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.