📚📚 Read every day challenge - Summer 2021 🏖🏖

Japanese Language Reading
#769

Main post

Day 30 :ballot_box_with_check:
コーヒーが冷めないうちに , 4 pages.

One month!!! :tada: :tada: Congratulations to everyone that is participating; whether you have read just one day or everyday, you’ve done more than you had previous to this challenge. And if you’re not participating yet, join in! We still have another month ahead :relaxed: . I’ve been thinking, big shout out to @Redglare for the idea, it has motivated many of us to read more or in my case to plainly start reading. I’ve been thinking that perhaps we could make this a recurrent thing in the forums? Like, I will definitely take a couple of weeks after this to completely cool down, but I wouldn’t mind an Autumn 2021 challenge at all. Maybe when the time comes we can even swap to year quarters to avoid confusion for our southern hemisphere pals ^^ . So something like two months of challenge and one off to prepare for the next. Just an idea!

Response to trunklayer

I’m honestly liking it very much! There’s this slightly uneasy feeling whenever you finish a series and look for a new one, the feeling of expecting the next one to be up to the previous one’s quality. This one got me hooked really early, and I’ve only read 6 chapters so far but the build-up has been great, not to talk about the voice acting. I really love Satori Reader at this point.

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#770

I second aaall of this! :laughing::sparkles:

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#771

Home post

  • June 30th からかい上手の高木さん chapter 4 page 12 panel 3

Today I was very tired, it was late, and my arm was quite sore but I didn’t want to break my streak, so I convinced myself I would sit down and just do part of what I thought was a big complex panel.

But then it was done and I found it much easier than expected!
I only needed to lookup どうしよう.
Seeing しまう was also great fun and had me excitedly highlighting it in my note book - I’ve been writing out and breaking down every line, which is why my dominant hand being injured is slowing me down so much.

Maybe it is just a few days of really good luck, but this definitely feels like something is clicking.

The panel, for the curious.

それはマズイ… 高木さんの方が身長が高くなってしまったら、今まで以上にからかわれてしまうじゃないか。どうしよう…どうしよう…

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#772

Summary post

Day 30: June 30th
What did I read?: ふたりのライオン
How much did I read?: 28 pages (from the middle of one chapter to the middle of another lol)
How long did it take me?: 1.25 hours

Reading strength restored! Honestly I’m surprised it took me that long to read this much, but it did not feel like it took that long at all. I love this manga and these characters, they’re so cute :3 I love Onizuka so much and I do not know why, he’s just adorable to me. :heart:

And this makes a full month of me reading something in Japanese daily! I’ve never read that consistently and frequently in Japanese before - I never used to read on the weekdays at all, but I’m surprised at how painless it’s been most days. Part of that is probably my choice of reading material, but I feel like my mindset is starting to change a little bit too - like, yes, I can read something on the weekdays, even if it’s just a little, and it’s fine. I’m always afraid that it’s going to take “too much time” or too much mental energy/effort to read, so I don’t bother trying at all. According to Bookmeter, I finished 5 books/volumes this month :o (Some of those were started before the beginning of the month, but at least 3 were read completely from start to finish in June)

Honestly I would love this! I was just thinking about how nice it would be to continue the challenge on for longer than these 2 months. If we take a break month, I might make that my own personal English reading challenge month lol, I have lots of unread English books hanging around too xD

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#773

log

Okay so I took a break from fictional books because work and life crazy.

not reading related

I had to swap entirely to Japanese at work which meant a big and immediate focus on spoken and written Japanese. I’ve had to teach kids how to use computers at work which meant learning just so many computer words in Japanese and reading a lot on computer terminology along with Japanese-only user manuals. And you know what, I’m going to count that.

Here’s me tentatively getting back on the official reading wagon because today I read multiple local news articles relating to Corona, multiple bear attacks, and our new lord and and local savior, イカキング.

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#774

Wiki post

June 30 Update

Aaah, it’s the end of the month! While I haven’t managed to read every single day, I still managed 25 out of 30 days (I think)!

Today’s reading was ナルト volume 3. I read about about 2.5 hours and finished half the book. It felt very smooth overall, even when there were long conversations (which were admittedly light over the past 100 pages).

I think one of the most obvious progress markers for me is how much my reading speed and stamina has improved over the past month. I started out being able to read a chapter from one of my standard shounen manga over the course of 1 - 2 hours, and then I had to stop (specifically, it took me around this much effort to read chapters from Haikyuu back then). Now, with just a bit of extra effort I can easily finish 4 - 5 chapters in about 2 - 2.5 hours (and a Haikyuu chapter typically takes between 20 - 40 min), and I can do this multiple times a week.

I’m also a lot more comfortable reading without marking down every single word I don’t know and trying to understand unknown words based on context.

I’d like to quantify how much time I’ve spent reading this past month, but it’ll take some time to read over every post and calculate it. In the mean time, I’ve finished seven manga over the course of the month, four of which I started this month as well! There’s another two books I’m more than 50% through (Haikyuu and Naruto). It feels like I’ve come a long way.

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#775

Started 1Q84 Book 2, about 30 pages in. Nothing interesting to report haha, but it’s off to an interesting start.

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#776

Day 3: July 1st

Read:

気のきいた短いメールが書ける本：Points 14 and 15 (finished all Points!). Plus the first 気のきいた短いメール術：「約束する」. Total of 8 pages.

Interesting point: the book recommends to avoid making requests in the negative form because that implies that it might be difficult for the other person to do. Even using really polite language, it’s best to avoid 〇〇ませんか. Example from the book:

X：打ち合わせをして頂けませんか。
◯：打ち合わせをお願いしたくご連絡致しました。

Another example of a good way to make the request (avoiding negative form):
5日から始まる週の午後、ご都合のよい日はありますでしょうか。

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#777

No idea. I only read along with like the first story, so I wouldn’t be a good candidate to restart it anyway. (Also, I read far less comprehensively as my normal mode nowadays.)

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#778

One month! :books: :partying_face: :sparkles: I’m so happy that people found this challenge motivating :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

More reading :eyes::sparkles::books: I definitely want to do another challenge next summer, which is why I put “Summer 2021” in the title. (Maybe not the best title considering it is not summer everywhere on the planet :sweat_smile: :caught_durtling: ) I think it is amazing that people who don’t even have vacation have been participating, not sure if I’d be able to do that. You guys are impressive! On busy days, I tend to read just before going to sleep, so posting and journaling wouldn’t quite work for me, personally. I think your idea is great, though! 100% support :grin: It’d make me happy to see more people reading and continue challenging themselves :books: :muscle: If you’d like to arrange a challenge thread after this one I’m all for it! :durtle_noice:

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#779

:ballot_box_with_check: Day 31

I finished カラフル! The entire book was so good, from start to finish.

Started chapter 1 of ぼくはイエローでホワイトでちょっとブルー. It’s non-fiction, written by a Mom (she’s native Japanese married with an Irish Catholic man) who’s raised her son in England. The book is about the challenges and discrimination he faced while in middle school.

The kanji level is–I know how to read nearly every kanji, but I don’t know what most mean. So we’re moving slow at the moment :sweat: :sweat_smile:

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#780

Haven’t posted in a while, but I did read some more! I tried to read the first volume for free on BookWalker, but that expired so now I am reading more higehiro. My speed is still around 1-2 hours a page, since I want to understand the grammar (and I don’t know that much vocab yet). Since it is going so slow, it feels like I don’t make that much progress, but I still think I learnt more than without trying to read anything xD

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#781

4 pages of コーヒー… Finished this week’s IBC.

I started reading on 2nd of June and so far didn’t skip a single day. Unfortunately, (current day of month)-1 formula no longer work to count how many days I read in a row.

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#782

Tracker Post

In a mixed blessing of sorts, I was able to take a trip to see friends/family at the end of June. I surprised myself and tried to keep up with reading for a few days, but I found myself too tired to even want to read a single page of anything by the end. It’s a new month, though! My goal for this week is to catch up on with the 殺人出産 book club (of which I am once again behind on :sob:) and blast through ヒトゴト so I can focus my attention on クビキリサイクル.

頑張るよ〜

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#783

Summary post

:heavy_check_mark: Day 6
July 1

  • ルーンファクトリー5
    (1年 秋29 → 冬3; バサラの隠れ家のダンジョン; リュカ → 告白 → 恋人)

  • 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
    (34% → 38% → coffee → fell asleep while reading anyway → woke up → 40%)

I want to add my thanks to @Redglare for creating this thread :sparkling_heart:

At first I wasn’t convinced - there’s already 多読/extensive reading challenge thread, is there really a need for another one?, I thought.
And it seems that yes, it is. As proven by how active this place is.
I think the main appeal of the summer thread is that it’s all about reading a little bit everyday, while even if 多読 does have a place to put your daily goal it concentrates more on quantity and a big scary yearly target. People were usually talking about finishing whole books, not about smaller daily achievements. Not that it was prohibited :wink: but I was also feeling uneasy sharing smaller bits of progress.

Soo, I was proven wrong and now I think it’s great that both threads co-exist together.
And I would love the “read every day” threads to continue. I prefer no break for August, but if majority chooses the break, then :woman_shrugging:t2: 仕方がない, I’ll just join the next one available. :upside_down_face:

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#784

I’ve seen other people write June - August as their goal so you’re not the only one :grin: This challenge thread doesn’t have to end by the end of July, was mostly just an estimate based on what fitted me best, hehe ^^

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#785

My copy of “A dictionary of intermediate Japanese Grammar” arrived today and oh boy it’s beefy. I’m gunna be reading this every day ahha. In hindsight, I shoulda bought it earlier… Ah well.

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#786

Summary post
July 1

・Read SAO 8. (p250 → 281) Almost page 300 :eyes:

Reading went a tiny bit better today. Sometimes I think I understood a sentence, but then the next few sentences doesn’t make sense, so I go back and realize there were words I didn’t really know so I look them up and then I finally understand what is going on. This second side story is much more challenging to read compared to the first one :durtle_durtverted_lvl1: I really liked the first one, maybe because I remembered it from the anime.

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#787

Summary

Today I read another 3 chapters of 鬼滅の刃３. Only one chapter left but it’s like 25% of the volume according to bookwalker so managed to summon all of my self control and leave it for tomorrow. One thing I have been doing while I’m reading this series is watching the anime episodes after I read the manga chapters, sometimes using the ‘language learning with Netflix’ extension, sometimes not depending on how lazy I’m feeling. I’ve been finding it pretty useful, generally there’s at least one thing in an episode that I slightly(or majorly :sweat_smile:) misunderstood that I get from the anime (even though Im still watching with Japanese subs) because especially visual stuff in the fights is way clearer when animated. Hoping that it will also help the vocab sink in more through repitition but who knows! Anyway, it’s fun! My boyfriend wants to watch the film together sometime (he isn’t learning Japanese so will be with English subs) so that’s incentive for me to keep up the pace so I’ve read the manga first while also not making him wait like half a year!

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#788

Main post

Day 31 :ballot_box_with_check:
コーヒーが冷めないうちに , 6 pages.

I’m already sensing a nice improvement compared to the first days; I have to spend less time for a higher number of pages, and even though it’s still work, I’m getting used to the words that the author likes to repeat, and it became not so bad at all when I added them for review these previous days. I’m encountering them again randomly, which helps both to reinforce it and to read it faster. It has become way easier to sit down and read for example 5 pages, whereas before it worn me out so much it felt like I needed a very long time (I still need a fair amount).

I still feel uneasy when I see Japanese text though, I automatically go: nope, there’s no way I understand this language. Then I start reading and it’s not so bad :joy: . But damn does it take sooooo long to drop that feeling of panicking whenever you see a page full of Japanese.

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