📚📚 Read every day challenge - Summer 2022 🏖 ☀

[omk3]

September 3

Tugumi, chapter 6

Grammar: 上がる、あくまで、あげく、上げる、あたかも、あっての

I started and finished the current Tugumi chapter. I may continue reading tomorrow too, and go a little ahead of the club, because I’m definitely enjoying the book more without breaks. However, after that I’ll definitely need to switch to 十角館の殺人, because there’s no way I’m letting myself fall behind the mystery book club and be unable to click on spoilers. Speculation in mystery book clubs is the best.

On the grammar front, I read about several grammar points today. Out of those, あたかも and あっての were new to me. あたかも is apparently a more literary まるで, and could be translated as "just like/as if. XあってのY seems to mean that Y can only exist because/for X, where X refers to human beings of some sort. I’m still not entirely clear how it works, but I’m at least aware of it for when I come across it in the wild.

[Redglare]

End of Summer Reading Challenge

My goal for this summer challenge was to read 5 books. Considering the books I usually read (Honzuki, SAO, Kusuriya), I felt that was a lot for 8~9 weeks, but not impossible. I wanted to challenge myself, after all. Turns out shorter and “easier” books don’t require as much time!

List of what I've read

Title	Type	Progress	Completed
Sword Art Online Progressive 1	LN	50% → 100%	July 12
神経細胞 - Wikipedia		→ Glia cells
花嫁は元男子。	Manga	100%	July 13
わたしの幸せな結婚 1	Book	100%	July 17
わたしの幸せな結婚 2	Book	100%	July 19
わたしの幸せな結婚 3	Book	100%	July 22
詩的私的ジャック (Saikawa&Moe Vol.4)	Book	36% → 100%	July 24
わたしの幸せな結婚 4	Book	100%	July 28
わたしの幸せな結婚 5	Book	100%	Aug 1
わたしの幸せな結婚 6	Book	100%	Aug 5
夜が明けたら、いちばんに君に会いにいく 上	Book	100%	Aug 20
夜が明けたら、いちばんに君に会いにいく 下	Book	100%	Aug 22
本好きの下剋上 10	Book	100%	Aug 31
Loopers via Youtube Playlist	VN	Part 3, 4, 5

Medium	Total
Books	10.64 books
Light novels	50% of SAOP1
Manga	1 vol
Visual novel	ca. 19 700 characters [1]

So I ended up setting new personal records

• Prev. record: かがみの孤城 下 (7 days) - June 2022
• New record: わたしの幸せな結婚１ (3 days) - July 2022
• New record: わたしの幸せな結婚３ (2 days) - July 2022
• New record: 夜が明けたら、いちばんに君に会いにいく 上 (1 day) - August 2022

What was different for me this challenge compared to past challenges?

I had way more time for reading because I went home for vacation. That was very chill. Could read through the entire day if I wanted to, and so I did. Which also means stamina has increased, I guess? It’s not an easy thing to measure (and I’ve probably mentioned increased stamina in every summary so far lmao). But I did a lot of nyooms

One thing that can be measured though is known vocab. Not that I have any reliable numbers tho (), I do however look up pretty much any word I’m unsure about which over time leads to fewer lookups. Especially within the same series (SAO, Honzuki, Kekkon). I didn’t read any (for me) crazy difficult stuff like Kusuriya, that would definitely take longer to finish. (Is that a challenge? Yes, yes it is I’ll finish more of you before you know it )

If I were to compare this and last summer, it’s a bit hard to say since the variation in mediums isn’t very comparable. Summer 2021: 4.45 books and 21 volumes of manga. While this summer I read 11.14 books and 1 manga. Hmm… More than double as many books? :D This is why tracking progress is fun. And I’ll have something to compare for next summer too (I swear, if I didn’t track, I’d forget everything I’ve accomplished and feel like a droopy plant)

@Redglare

Was a bit hard to stay focused at times, but surprisingly didn’t suffer from fatigue. Feels good! Makes me wonder what’s the (next) main bottleneck holding me back in my reading skills right now

Answer: Vocab. A lot of still unknown low-frequency words. I’d love to keep track using SRS sites, but I’m not very consistent at it yet. If only there was a quick and easy way to add known words without sorting through all of them (this is why I have no reliable number of how many words I know ). Some days I spend more time on SRS than reading, which kind of defeats the point in my opinion. Half an hour of reading and two hours on SRS? smh. At least for the stuff I read this summer, grammar was barely any issue at all.

Anyway, long summary xD Looking forward to the next challenge!

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1. according to Loopers book club people
   ↩︎

[pm215]

@Redglare

A lot of still unknown low-frequency words. I’d love to keep track using SRS sites, but I’m not very consistent at it yet. If only there was a quick and easy way to add known words without sorting through all of them (this is why I have no reliable number of how many words I know ).

Yeah, this is pretty awkward; I just went through this with jpdb.io. I was able to feed it my existing anki deck as a starter, but other than that the best method I found was just to get it to sort the vocab deck for the book I was reading by frequency-across-whole-corpus and then go through clicking ‘never forget’ as fast as possible for a big initial lump of words I already know. (Its UI is not as smooth as it could be for this process, sadly.) I also did the same for a “top 3000 words in the corpus” deck which you can get it to create.

Some days I spend more time on SRS than reading, which kind of defeats the point in my opinion.

Definitely!

[kimera]

End of Challenge!
(my calendar)

So how’d it go…

First off, the elephant-sized gap in the middle was when I purposely put my Japanese studying on hold for family shenanigans.

The good: Apart from that big ol’ gap, only missed 3 days. This challenge got me to at least pick up the book even if I was busy or didn’t feel like it. So success!

The not so good: Mid/late September I fell into a bad habit where right as I was about to go to bed I’d remember I hadn’t done any reading, say “okay just one page so I don’t break the streak” and then of course stay up too late and have trouble reading because I was so tired. Gotta work on fixing that for next month.

The books: vol 1 of Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle, started on vol 2. That’s about it but that’s fine. My goal was consistency not speed, some days I only read 1 page.

Plan for September:
Keep NOT counting pages, low pressure is good.
Set a mid-afternoon reminder (or maybe read during lunch).
vol 2 ch 1+2 (which will hopefully it’ll go faster if I’m reading during the day and not while half asleep) & Hunter x Hunter book club

Thanks to @windupbird for organizing this and to everyone else for the company and the accountability!

[lucylavelle]

September 3rd!

Today I read Chapter 4 of volume 2 of Yoru Cafe. No huge difficulty reading it this week, though as always it took me a very long time!

(Home Post)

[rikaiwisdom]

9月3日
A bit of ルーパーズ

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Didn’t update in a little while. Truth be told, I haven’t been reading a lot this week. I have an important wedding coming up and needed to allocate time for tedious appointments in preparation. I wasn’t too busy or anything but I tend to get tired easily with things I give little value to (shopping tends to be terribly tedious for me). So anyways, all my free time has gone to gaming lately, and mostly not in Japanese.

Official end of the challenge though, well done everyone . The weekly schedule ended up working much better for me than the two-month one. If only just for removing a little pressure it has been worth it, I liked starting a new week each Monday. I also preferred not having a calendar to check daily, and I got rid of the links to each day because I realised they serve no purpose to me. This has made me wonder if I want to log days at all, and on that note if I want to have a home post. I think I do like the home post, and it’s good to come back to the progress and see how much you’ve improved, so I think I’ll probably keep it but instead of tracking days, I might just log what I’ve been reading there. It’s still a fresh idea and I don’t know what I’ll end up doing but I might experiment.

My idea behind not tracking days is that, well, occasionally I plainly just don’t really want to study Japanese, or I have a day that I’m too tired, or I really need one or two days of rest to avoid burnout. While the daily commitment has made me study almost everyday, some of those days I only did something to check the box when I could have just rested and come again the next day. I think I’m starting to realise that I don’t want to force myself to do this everyday. Luckily I don’t have many days when I feel like not studying at all, so I think it would be manageable. This is especially relevant when I want to be doing this throughout the year, challenge after challenge. There is no way I can do that without taking breaks or taking care of responsibilities, and I don’t want to feel bad when I inevitably miss some days. So essentially, I think this is possibly the point where I say goodbye to the reading everyday challenge, and welcome the reading almost everyday challenge, which means that I’ll be using the thread just exactly the same but not update any calendar . Same thing, different approach, and hopefully no guilt whatsoever.

You’ll see me posting very frequently anyways, that won’t change . Just hoping that being more rested and less forced to do it daily can make my study days more productive and balance it out, and overall turn it into an even more positive experience. As I said, an experiment.

[enbyboiwonder]

Home

I was able to go the the flagship HPB today to use my bday coupon, and they had several of the 今日から㋮王！ novels (which I learned today is known as the まるマシリーズ), though it’s all random volumes so I wouldn’t be able to read them anyway. Maybe the 外伝 and 番外編 after I’ve watched some more of the anime and have more than a vague idea of who the characters are again.

I finished HQ vol 15 and read the first chapter of vol 16. I knew Karasuno faced off against Seijou in the semis, but I still wanted Datekou to win…

For some reason, even though I don’t like Oikawa very much, I do like him in Kidzu Natsuki’s iwaoi DJs (and I tend to like him in ushioi fics). Also I’m pretty sure Oikawa’s the reason I don’t like Seijou as much as I feel like I should.

Some vocab of note:

手玉に取る (てだまにとる) [expression, ラ五] to lead someone around by the nose
ぶっちゃけ [colloquialism, adv.] frankly; honestly speaking; to tell the truth; to put it bluntly. It comes from the verb ぶっちゃける “to speak one’s mind and hold nothing back.”
頭がきれる (あたまがきれる) [expression, 一] to be sharp; to be keen; to be on the ball; to have a mind like a steel trap; to be clever
諸刃の剣 (もろはのつるぎ) [expression, noun] double-edged sword
百も承知 (ひゃくもしょうち) [expression] knowing only too well; being fully aware of
苦肉の策 (くにくのさく) [expression, noun] last resort; desperate measure taken under the pressure of necessity. 苦肉 itself means “hurting oneself (to trick an adversary).”
意地でも (いじでも) [expression, adv.] at any cost; at any price; at any expense
殻を破る (からをやぶる) [expression, ラ五] to break up and start anew; to break out of one’s shell; to make a fresh start; to go outside oneself

[natarin]

September 3 Home Post

I managed a bit more 跡を消す reading time today, though I was still largely busy with other things. I’ve been enjoying it when I have the time though! Just figuring out schedules and such still haha

[ChristopherFritz]

Day 65: September 3rd

orange Volume 2 (74% ➨ 100%)

藤代さん系。 Volume 2 (51% ➨ 75%)

ご注文はうさぎですか？ Complete Blend Volume 1 (53% ➨ 57%)

スーパーマリオくん Volume 1 (43% ➨ 47%)

にじいろフォトグラフ Volume 1 (39% ➨ 52%)

Making some progress on the manga I usually don’t pick to continue reading.

[DIO-Berry]

Home

ジョジョの奇妙な冒険28

70 - 124

I got the JoJo All Star Battle game yesterday and the audio (mostly 1 liners) is all in Japanese. I’ve gone and changed my settings to Japanese too, which is pretty fun. It’s nice that I can read most of the sub menus (the top menus are in English I guess?). There’s also a ジョジョ辞典(じてん), which has some entries that I copied into my list of common words, stuff like 刑務所(けいむしょ) and 幽波紋(スタンド), although I should unlock more later.

As for my reading, I’m really into the climax and it’s intense. The fighting is awesome and incredible and also either very few words or almost text walls. It’s nice to see the characters’ thoughts in those moments, it comes across much better in the manga than anime I think, but it’s still cumbersome to read.

[Thud]

I had read some polar bear cafe again and it’s real comfy. Those are the moments I feel like I progressed a lot. Just gonna take my time with it.

More importantly is getting a new volume next week.

@DIO-Berry

幽波紋

Ahhh Hamon.

[DIO-Berry]

deep/hidden/ghost hamon becomes stands. Easy logic, right? helps me remember how to write it in kanji at least lol

[lucylavelle]

September 4th!

Today I read chapter 8 of Orange. A lot of stuff happened in this chapter so I’m really looking forward to starting Volume 3 now!
I’m not sure if I can quite consider volume 2 finished yet though, since it has an extra unrelated story at the end of the volume - I’m planning to read that tomorrow

(Home Post)

[Zakarius]

The Tanuki Falling Leaf Party: Date 20220904

吾輩は狸である progress: 16.31%

Chapter 2 complete!

Chapter one was great reading, it felt pretty modern and was an amusing, fun read. Chapter two - other than the hilarious zouni incident - felt a bit lacking, it’s been pretty much all dialogue about… not really that interesting of things. Think this may be a case of the topics being so rooted in the time period that they were written - so, so much of it just goes over my head.

Sōseki had only intended to write the first chapter as a stand alone at first, and it does show really, at least with chapter two. But chapter three is back to Wagahai-cat pondering if he is actually more than a cat and on par, or above, his humans. So hopefully chapter three will be a return to amusing cat shenanigans (that starting sentence though )

Japanese found within the acorns

Meowords

火消壺「ひけしつぼ」ー Charcoal extinguisher
戒名「かいみょう」ー Posthumous name (Buddhism); Dharma name
果報者「かほうもの」ー Lucky person
肖像「しょうぞう」ー Portrait; likeness; picture
吉備団子「きびだんご」ー Dumpling made with mochi/millet flour (from Okayama)

[pm215]

@Zakarius

Chapter one was great reading, it felt pretty modern and was an amusing, fun read. Chapter two - other than the hilarious zouni incident - felt a bit lacking, it’s been pretty much all dialogue about… not really that interesting of things. Think this may be a case of the topics being so rooted in the time period that they were written - so, so much of it just goes over my head.

It seems pretty clear to me that it takes Soseki a while to figure out what he wants to do with the setting, but (having got about halfway through the book) I think he kind of settles in to mostly poking fun at humans with the occasional more cat-focused scene.

Personally I like the conversational parts too, because I find the period and setting interesting. Japan had opened up to the West only a few decades earlier, and rushed into a headlong desperate effort to ‘modernize’ and ‘catch up’, including on the intellectual side, with the establishment of universities. And universities means university graduates, who can then sit around trying to impress each other with writing haiku, doing amateur dramatics, making offhand references to the last king of Rome and so on. (Some of it feels like a turned-up-to-11 version of the kind of idle conversation I might have had with university friends.) There’s also a bit of arts-vs-sciences subthread – as a Japanese university graduate in physics you could do genuinely internationally recognized work; as a graduate in English lit you could … become a lazy overeducated English teacher? (Sanshiro is a bit more explicit about that idea.)

I do strongly suspect that the humour suffers from working through it at second-language-learner pace. At least for me I have to work at getting through ten pages of this, so what for the original audience was a light-hearted bit of back-and-forth banter becomes a hard graft split over several days’ reading.

[omk3]

September 4

Tugumi, chapter 7
Grammar :あと、あとから、あとで、あとは…だけ、あまり、あらためる

Finished chapter 7 of Tugumi, and I’m now one week ahead of the club. I enjoyed most of it - Yoshimoto’s writing is almost like poetry, in that it conjures up images from my own memory, and feelings I remember having felt, even as she’s describing very specific events in a very specific person’s life that should have nothing to do with me. What I didn’t enjoy was a rather large chunk of dialogue that had me almost completely lost. I always found Tugumi’s way of speaking hard to understand, and this time she talked a lot about rather abstract things, and I feel like I understood next to nothing. Why is dialogue still so hard for me?

On the grammar front, I read everything about all the various grammar patterns starting with あと, あまり and あらためる. Nothing especially new there, but some of the example sentences were quite hard.

[DIO-Berry]

Home

ジョジョの奇妙な冒険28

125 - 150

I started reading too late in the day. The nice thing though was

ROADROLLER

I really hope I finish this volume today, I meant to finish it yesterday

[enbyboiwonder]

Home

Since it’s just the bottom trim that still needs more paint, I started moving books back onto my shelf (although so far it’s 99% ones that have never been on it in the first place lol), so here are several of my JP novels, including my new ones from yesterday, just sitting there looking pretty:

I can’t wait to get more. (Seriously, I’m like this close to buying all of Asano Atsuko’s baseball novels, and there are like 15 of them, as well as あと少し、もう少し, which is a novel about running.)

This also means I’ll be having more books to take to HPB soon. Those ENG manga I’d decided to keep until I get them in JP? Yeah, I’m selling them. And I have several others I’ll have to make a decision about whether I’ll be collecting them only in ENG, only in JP, or both. It’ll still be a bit though, since of course they’re in the bottom box (of four).

Today I read the preview of あやかし怪盗, and I also finished HQ vol 16 and read 5 chapters of vol 17 to finish the match. Wanted to finish this vol too, but I’m too tired. (Also, then I’d be in the middle of the Shiratorizawa match. At least here, it’s not difficult to put down, relatively speaking.)

Yamaguchi must talk about Tsukishima when he trains with Makoto, because Makoto just called him Tsukki in ch 140. lol, oh, Tsukishima would hate that if he ever found out.

asdfghjkl Oikawa’s like, “Sawayaka-kun isn’t refreshing at all! Who the hell gave him that name! It was me!” Anyway I love getting to see Suga stand on the court ♡

Take-chan’s reaction to Ukai-kun genuinely thanking him, and then his “You can praise me to your heart’s content once we win tomorrow” aaaaa

Some vocab of note:

夜な夜な (よなよな) [adverb] every evening; night after night
眷族 (けんぞく) [noun] follower; retainer; underling
拮抗 (きっこう) [noun, する verb (自)] rivalry (between two equally strong sides); struggle for supremacy; competing (with); vying (with); contending (with); being an equal match (for)
反抗期 (はんこうき) [noun] rebellious phase
大概にする (たいがいにする) [expression, する verb] to stay within bounds; to not take (something) to extremes; to not get carried away; to not go too far
宣戦布告 (せんせんふこく) [noun, する verb] declaration of war
取るに足らない (とるにたらない) [expression, い-adj.] insignificant; inconsequential; trifling; negligible; of little importance
爆睡 (ばくすい) [colloquialism, noun, の adj., する verb (自)] sleeping like a log; (being) fast asleep (bombed, crashed)
存分に (ぞんぶんに) [adverb] to one’s heart’s content; as much as one likes; freely; unreservedly; fully
タメ [colloquialism, noun] the same (age, social status); peer

[natarin]

September 4 Home Post

I continue to barely hang on to consistency just barely managed a little 跡を消す at the last minute before bed, now I’m off haha.

[WaniTsunami]

Where the Fall Challenge at? I’m ready like Mom’s spaghetti!

CORRECTION I thought we were in Fall. T-T

I haven’t been posting because I thought this was finished!