Finished the first volume of ベルセルク, will buy the next one today maybe.
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I’m reading this series too!! How do you like it?
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Pretty cool so far, violent as I expected. I’d watched some episodes of the anime about 5+ years ago so I can follow the story no problem. Now, word-wise I can’t understand everything cos some of the words are pretty archaic (makes sense considering the setting, however).
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Yeah, those archaic words slow me down too.
I’ve never watched the anime so I’m going in fresh! Do you recommend the anime too?
Didnt watch enough of it, but I’d say go for it. Just uh, watch the old version haha. The new version was made with CGI or something so it looks reaaally odd.
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Oh god yeah the new version was actually my first exposure to Berserk, and I hated it lol. Love the manga though, so maybe I’ll try the anime! Thanks~
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Day 30 
コーヒーが冷めないうちに , 4 pages.
One month!!! 
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 
. 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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I second aaall of this! 
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- 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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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. 
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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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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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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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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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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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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One month! 
I’m so happy that people found this challenge motivating 
More reading 
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 
) 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 
It’d make me happy to see more people reading and continue challenging themselves 
If you’d like to arrange a challenge thread after this one I’m all for it! 
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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 
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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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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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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 
) 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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