📚📚 Read every day challenge - Summer 2021 🏖🏖

[Aislin]

I’m considering joining the party, even if it’s awfully late for that
I was reluctant before, because I knew beforehand that I would miss some days in June and it was demotivating, but now I finally may try for a streak.

My first goal is to finish Disgaea 6 before it releases in English on June 29th. I’ve got 4 chapters left, so one for each day. I started playing it right after the demo was released back in January (progress carries over), but then got distracted by other things.

(I know that some people think that postgame is the true essence of Disgaea, but I’m happy with just doing the main story.)

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So far:
魔界戦記ディスガイア6 (video game) (main story)
ルーンファクトリー5 (video game) (main story, will continue postgame sometime later)

乙女ゲームの破滅フラグしかない悪役令嬢に転生してしまった…4 (light novel)
乙女ゲームの破滅フラグしかない悪役令嬢に転生してしまった…5 (light novel)
カラフル (YA小説 according to Japanese Wikipedia)
授乳 (Sayaka Murata Book Club)
生命式 (also by Sayaka Murata but not part of book club)

不可解なぼくのすべてを3 (BBC manga continued as an offshoot club)
不可解なぼくのすべてを4 (BBC manga continued as an offshoot club)
不可解なぼくのすべてを5 (BBC manga continued as an offshoot club)

文豪ストレイドッグス21 (manga)

メタモルフォーゼの縁側1 (manga)
メタモルフォーゼの縁側2 (manga)
メタモルフォーゼの縁側3 (manga)

Dropped:
地縛少年花子くん1 (BBC manga) (at 43%)

[Redglare]

Is never too late! Welcome aboard

[maykeye]

Day 26: finished ABBC. Was too busy reading (English version) Your Turn to Die to read anything else.

[momoni]

Main

Contrary to what I had hoped first week of vacation ended up being so busy I read the bare minimum most days and broke my streak on Friday. Oh well, I still read more than I would have without this challenge

June 21
Since I finished コナン I decided to switch back to manga for some light reading - 乙女ゲーム vol 2. Read 25 pages.

June 22
Visiting friends for 3 days so zero free time. Read 3 pages of 乙女ゲーム at 1am just to keep the strike going.

June 23
Read 7 pages of 乙女ゲーム.

June 24
Read 2 pages of 乙女ゲーム.

June 26
Forgot to read anything.

June 26
Read 107 pages and finished 乙女ゲーム vol 2. I’m really liking the series so far and will be buying vol 3 soon.

Spoilery thoughts on the series

When I started the series none of the four main guys seemed all that appealing with their abundant (tropey) character flaws. Seeing how excited Catarina was over meeting Mary and Sophia just made me root for the girls instead. With the second volume some of the guys have somewhat redeemed themselves and seem much more likable now that they’re older. And suddenly I feel like I’m in shipping hell - now there are too many options, how does one choose?!

[Redglare]

Summary post
June 26 Another short update

・Read Honzuki 5. (48% → 60%) Ended up reading a bit after I posted last night.

・Started 冷たい密室と博士たち - Doctors in Isolated Room. ( → 9%) Was just curious about how many parts (subchapters) there were in the first chapter and each of them turned out to be shorter than expected, so I ended up reading the whole first week’s part… In other news, new book club. Yay! :3

[windupbird]

Summary post

Day 26: June 26th
What did I read?: いつでもサメーズ
How much did I read?: 14 pages
How long did it take me?: 24 min

This book is so fun. Now we have some 4-koma fable retellings mixed in xD

This one is honestly my favorite, I laughed so hard

The Shark and The Hare

pffff
Honorable mention for favorite fable goes to The Little Match Seal

I feel like I’m starting to get some of these goroawase, but some of them seem like a bit of a stretch imo haha. Like, props to whoever was creative enough to come up with ホタテの日.

[sycamore]

Summary

June 26 umm, so today I finished reading the first vol of 鬼滅の刃 and it ended on a cliffhanger so ended up reading the first two chapters of the next volume too. Thinking about it now, this is the first manga with shonen pacing I’ve read where I hadn’t already seen the anime…so that’s probably why I’m finding it very addictive. While I have the energy for it I’m not going to complain though! Really enjoying it so far. Tanjiro is such a sweetheart It really is a manga that loves to use kanji for usually all kana words though - even things like 此処 (ここ)! It has furigana on everything though so nbd, it’s just funny

@deejayyp

Bunpro has a bookmark system that I use quite often, I note down grammar when I see it, look it up and then bookmark it for future study

I feel so silly that I had completely missed this feature! I went and checked Bunpro today after you mentioned it and was like “bookmark? How do you bookmark? Oh yeah, the massive bookmark icon that I somehow never noticed before!” I think that’s pretty much the perfect way to do things - thanks!

@rikaiwisdom

Oh and I also consult the reference book “A handbook of Japanese Grammar Patterns” which is great

…must…try…to…resist…buying…more…Japanese…learning…resources…

In all seriousness - it sounds really helpful! I am intruiged by the Japanese version (mainly as most of the resources I’ve been using for N3+ grammar points have been in Japanese, with the exception of Maggie sensei) but maybe it would be too tricky. Something to ponder…

@rikaiwisdom

lso I didn’t know that 次第 was a “grammar point” in itself, thanks! I learned it from the first volume of やがて君になる . I just checked because I had a faint memory of seeing you there ^^ I haven’t kept reading it though. But it appears quite soon, either the first or second chapter. Edit: Just checked it out of curiosity, it’s on page 55 (supposing it’s the same in every version).

Hahaha, I think this is a case of what I have started calling to myself “unknown grammar blindness” - which is a situation I quite often find myself in where I think I’ve just learned a new grammar point and then I’ll be rereading something I read earlier (generally for book clubs) and there it will be! I guess I must have just looked up the word and not realised there was a related grammar point (I only realised this time as I was doing my lookups on the Takoboto app and it usefully highlights where theres a related grammar point).

[rikaiwisdom]

Main post

Day 26
コーヒーが冷めないうちに , 7 pages.

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This is definitely the most I’ve read in a day so far, and I didn’t think I would read the whole thing, whoah. The new week for IBC just started yesterday and I was falling behind, I still had a few pages to read for the first week, so I decided I would do only this today. There are SO many words I don’t know that make me go waaaaaaay too slow, I don’t even know how long these 7 pages took me, around two hours, which I’m not sure if it’s too bad, but it looks ridiculous to me . This is literally the first Japanese novel I’ve ever read. I started with 君の名は for the IBC but I felt very overwhelmed and I fell behind quickly; I soon lost all motivation to keep going. I feel both comfortable and uncomfortable with this one: some passages go very smoothly, and others just break my brain in pieces for a while. If I encounter some sentence that only has one word it’s alright, but when I encounter one that has 3 or so unknown words, pain. I also go very slow intentionally because I try to fully comprehend everything that is happening while adding vocab to SRS.

Having said this, it’s honestly very fun. Today I’ve already become more comfortable than the previous days, and it feels very rusty the moment I start, but after a while the pace becomes better. I’m also mining so much vocabulary so I’m happy.

@sycamore

In all seriousness - it sounds really helpful! I am intruiged by the Japanese version

I’ve read that the Japanese version is much better if you can read it, but since I wasn’t confident in my ability to read it relatively unhindered, I preferred to buy the translated version for now ^^ . But I’ll definitely get the other one eventually. I just don’t know where I fall level wise tbh, maybe I could’ve gone with the original instead. Maybe you can find samples online to check?

@sycamore

I guess I must have just looked up the word and not realised there was a related grammar point

To be fair, I feel like it’s way too common to refer to many things in Japanese as “grammar points”, when they just seem like regular vocabulary to me. Most of these are quite evident if you comprehend how the particles work, and things like that. You see in BunPro and in many other places things like “N3 grammar, two hundred and whatever grammar points!” , like… wth xD I don’t like how everything in Japanese is branded as grammar. Grammar is, to me at least, things like verb conjugations, particles use, verb tenses, etc. Many points in bunpro are so closely related to each other you can add 3 or 4 at the same time. So when I encountered 次第 , I looked up the meaning and figured out how it was used; Jisho marked it as suffix among other things. I haven’t even added it to BunPro yet

[sansarret]

June 26. Time: 30 min. Manga Pages: 16, not looking up anything
What: Manga からかい上手の高木さん (Volume 1), current pick of ABBC. Chapter 9, Pages 1-16.

Decided to go thru the whole chapter without using my usual helpers (jisho, ichimoe, deepl).
I think I understood about 50-70% of the story (well, it is manga after all). Kanji were not the obstacle.

[chrisosaurus]

@Axazel

I hope you have a smooth and quick recovery!

Thank you very much =D

Home post

I’ve started playing Super Mario Odyssey in Japanese, so going to kind-of count that as reading (since I am trying to dissect lots/most of the sentences).

• June 24th 高木さん chapter 4 page 10 panel 4 and ~30-60 minutes of Super Mario Odyssey in Japanese
• June 25th 高木さん chapter 4 page 10 panel 5 and ~30-60 minutes of Super Mario Odyssey in Japanese
• June 26th 高木さん chapter 4 page 11 panels 1 and 2 and ~30-60 minutes of Super Mario Odyssey in Japanese

[Thud]

Main Post

Finished reading volume 9 of Yotsuba over the weekend. These were all very good chapters, making it into one of favorite volumes.

chapter 60

Here the Ayase sisters finally visits Yotsuba’s house. She does a proper job showing all the good spots.

They can’t help but clean up the place which makes the dad suspicious about what yotsuba did. Fuuka finally gets her coffee, also she can’t come to the hot air balloon race. Poor Fuuka, but at least she made a neat dinosaur.

chapter 61

Way too early for this, which makes for some good comedy material.

I love panels like these. They show off the goofy side of their characters. At the site yotsuba already forgot what they came for. There is a lot to do there, so it makes sense. There’s some beautiful spreads here with the balloons, definitely worth a look.

chapter 62

Continues straight from the last chapter, where they get to ride in the hot air balloon for a bit. Duralumin acrobatics are very good here. Remaining part of the chapter is just more fun wholesome stuff.

[Axazel]

Day 27

I read half of chapter 14 in カラフル！ I still have no idea how this mystery will end. What a fantastic book. I can hardly wait to have the full day to read tomorrow.

I’ll finish カラフル this week, so I have to line up my next book (don’t want to miss a day ) I think I may 've already made my choice. We’ll see!

[Belerith]

I feel like I may have missed a day…??

26.6.
Soo I started a new manga available on unlimited yesterday, 珈琲が冷めない距離, which is about a young woman working at a coffee shop and one of their regular customers, a deaf man working at a 和菓子屋 nearby. I found it very cute (the art style is a bit unusual, but it’s charming, and all color ), and so relaxing I only stopped reading when my kindle shut down on its own because I had forgotten to charge it. Good thing too, I needed to sleep.

27.6.
I finished volume 1 of 珈琲が冷めない距離. The 2nd one is also available on unlimited so I read that too. I also read some more of the after story of あせとせっけん. Only 40 pages left… :’(
On the non manga side of things, book club stuff.~

[maykeye]

Finished BBC’s Nichijou. Going to take a good nap and watch マイクラ借金返済物語

[BarelyFragile]

Wiki post

It’s been a while since I last posted, and that’s mainly because I’ve been drowning under job interviews and work, so I mostly didn’t read this week. Skipped Tuesday through Friday, but finally managed to read something yesterday and today.

June 26 Update
Honestly, I only really read this day because I had the Haikyuu read aloud and I didn’t want to go in without preparation. One chapter only took about 25 min (which feels great???). I wanted to keep reading but was also too tired to do so.

June 27 Update
Today’s the first sort of “free” day I’ve had in a while, and I decided to spend some of that time reading in Japanese. I started out by catching up with this week’s 日常. This is the last week of the book club, so I finished out the book. It’s at least a fun read, but it’s mostly not my style, so I’m kind of glad it’s over. Still, it resulted in several giggles, and it’s not a bad story by any stretch of the imagination.

Next was 明日、私は誰かのカノジョ. I only had about 40 pages left for this one, so I finished it out as well. Glad to know the story’s resolution, but also sad to be done with this main character. I’m not entirely sure how much I like the character that’s going to be the star of the next volume, but I think I’m likely to pick it up next time I buy more books from Japan.

After finishing these two, I still felt like reading some more, so I decided to get started on トニカクカワイイ. I’ve watched the anime for this on Crunchyroll and thought it was entertaining and cute, so I decided to pick it up. I just read the first chapter, and it wasn’t particularly difficult (man, having furigana simplifies lookup so much), and I’ll probably read some more tonight, time permitting. The main character is entertaining in his intensity.

In total, read for about an hour and a half, and realized I really missed reading every day. Hopefully, this upcoming week will be a little less busy and I can keep up with reading a bit more.

[Aislin]

Day 1
June 26

• 魔界戦記ディスガイア6 (12-1 → 12-4)

Day 2
June 27

• 魔界戦記ディスガイア6 (12-4 → 13-4)

[Redglare]

Summary post
June 27

・Read some SAO 8. (p150 → 172)
・Read some Honzuki 5. (60% → 64%)

[Natsuha]

I finished あさこ manga vol.1 today. Of course there is a cliffhanger at the end of the manga and I wonder what will happen next. But I don’t have the second volume yet. I will have to read something else tomorrow.

During this challenge I finished reading three manga volumes already.

[d-hermit]

I’m still reading everyday to continue my streak, but I’ve become too lazy to update write updates

[Vanilla]

Got 250 pages donezoes today along with all my other srs stuff. The books have been pretty interesting too so it really didn’t take much effort to get myself to read. The books being カノうわ 4 and 妹さえいればいい 4

During the week I’m only able to get in like 25 pages a day on top of my srs and 20 words a day so its nice to be able to catch up on the weekend.