June 19. Time: 1 hour. Manga Pages: 6
What: Manga からかい上手の高木さん (Volume 1), current pick of ABBC. Chapter 8, Page 1-6.
Skipped yesterday due to social life happenning on Friday evening. Today reread the pages with looking up everything.
Day 19
Satori Reader: Kiki-Mimi Radio, Episode 25.
Only two episodes left before choosing a new series. Also the new Intermediate Book Club book just started so I will be reading that as well. I will be prioritising it so I don’t fall behind but I’ll definitely try to keep using Satori Reader daily regardless.
Day 19: June 19th
What did I read?: サメーズ
How much did I read?: 24 pages - finished the book (already )
How long did it take me?: 19 min
I should have been reading something else today, but you know, there are a lot of things I really should have been doing today that I didn’t do, so…at least I did something. I was supposed to be relaxing today so I could recharge for the week, but all I really did was stress over all the stuff I still need to do while simultaneous not doing any of it. Fun times.
Luckily the sharks did not let me down, when I finally got around to reading
This is my favorite shark of today and I don’t know why, he just has such a big mouth
And while looking up his name in Jisho, I accidentally discovered this ridiculous vocab word:
姥捨て山 (うばすてやま):
- mountain where old people were abandoned (according to legend) [what]
- position or division in a company to which an old and ineffective person is transferred [lol]
- women’s college (slang, derogatory, Meiji, Taisho period slang) [wow rude]
My other favorite thing of the day was the 4-koma in which the sharks pop out and surprise a surfer in the water, then proceed to steal his surfboard and surf away
This might be a weirdly specific recommendation, but I would honestly recommend this book for anyone who’s interested in learning more sea creature names in Japanese? Like there are lots of animal names in here that were new to me (or more specific than ones I’d seen before, like specific types of sharks etc), and they are all accompanied by adorable illustrations - what more could one ask for, really xD I love sea creatures, so it’s fun to get to see some of their names in Japanese and learn some little fun facts about them.
June 19 Update
Today was another 明日、私は誰かのカノジョ day, though I only managed about 20 pages since it’s been a long day. Only took about an hour to get through, not bad at all.
Read prologue yesterday and +4 pages of コーヒーが冷めないうちに from IBC, completed page 11. Maybe I’ll read more in the evening. Maybe not. I need to reach page 20, so it’ll take couple of days. There’s definitely a difficulty spike between BBC and IBC.
Have you played it?? I haven’t heard anything about it, but I’m really loving it!
Went to a bookstore and picked up a real book (推し、燃ゆ which I really want to read but don’t stand a chance in hell at understanding yet) along with 夜は猫といっしょ and100日後に死ぬワニ.
Aaaand I read half of 夜は猫といっしょ just because it’s cute and very very easy. I already read100日後に死ぬワニ when it was updating daily on twitter but it’s been over a year so I want to try rereading it all at once. It was fairly popular last year and I think it’s getting an anime movie?
Well - reading done earlier than usual - woke up at 5:30 this morning and couldn’t go back to sleep, so I read for an hour. I have opened up ‘Love so Life’ vol 3. As manga go, it’s definitely more difficult than Yotsubato or Chi, but not too bad - some of the fonts are tricky to read, but that’s probably good practice. Plot wise - super, cute and fluffy, despite the frequent references to 中村さん’s mother dying when she was very young, her relatives not wanting her, and her being raised in an orphanage - you know, classic tragic backstory. Always leaves me with a little smile on my face.
Just finished reading volume 8 of Yotsuba. It was a good volume, with some nice variety to it.
chapter 54
Festival was a nice lengthy chapter. Yotsuba worked hard here for the candy. She was pretty scared of the 天狗, which is good to know how tengu is written there.
chapter 55
Yotsuba got a good plan for eating which candy every day. I like they stop by the park to get some acorns and the dad gets into it as well, very wholesome chapter.
Did many things today, but it was mostly work and very little play.
Still managed 40 pages of 天冥の標 3 (so, only 470 to go…). Space combat! Wee! Also, we finally got the origin of a word that is used in part 1 (so 200 something years in the future, simulating language evolution… wait a minute the incident that led to the problems in volume 1 were from 200 years prior, so, now ?!? well, I think I know what this volume will be about)
I’m guessing for you, reading a novel in japanese would fall into the play category?
As for me, I am “keeping up”. I get my koohi reading done every day and 20 words + reviews but haven’t been doing much reading on the side (not that I have for a majority of my japanese studies, and its more of a recent thing anyways). Just finished the third and final (so far) book of the わたなれ series. Solid thumbs up from ya boi. Also a little over halfway done with the fourth volume of 妹さえいればいい and its better than I expected. Kinda lewd doe ngl (満更でもない)
Just pulled up my new book, カノうわ4 and see 一定期限恋人生活 on one of the pre text illustrations (idk what the actual name is), and goddamn. I mean, I don’t mind it particularly, but I feel like I’ve seen this so much that they just gotta make a whole 仮交際 genre or something.
Today is my one year anniversary on WaniKani so I pushed myself really hard the past couple of days to finish my very first light novel in Japanese by today!
名探偵コナン 紺青の拳 completed
June 17
Read 16 pages of 名探偵コナン. Busy work day so read as much as I could after work.
June 18
Read 40 pages of 名探偵コナン. Started reading as soon as work finished and just tried to push myself to read as much as possible. Took a couple of small breaks in between. The part that was the most unclear to me from watching the movie happened to fall near the end of those 40 pages and since I was getting tired by the end I’m not certain I understood this part that much better this time around.
June 19
Read 48 pages of 名探偵コナン. Start of vacation so read コナン throughout the day with breaks in between. As with the day before I got tired during the last couple of pages which in turn means my comprehension wasn’t as good as usual. Still super proud of myself for being able to read this many pages in a day.
June 20
Read 23 pages of 名探偵コナン. Final day. I was super motivated and excited to finish the book. Decided to time myself again and this time it took 1h 42 minutes. There was a lot of dialogue near the end and two of the pages only had 2-4 lines of text which helped read these pages faster than normal. Still proud of myself!
I would never had even thought of pushing myself this hard if it weren’t for this challenge - once again, thank you everybody for your interesting and encouraging posts!
Summary post
June 20
Read 2 parts of the last chapter of Subete ga F ni Naru. (94% → 97%) 2 parts left and probably atogaki. Was hoping I could finish the book today, but that didn’t happen. Will do tomorrow! Especially because of active book club thread
(I tend to not look until I’m done with that week’s reading because of potential spoilers. Having unread threads bothers me, so I try my best to catch up sooner rather than later, hehe)
Ah, yes, that’s what I meant
I’ve been reading 蜘蛛ですが、なにか? every day. Read 8 pages today and over 20 pages yesterday. Pretty interesting. 60/329 pages (18% done).
I’ve been a bit lazy on one hand and wanted to eliminate distractions, so I sit down with the book and a pencil and read. When there’s a word I don’t know or some grammar that doesn’t make sense to me I highlight it. So far there hasn’t been a case that I couldn’t understanding something at all, only that I missed some nuance or a detail. Also I noticed that if I don’t look up something right away I sometimes look at the kanji/vocab and realise I actually know them, just can’t easily recall.
And then when I’m done reading for the day I go over the read pages and look up the stuff I was really curious about.
I think I sped up considerably and can do around 10-12 pages per hour. I will try to read around 10 pages everyday.
June 20. Time: 45 min. Manga Pages: 4
What: Manga からかい上手の高木さん (Volume 1), current pick of ABBC. Chapter 8, Page 7-10.
Day 20
Satori Reader: Kiki-Mimi Radio, Episodes 26 and 27 (finale).
End of the series. I ended up liking it quite a bit, I didn’t expect at all that it was going to have the development it had but it was a nice surprise. I’ll make sure to give it a reread some time in the near future to practice the things learned. I know they’re planning to release the option to listen to all of the episodes of the different series in one go; I hope they are able to do so soon, that would be amazing!
Starting a new series soon; if not tomorrow, then probably the day after.
I may not have remembered to update my tracker on here every day, but I haven’t missed a day of reading so far! I’ve only been sticking with 殺人出産. This week is the final section of the title story, which is exciting!
For this upcoming week, I want to try to alternate what I’m reading each day. I find I have trouble juggling multiple books at once. I don’t know if it’s that I find it difficult, or if it’s simply because one inevitably catches my interest more than the others. I guess this is a challenge within a challenge.
Day 20: June 20th
What did I read?: よつばと! Vol. 15
How much did I read?: 46 pages (1 chapter) - finished the volume
How long did it take me?: 39 min
Well, today was basically the opposite of yesterday I got everything done that I needed to get done, and I still somehow had energy to read Yotsuba at the end of the day! Once again, the volume ended in a really sweet and heartwarming way.
Yotsuba looks so cute with her new ランドセル
June 20 Update
Today’s reading material was once again the same. This time I powered through about 50 pages, and it only took about an hour and a half. Especially with the lack of furigana, I’m surprised at the rate at which I’m flying through this manga. It’s really interesting (though I get the impression I definitely won’t get the happy ending I want ), so I’m looking forward to reading more of it over the next couple of days. It’s likely I’ll finish it this week.