📚📚 Read every day challenge - Summer 2021 🏖🏖

Japanese Language Reading
#333

7.6.
Yesterday was a bit crazy reading wise. I had the day off, what else was in supposed to do? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Shenanigans

I finished 赤毛のアン chapter 19! Woo! The next few chapters are much shorter, so I might end up reading a chapter a night for a bit~

This is when the crazy happened and I started a few new things. I got the kindle unlimited deal of 3 month for 199 yen or so a week or so ago, so I figured I should make use of it and started a manga, ぼくらのへんたい, as well as a children’s book, 世界一周とんでもグルメ, that are free on the subscription. Sadly only the first volume of that manga is free. I like the premise, and the characters. The children’s book is a super smooth read, who’d have thought. I got through the first chapter, about a third of the whole thing, in what felt like no time (probably was an hour or so? I even made a few flashcards of some expressions and onomatopoeia). It’s not even that short at 3000 kindle locations, and pretty cute so far.

So manga and children’s books will probably be how I make use of the subscription.

For some reason I then thought it would be a grand idea to start another book, so I went ahead and read a bit of リゼロ 17. Yay. :upside_down_face:

I’m back at work now, so days like this will be rare. :smiley:

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#334

I am pretty biased, as I love go and having such a popular manga about your favourite niche past time is a luxury! I’m half way through watching the anime and I really like it; nice characters, easy to watch, simple storylines which will hopefully make the manga easier to read!

The only problem (or advantage, depending how you look at it) from a learners perspective is that all kanji have furigana (though on the Kindle version they are pretty hard to make out).

Let me know if you try it!

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#335

:ballot_box_with_check: Day 8

Woo!! Finished chapter 2 of カラフル!

The book is getting really interesting. Also, I’m starting to pick up the pace a bit more too.

Probs because I changed my reading pattern

Because I don’t watch to stop the story to look up words, I’ve been circling the ones I don’t know and going back to look them up after I finish reading. It feels like I’m reading twice in one sitting, and I’m really enjoying this feeling of 1) reading followed by 2) review.

Interesting words from today's reading!

口下手くちべた = A tongue-tied person
気がむく = To feel inclined (to do something)
にんまり(と笑う) = (laugh) with a smile of satisfaction

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#336

Well, from my experience in Japanese language school in Japan, the reading material was quite often sad or dark there too. Although confirmation bias is probably at hand, haha. I’ve read all Ask volumes except the second and third one for level 4, and I don’t think there is a volume without a sad story, but certainly volumes without any that you could call happy.

Edit: Also yeah, many are fairytales or folk tales and they have that similar dark tone that European ones have too. ^^

Btw, for those who might be wondering if level 4 is a necessary/useful level of graded readers (when it comes to Ask), level 4 can easily be skipped because it is similarly complex to native material, in fact a lot of it is straight native material. The only benefit is that you know you won’t find any especially hard grammar and that the vocabulary will be fairly standard (aka if you’ve picked up a good base of vocabulary, it will only be a word here or there that are unknown to you). However, only really pick it up if you’ve enjoyed earlier volumes for their content.

If anyone is interested in what I’ve thought of the Ask reader volumes including from level 1-3, check out the Graded Readers and Parallell texts (casual) book club. There is no central area to find my reviews, but searching for my username and Ask should probably bring them up. Also you can find how other people found those graded readers and a few others.

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#337

Thank you! :grin:

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#338

Home post

June 8th - からかい上手の高木さん chapter 3 page 11. Phewf this page was also a bit tough. It took all my morning commute and I still wasn’t finished, so I found time at work to take another ~20 minute break to finish it up. The evening was spent flat hunting and filling in an application, so no more time to read.

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#339

A thing I have been finding cool about this challenge (aside from reading everyone’s posts and getting even more ideas on things I want to read) is having a set focus for a couple of months. I’m pretty terrible when it comes to Japanese of being like “oh I should be focusing on listening, oh no maybe reading, oh no maybe speaking etc etc etc”. I feel like this challenge has given me a nice excuse to say “okay, for these two months my main focus will be reading (more specifically for me on trying to build up reading pace and stamina in Japanese).” If I’d been organised it would have been good for me to time myself reading something at the start and then maybe a chapter from the same series at the end to see what improvement there is…I guess I could maybe do that now and still have a fair few weeks comparison :thinking:

It’s made me think about setting these kind of mid term goals/challenges might be a good approach to take going forward. Like whether after these two months I might want to set a new goal for the next month or two. Not sure what yet, perhaps trying to increase my comfort with using monolingual dictionaries (which I’ve been dabbling in a bit but aware that to switch over completely would mean reducing the amount and difficulty of the things I’m picking to read for a while which is difficult for me as I want to read all the things right now). Or something completely different! Has anyone else also been prompted by setting goals for this challenge to think about their approach to Japanese learning going forward?

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#340

If you do, feel free to put those in the 多読 thread! (Similar to this thread but it’s more about having a target in terms of books for the whole year rather than a focus on reading everyday; they are definitely complementary though!)

(Obviously that only works if you want to continue your focus on reading in general; if you want to focus on say listening instead, it’s not very helpful :sweat_smile:)

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#341

Today I started reading quite late. So far I’ve read:

  • Today’s NHK Easy News.
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#342

Thanks! Yeah in the past I think I’ve always though I didn’t read enough to track things in that thread (probs just my standard imposter syndrome) but these two months might be a good taster to see if setting those sorts of year long goals makes sense! I have definitely popped into that thread a few times to marvel at how much people can read :slight_smile:

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#343

Day 7 - June 7th
今日の読書: からかい上手の高木さん.
ページ: 13

Finally I finished chapter 5 and started chapter 6, meaning now I’m caught up with the ABBC! Time to start reading another manga in the meantime (´。• ω •。`)

Day 8 - June 8th
今日の読書: からかい上手の高木さん.
ページ: 4

Done with chapter 6! I’ll post few questions later but the last chapters were a breeze compared to the first one (ﾉ´ з `)ノ

今日の読書: 日常
ページ: 15

Another pick from WK’s book clubs, this time is 日常 from BBC! When it started back in Aprile, I was able to read the first chapter, but soon after I stopped (＞ｍ＜) So today I’ve just read again chapter 1 and I plan to catch up as I did with からかい上手の高木さん!

Tracker〜

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#344

June 4th: Continued 海の見える理髪店 and made some progress. Also started with the week’s assignment of 殺人出産.

June 5th: Finished the week’s assignment of 殺人出産. Started the week’s assignment of すべてがFになる.

June 6th: すべてがFになる. Almost done.

June 7th: Finished the week’s assignment of すべてがFになる. Did not have much time so that was it.

June 8th: Finished the first story of 海の見える理髪店 (which has the same name). Don’t know yet what to make of it. Looking forward to the other stories; I wonder whether they are similar or not. We’ll see soon :slight_smile:

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#345

Day 7. New episode of 霊夢のからくり生活 was released today which meant pausing almost every frame with subs.
Phrase of the day: 採掘は「借金」で懲りてると思ったが
Speaking of the mining, you learn the lesson by the debt? Are the implication that you are going to mines if you are in debt or something?
Context had nothing to do with the debts.

In Cannibal Flan manga, next 3 pages were mostly Flan being cute.

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#346

It sounds to me like, they thought if they went into mining, debt would be a major setback, but it turned out it wasn’t. I have no idea if that fits with the context though. (does it?)

懲りる I believe (from poking around Jisho and Weblio) is like, “learn the lesson” only in the sense of “you learned your lesson” - you tried something and failed, and are now discouraged or try to avoid doing that again. You learned the difficulty the hard way.
I could also believe they mean something other than like, start-up loans, the way 借金 is in quotes like that.

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#347

Not really myself but because I already have a separate study log. I’ve had a couple of months of trial and error since I started, and recently came to realise that I’ve been doing better with open and relaxed schedules. I don’t have fixed goals (other than daily SRS reviews), so I don’t feel bad when I don’t complete them, and since I don’t feel bad I end up doing more than when I did impose myself some goals. I have it divided in different categories like reading, listening, grammar… and I just log what I do. As long as I’m doing something every day or at least every week I’m happy about it, it means I’m moving forward. And I can see that visually when the week ends and I see what I’ve logged. The main/summary posts everyone is doing here has the same effect I’m sure. You get to see in the form of checkboxes or whatever how long or how much you did. These are specially useful when you’re feeling down or having a week where you don’t do much; it doesn’t bother as much.

So for this reading challenge it’s more the same, I just log here what I read everyday, as well as in the study log with the rest that I do. I like the relaxed nature of it, “no goals just read” (which ironically is a goal itself).

This mindset can potentially attract heavy procrastination as well though so I’d say try different approaches ^^ .

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#348

I continued reading ふらいんぐうぃっち manga vol.1. I plan to finish it tomorrow.

Reading seems to get easier the more I read. Maybe I will become good at reading japanese one day.

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#349

Same as @rodan, I’m not sure without context, but at first glance I’d read this as something like, “(subject) thought you (he she they whatever) would’ve been put off of mining by (the bad experience of having had) debt.” Hard to tell without more context, but that is my guess!

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#350

Summary post

I managed to not get too distracted :eyes: :sparkles:

June 8
・Finished Honzuki 4 :tada: 86% → 100% Can check off one box in my summary post

I’ll definitely read more Honzuki, though I might start SAO 7 first. It’s one of the books I have on my shelf, so I could pick it up tomorrow when I get home. Perfect! In the meantime, I can read a bit more Subete ga F in Naru if I can’t sleep on the train, but I’m considering rereading one of the scenes that got a bit too technical for me. Thanks to @NicoleRauch for explaining stuff in the book club thread :grin:

Many travelling, many waiting time. It’s been a long day :zzz: :zzz: :zzz:

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#351

8.6.
I read chapter 20 of 赤毛のアン and finished up volume 1 of ぼくらのへんたい and chapter 1 of リゼロ vol 17. None of these were a lot of pages. :slight_smile:

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#352

Wiki post

June 8 Update
Today’s reading was ナルト chapters 10 and 11, which covers about 40 pages. It took me approximately 3 hours, and I encountered about 75 unknown words along the way. The first chapter was, for the most part, straight forward to get through, except for a couple of pages of Kakashi’s deductions about Tazuna’s mission. The second chapter is where most of the new words appeared, and it’s because Tazuna explains the Gatou situation. There were many economy related words I had no background for, so it became pages of confusion.

Writing down each and every word I didn’t know took me back to when I first started reading and took 10 - 15 minutes per speech bubble to make out what was going on. It’s painful. I’m happy to move on from it, but I’m sure it’s not the last time I’ll encounter this.

My original plan was to read one chapter of Naruto a week to finish by end of July. Since there are 10 chapters in this volume, I realized that wasn’t going to be possible, so I decided to amp up the reading a bit more. My book club picks each have about 3 weeks left before they’re done. If I push myself a bit, I can probably finish both 進撃の巨人 and ナルト by the end of June as well. That does mean I’ll need to find more books to read for July though…

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