📚📚 Read every day challenge - Summer 2021 🏖🏖

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.

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June 27 Read a bunch more 鬼滅の刃 2, 5 chapters I think (100 pages). I have only two chapters left and more than 2 hours on public transport tomorrow so expect I’ll finish this volume tomorrow.

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Main post

Day 27 :ballot_box_with_check:
IBC: コーヒーが冷めないうちに , 5 pages.


Wanted to do some Satori Reader too but I don’t want to feel burnt out so this will be all for today.

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Summary post

Day 27: June 27th
What did I read?: いつでもサメーズ
How much did I read?: 13 pages
How long did it take me?: 28 min

Sorry, this is a boring update. I’m tired, I’ve been doing work stuff like all weekend :disappointed:

But please enjoy this picture of the sharks doing their summer homework

イタチ (top right) looks like he’s having a lot of fun, honestly :laughing: Of course, シュモク is the studious one :heart: And ホオジロ just looks panicked xD

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June 27. Time: 1 hour. Manga Pages: 4
What: Manga からかい上手の高木さん (Volume 1), current pick of ABBC. Chapter 9, Pages 1-4.

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Home post

  • June 27th 高木さん chapter 4 page 11 panel 3 and ~30 minutes of working through Super Mario Odyssey screenshots I took during play over the other days.

Even though my surgery still means I can’t use my right hand much, I am finding that reading is getting easier over time, which is honestly just super exciting and way beyond what I was expecting this “early” into my Japanese journey.

A pleasant surprise:
On Friday I got a phone notification from Bookwalker in Japanese

Notification contents

[期間限定7/2まで] 全商品対象の80%OFF クーポンをあなただけにプレゼント

Notification readings

[きかんげんてい7/2まで ] ぜんしょうひんたいしょうの80%OFF クーポンをあなただけにプレゼント

My first instinct was to dismiss it as “I wouldn’t be able to understand it”. But at the last second I decided it wouldn’t hurt to try. It turns out that of the 9 Kanji I knew the readings for 8 of them =O. With a few quick Jisho lookups, I was done.

Then I wanted more, so I opened Bookwalker and poked around the online store (in Japanese).
To my pleasant surprise I was able to make decent progress, I downloading a bunch of free books, and bought チーズスイートホーム.

I was impressed with how much I could infer by combining context with the fragments I understood. I still relied on Jisho.org & Ichi.moe, but it was much less painful that it used to be. The fact I could read any of it was amazing!

What reading has helped teach me:
Brains are lazy.
Even now I still find my brain automatically skipping over Japanese text, either assuming I can’t read it, or trying to find an easier way.
It takes active intention to force my brain to go through the process, but when I do, it has improved so much!

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So far

:ballot_box_with_check: June 01: かがみの孤城 上 (63 pages)
:ballot_box_with_check: June 02: かがみの孤城 上 (20 pages)
:ballot_box_with_check: June 03: かがみの孤城 上 (90 pages)
:ballot_box_with_check: June 04: かがみの孤城 上 (40 pages) + 日の鳥1 (10 pages)
:ballot_box_with_check: June 05: かがみの孤城 上 (112 pages)
:ballot_box_with_check: June 06: かがみの孤城 上 (69 pages) ~ Finished
:ballot_box_with_check: June 07: かがみの孤城 下 (170 pages) ~ 48%
:ballot_box_with_check: June 08: かがみの孤城 下 (81 pages) ~ 68%
:ballot_box_with_check: June 09: かがみの孤城 下 (116 pages) ~ Finished
:ballot_box_with_check: June 10: がばいばあちゃんの幸せのトランク (136 pages) ~ 50% + 日の鳥1(17 pages)
:ballot_box_with_check: June 11: がばいばあちゃんの幸せのトランク (53 pages) ~ 69%
:ballot_box_with_check: June 12: がばいばあちゃんの幸せのトランク (85 pages) ~ Finished
:ballot_box_with_check: June 13: きよしこ (16 pages) ~ 5%
:ballot_box_with_check: June 14: 風立ちぬ (5 pages ~ 25%) + きよしこ (29 pages ~ 15%)
:ballot_box_with_check: June 15: 風立ちぬ (36 pages ~ 56%) + きよしこ (56 pages ~ 35%)
:ballot_box_with_check: June 16: きよしこ (30 pages) ~ 45% + やさしさいっぱいの土の上で (manga, 1 chapter)
:ballot_box_with_check: June 17: きよしこ (68 pages) ~ 68% + やさしさいっぱいの土の上で (4 chapters ~ Finished)
:ballot_box_with_check: June 18: きよしこ (44 pages) ~ 83%
:ballot_box_with_check: June 19: きよしこ (48 pages) ~ Finished + とつくにの少女 Vol. 2+3
:ballot_box_with_check: June 20: 風立ちぬ (8 pages) + とつくにの少女 Vol. 4
:ballot_box_with_check: June 21: 風立ちぬ (26 pages)

New:
:ballot_box_with_check: June 22: 風立ちぬ (16 pages ~ Finished) + とつくにの少女5 (62%) + 無限島上 + ムーンライト・シャドー (12 pages)
:ballot_box_with_check: June 23: ムーンライト・シャドー (13 pages)
:ballot_box_with_check: June 24: ムーンライト・シャドー (12 pages) + とつくにの少女 Vol. 5-6 (5 chapters) + 無限島下 (1 chapter)
:ballot_box_with_check: June 25: とつくにの少女 Vol. 6 (1/2 chapter)
:ballot_box_with_check: June 26: とつくにの少女 Vol. 6 (1,5 chapters ~ Finished)
:ballot_box_with_check: June 27: とつくにの少女 Vol. 7 (1 chapter)
:ballot_box_with_check: June 28: ムーンライト・シャドー (23 pages ~ Finished)

I was busy and/or meeting family and friends over the weekend, so I almost broke my streak. I managed to read half a chapter of manga Friday night at 2 AM, though, so ぎりぎりセーフ, I guess.

I’m done with ムーンライト・シャドー as of today, another story by Yoshimoto Banana that deals with overcoming grief. I quite liked it, especially how it ended. The afterword was very interesting.

I’ve read two more volumes of とつくにの少女 and still love it. I’ll probably have to read vol. 8-11 digitally since they weren’t out yet when I left Japan in 2019.

grafik

I’ve also read the first volume of 無限島, an incredibly beautiful manga in full-color that… wasn’t printed in color. I only found out the digital version was fully colored later, so I’m reading volume 2 on my Kindle right now.

This will probably be another slow week for reading. I’ll be getting a new laptop which will require a few hours to set up, in addition to work and other RL stuff to take care of. I’ll continue to read a couple of volumes of manga and maybe start 世界の終りとハードボイルド・ワンダーランド. But damn, are Murakami’s books long! A few of them, anyway. Will probably occupy much of my July schedule.

Speaking of which, I’m planning to make a breakdown for my June reading activity and set new July goals on June 30th / July 1st.

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Main post

Haven’t read anything on last weekend, but restarting now. Today I’ve read:

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  • Read 4 pages of IBC’s coffee. Plan is to go 4 pages/day to finish at thursday.

  • Forbidden Scrollery: around 10 pages, 102/153(66%). This page is blessed. It marks two thirds overall, it ends the chapter and on top of that in original order of pages it’s a page number 100.

By the way, is anyone aware of Japanese sites equivalent to vndb/mangaupdates?

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Main

Since I finished 乙女ゲーム 2 I needed to figure out what to read next. I’d been eyeing ふしぎ駄菓子屋 銭天堂 for a while now but it always seemed too difficult. Now that I had read through コナン though it seemed much more doable so decided to purchase volume 1. Also purchased volume 2 of やがて君になる for days when I want to read something easy.

June 27
Read 11 pages of ふしぎ駄菓子屋 銭天堂 1 and 19 pages of やがて君になる 2.

June 28
Read 4 pages of ふしぎ駄菓子屋 銭天堂 1 and 61 pages of やがて君になる 2. I’m almost halfway through やがて君になる and it’s only the second day I’ve been reading it - guess I need to start thinking of the next manga to read. :sweat_smile:

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Well…more days down. I have no idea when I last posted. But, I feel very successful that (at least according to my paper reading log) I haven’t missed any days yet. Really glad that I have Chi available as the easy reading for when I’m wiped out and/or forget to read until later at night.

I read for about 2.5 hours today - finished the rendition of 桃太郎 in the treasury of Japanese folktales. It went faster than I expected, given how slow I’ve been with some of the folk tales. I appreciated that there were some repeated pieces of dialogue that I recalled and could get through faster each time. Then I went on and finished the first volume of 極主夫道 - look ups without furigana are still terrible, but I know more and more of the kanji, so there’s fewer of them to do - of course, they’re often ridiculous, complicated ones - if they’re too long, I now use Google Lens to capture the text, and then can look up the word. I enjoyed the book, but don’t think I’ll be embarking on volume 2 soon - still pretty tough going for my level.

Other highlights this week - I finished volume 7 of Chi’s Sweet home - it was cute as usual. My husband does not think it’s cute when he’s trying to sleep and I shake him to show him Chi being an adorable idiot.

I also finished vol 3 of Love so Life and embarked on volume 4 - I’ve been keeping separate vocabulary lists for each chapter, and it’s definitely interesting seeing how many words I’m looking up for each chapter - some chapters feel like fewer, but the actual count is similar to the last one. About 60 words/chapter right now - since I usually read a chapter in 1 sitting, I am not SRS-ing all of them - I’m thinking about extracting my lists and comparing them to figure out which words are recurring in this series so that I can SRS the most useful ones.

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Summary

June 28
As predicted, finished 鬼滅の刃2 on my train rides today. I think from looking back at my posts I started the first volume on the 24th so that’s about 2.5 days per volume which is pretty ridiculous tbh, It’s really cool to have found something that I enjoy enough that I want to race through (had the same thing with ボーイズ - although no furigana made that harder for me) but I do need to get better at remembering that reading in Japanese is still pretty exhausting for me and that I should stop before my brain starts hurting. I’ve definitely had a couple of times over the last couple of days where I was like “I’m pretty tired, I’ll finish at the end of this chapter” and then there would be some big dramatic cliffhanger or something and I’d end up keeping on going. I’m very much the same way when I’m reading in English…it’s just that that’s a lot easier and a lot quicker so I can get away with it! It’s been really fun and enjoyable and I’m really keen to find out what happens next but also I do feel quite tired by it, especially as I’ve been reading on an iPad which is a lot of screentime. That said, a perk of reading regularly in Japanese has been that it’s reminded me of how much I love reading! It’s easy to get out of the habit of reading for pleasure when you work a pretty reading intensive job like I do, so it’s been a really cool perk. No more reading for me today though! Going to play some Mass Effect instead :slight_smile:

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:heavy_check_mark: Day 3
June 28

  • 魔界戦記ディスガイア6 (13-4 → 14-2)

Hmm, it seems I may need one day more than I thought to finish this.


Wait, but you have other light novels listed in your main post. Are these even easier than 銭天堂? :open_mouth:
(I hope it doesn’t sound condescending, I’m asking because I’m genuinely interested in easy novel things :stuck_out_tongue:)

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Wiki post

June 28 Update

In heavy contrast with the four days of not reading anything last week, I started and finished a volume in two days. Yesterday, I kept reading トニカクカワイイ later in the day until I’d finished about half the book; today I finished out the rest. Only took about an hour and a half for today’s reading since this manga is very easy to read, even when characters decide to start using complex words and think very hard. I love both the main characters so much, they’re adorable. I’ll definitely be picking up the next volume of this one.

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27.6. take 2
I ended up starting 私の押しは悪役令嬢。in the evening after posting. It’s free on unlimited… Apparently what I need to read more is actually a time limit. One more month of unlimited, gotta read as much as possible. :eyes:

Today I read some more 私の押しは悪役令嬢。, finishing chapter 1. :muscle: I now understand what people mean when they that there is a lot of empty space in (some) light novels, but I do come across a lot of fun idioms and medieval/fantastical/game terms. This is clearly meant for light reading, for adults. Not sure if I’ll continue with the next volumes yet… They’re part of unlimited as well, but I guess I’ll see if I like it enough.

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I started to read アポカリプスの砦 manga volume 1 it’s probably harder than the manga I have read yet. But I managed to read over 20 pages. My reading skills seem to be slowly improving.

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Summary post
June 28

・Read Honzuki 5. (64% → 67%)
・Read SAO 8. (p173 → p182)

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Read one chapter of Sailor moon volume 3 yesterday and another one today, finishing volume three (of the kanzenban version). Yay!

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Bought the second book of 1Q84, gunna start reading it when I don’t feel sick.
Also bought the first volume of Berserk so I’ll also read that soon, too.

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Main post

Day 28 :ballot_box_with_check:
Satori Reader: The River Sanzu, Episode 6.


Ended in a cliffhanger but I’m too tired today to read any more ;-; IBC tomorrow.

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