I haven’t written an update since Friday. I guess I wasn’t focusing too much on reading lately.
However, even on a day I came close to skipping I still thought it wouldn’t be right and read a few pages 
June 12-14 2021
- was reading 蜘蛛ですが、なにか？5 for 15-20 mins before bed and read 2 pages every day.
- the language is an interesting combination of colloquial language and slang as well as stiff archaic expressions.
- it’s not a difficult read in general but it’s difficult to look up stuff when I need, because many slang expressions aren’t available in a dictionary.
Interesting things I learned
- 〜致し方ない you can probably guess that it’s a more archaic/formal way to say 仕方ない. But I decided to ask a Japanese tutor about it and he said that it’s curious why a stiff expression like this is used by a character who otherwise speaks very casually. He says that this expression really draws attention to itself, so it was probably used to highlight the sentence. Pretty interesting, right? As a learner I could understand the meaning of the sentence but understanding why it was written this way was beyond me.
- こちとら It’s an old 1st person pronoun that has a similar feeling to 俺 but generally older. A tutor said he thinks a samurai would use it for example.
- 〜パない that’s a slang form of 半端ない