great so it’s worth the struggle.
Today I was pretty tired so just read a chapter of やがて君になる。I’m getting back into it and starting to remember why I read the first vol over a weekend!
How was shipping with Mandrake? Do they ship internationally or would a forwarding service be needed?
June 7 one week already?? 0: Feels like I’m in the future.
・Read Honzuki 4. 75% → 86% Lots of stuff happened, couldn’t stop reading for a while 
ルッツ not receiving permission from his parents to travel to another city for work purposes, ベンノ admitting that he’s thinking about adopting him if that’s what it takes to let ルッツ reach his full potential, マイン staying in bed for at least a week(?) because of fevers, ルッツ “running away” from home, his family members bothering him at the his work place, and then マイン talking about all of the above with the 神官長… The fact that “normal” citizens usually are scared of just going near the nobel part of the city really set a different perspective to what we’re used to with our main characters going there all the time.
The part with ルッツ living away from his family for five days and feeling like he was completely alone, you could see in his eyes how tired he was already… Broke my heart ;-;
One thing I noticed is that ベンノ is too quick with scolding マイン for every single thing she’s doing wrong, he’s almost doing it reflexively by now. She might be a 考えなし, but she has no way of knowing everything, y’know?
Anyway, can’t wait to read the next chapter 
Probably just a few left and then extra stories at the end? I think that’s how the previous books were, too. Will travel tomorrow, so plenty of waiting time which means plenty of time to read, but knowing myself I get easily distracted by my surroundings so we’ll see how that goes 
2021-06-07
Summary post
氷菓、4 pages (176-179), 15 minutes. Looked up a couple of words but not every unkown word.
Really tired today, wasn’t sleeping well lately because of the heat, so didn’t feel like reading. But just to keep the habit going spent 15 minutes on reading.
Today’s text was pretty easy - it was a dialogue between two friends, nothing too challenging.
Will try to read around 20 pages tomorrow.
Yes
It was great - as d-hermit noted, they definitely just ship internationally. The hot tip is to order from the Sahra store because you’ll be able to see the shipping in advance (vs the storefronts, where you won’t know what shipping will be until it’s packed). Took less than a week to get here, everything was well packed and secure.
One note - recommend searching for titles on the Japanese site rather than the English site - otherwise it tries to search the translated titles some of the time, which doesn’t go great. Example, most of the Chi’s sweet home volumes had “Cheese” instead of “Chi’s” in the title, and I was super confused about why they didn’t have any volumes of it until I searched the author, and then changed over to the Japanese site instead. Easy to switch back and forth though, in case you’re not confident about reading most of the info in Japanese (which I am not)
You should still be able to find what you’re looking for on the English site, iirc. You just generally still need to search in Japanese.
June 1: かがみの孤城 上 (63 pages)
June 2: かがみの孤城 上 (20 pages)
June 3: かがみの孤城 上 (90 pages)
June 4: かがみの孤城 上 (40 pages) + 日の鳥１ (10 pages)
June 5: かがみの孤城 上 (112 pages)
June 6: かがみの孤城 上 (69 pages) ~ Finished
June 7: かがみの孤城 下 (170 pages) ~ 46%
Progressing well - even better than expected. 170 pages may be a new record for me. At this rate I’ll probably be done with the book in a couple of days. And yep, it’s still very good!
I’ve also started reading in a nearby park because the weather is so good lately. I’ll probably do that more often from now on. Amusingly I reguarly switch between at least 4 “devices” for the same book: laptop, phone, tablet and physical book, depending on where I am. For outside reading physical books are definitely the best, especially the smaller bunkobon books.
Yes. Except for end of arc books, the extra stories tend to come at the 90% mark, so probably just one or two more.
Happy fullcakeday!
June 7th. Time: 45 minutes. Manga Pages: 3
What: Manga からかい上手の高木さん (Volume 1), current pick of ABBC. Chapter 6, Pages 11-13.
One more day and I’ll finish club weekly assignment with two days to spare!
Since there was only that last part of the Ask Graded Reader volume 1, lvl 4, I decided to read it all in one go. And ah, again I am met with the love of sad stories that seems too common in Japanese literature. 
I typically don’t read sad stuff because well, I like the happier stuff better. But I got all the ask graded readers, all levels, all volumes, so dang it. I’m going to finish them. Only two volumes left and then I’m done.
I thought that would work, but literally got like 2 results for Chi when I searched the Japanese title (didn’t see the point of looking for the English title, I assumed the Japanese would be the effective one) on the English site, and tons of them when I searched on the Japanese site - it was weird. I had a few moments of that, where it searched weirdly on the English site, despite titles in the series being available, and just went to showing the site in Japanese. Of course, may have been user error - sometimes I’m dumb with technology.
The ASK graded readers are great, I went through the same “wow these are darker than expected” feelings quite early on. They kind of remind me of German children’s stories, although still different.
I have a few colleagues at work who I’ve shown them to and who have all had the exact same reaction, one of them (jokingly) now refuses to read them as they only make her sad.
Day 7
Satori Reader: Kiki-Mimi Radio, Episode 10.
One week in already! I wanted to read two episodes today but it’s already very late because, surprise surprise, I keep reading very late. Since there’s also a Satori Reader app I might just read there as well throughout the day. I mentioned before that these episodes are not long, in fact you can read them or listen to them in a minute or two, but what makes them slow for me is that they have a fair amount of unknown words and also many grammar explanations that I like to read and grasp, so I end up needing a lot more time. Because of that sometimes I can just do one article before feeling worn out and overcome with drowsiness.
I’ve noticed I’m not the only late-night reader 
Note to self: read earlier dummy.
Day 7: June 7th
What did I read?: サメーズ -サメとアザラシ- 
How much did I read?: 35 pages
How long did it take me?: 35 min
This random choice of reading material was brought to you by my love of かわいい sea creatures and my laziness xD I didn’t really feel like reading today because work wore me out mentally, but I didn’t want to break the streak. When I asked my brain, what would you most want to read today?, this was what it came up with. Why? I dunno. I bought it literal years ago and I haven’t thought about it for a while. But it was actually a really good choice for me today. The freaking sharks are so dang cute D: The grammar is generally simple, and the sentences short. It’s good practice for reading handwritten kanji without furigana. This was not what I set out to read today, but 
I liked it, it was fun 
June 7 Update
Today, I managed to read a bit more than I have the last couple of days. I caught up on this week’s ハイキュー！！chapter. It took about 30 min, though that was mostly because I had to keep track of all the words I didn’t know. About 35 words all in all, which is great compared to how many words I struggled with back when I first started this series. This chapter (and the surrounding ones) are quite emotional too, so I’m excited to see the resolution.
I also powered through another chapter of ナルト (took about 30 min), this time without using writing down any unknown words, and only looking up words that actively hindered comprehension. ナルト is a good manga to do this with, for me, since I already know the story, and I’ve watched the anime/read the manga so many times that I know what happens in each scene very precisely. When I don’t know a word it’s usually very easy to deduce it’s meaning. Probably only looked up 30 words, most of which were related to the Third and Kakashi’s explanations. As usual, the children’s speech is very easy to read and understand, and the adults only posed a challenge when they started monologuing – I get why Naruto zones out so easily. I’d forgotten how entertaining Naruto could be.
First Week Summary + Reflection
Total time read: ~8 hours
Total pages read: ~242 (manga) pages (this is approximately how much I read in English on a slow week)
It’s actually really cool to look back and see how much I’ve read over the past week! I think when I just stick to the book clubs, I probably get to around 50 pages max, and about 2 hours of reading in, but keeping up with reading daily has clearly pushed me to accomplish a lot more than usual. It’s also promising to see that the days I’m not feeling very motivated seem to be more or less evened out by the remaining days, so, hopefully, that’ll teach me to be less hard on myself.
I’d like to think that I can already notice vast improvements in my reading speed and comprehension at this stage, though that’s probably not very accurate. The chapters I read today included many low-text pages as shounen manga does. However, I do feel my reading stamina increasing, slowly but surely. I’ll take my wins where I can get them. I’m excited to see how much more I’m able to read as this challenge continues.
Since I’ve been doing the news reading challenge anyway I figure why not try this out too 
I’ve mainly been reading easy NHK articles and posts from Watanoc or Satori since the end of May + Quartet readings here and there, and I’d love to start adding in different content. I know I have some titles that have been sitting in my Kindle library I’d like to either finish or start, so my goal tomorrow will be to pick something from there. (Today was just an NHK article about Yuka Saso, and now I’m off for study time.) I might pick up the short stories I have from Lingo Mastery… I’ve been reading something similar every night, but for German, and it’s been pretty fun. 
Between self-studying, work, and preparing for a move, I don’t expect to make any huge readings goal dents, but a little something is always better than nothing. 
Goals:
| 6月 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 月 | 火 | 水 | 木 | 金 | 土 | 日 |
| 1☑ | 2☑ | 3☑ | 4☑ | 5☑ | 6☑ | |
| 7☑ | 8☑ | 9☑ | 10☑ | 11 | 12 | 13 |
| 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
| 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 |
| 28 | 29 | 30 |
| 7月 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 月 | 火 | 水 | 木 | 金 | 土 | 日 |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |||
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |
June Log
I also read an NHK Easy News article about a new medication for Alzheimer’s that been fast-tracked for FDA approval.