📚📚 Read every day challenge - Summer 2022 🏖 ☀

These are all great suggestions! I’ve been meaning to read ふらいんぐうぃっち in particular. I’m thinking I’d like to build myself a little library of physical manga to inspire me, so I guess it’s time to create an Amazon Japan account. Thanks for your input on this!

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I mostly stuck to reading stuff I was already familiar with regardless of difficulty. My first manga was Haikyuu. A few months of reading that series, I joined the 氷菓 (Hyouka) book club. Then I decided to read the Sword Art Online light novels, even though I was told it is around the N2 level (or partly because of it even, 'cuz I wanted to git gud - lots of struggle and perseverance, but definitely worth it for me).

So my recommendation is “read something you’re interested in”. Joining a book club is also a good idea. If you’re going to read something you’re not familiar with, I’d at the very least advise against picking mysteries (like Hyouka) because the language barrier going on is quite puzzling already.

Random snippet of one of my bookshelves on bookmeter

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This is good advice; I do find myself rejecting some recommendations just because I can’t imagine being interested past the first few pages. I really wish there were a bookstore with a good Japanese section in my city so I could browse (I need to become a member of my Japanese cultural centre, which looks like it has a good library!)

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If you don’t mind browsing things you’d have to import (if you want them physical), digital manga store sites such as BookWalker have a button marked 「試し読み」 on the book pages where you can often view the first chapter of a manga or novel. Some series have a very short preview (10 pages) and some have a long preview (50 pages).

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Really enjoying the time tracking feature on Natively so far :slight_smile:
As expected, my speed went up quite a bit after the first chapter of 告白, cruising altitude seems to be about 35 pages per hour.

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June 6th!

Chapter 80 of Yotsuba today. It was Halloween, so obviously Yotsuba was ridiculously adorable :blush:
The next 2 chapters are a 2 chapter story arc so I’d really like to try to read them together but that would mean reading about 90 pages in one go :smiley: I definitely have enough reading stamina to do that now, but I might have to save it for the weekend to have enough time!

(Home Post)

@Daisoujou HUGE congrats on finishing Summer Pockets, what a great achievement! Would you recommend it as a first VN to read in Japanese? I’m hoping to start one in the near-ish future.

@MarnieDEB A few things that I would rate as a good step up from よつば from my experience are:

  • からかい上手の高木さん
  • レンタルおにいちゃん
  • 三ツ星カラーズ
  • ふしぎねこのきゅーちゃん
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Great suggestions; thank you! I am making a list.

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Home post :bookmark: July 6th :beach_umbrella:

・詩的私的ジャック - JACK THE POETICAL PRIVATE (49% → 54%)

I finished chapter 6. (What happened with the “let’s pace ourselves” strategy? Seems like it doesn’t work for me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

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:sparkles: HOME POST :sparkles: || Mon 4th - Wed 6th July

Starting off with a variety this week!

Mon 4th - NHK Easy News

I read an article about the four day long interruption of au’s phone/internet services. The first paragraph took me a solid three reads to parse because I wasn’t sure what 宅配便 was (in hindsight, duh) and it knocked my confidence, but the rest of the article was surprisingly a breeze.

The comment from the 50 year old man waiting in front of the Tokyo store regarding how inconvenient the situation was and how he would be considering switching to another company if the outages lasted any longer got a laugh out of me. It’s somewhat comforting to see that the language of customer dissatisfaction is universal.

Tue 5th - 5分後に意外な結末 「バス停」

Yesterday I was stuck on trains between London and Leicester so I took along this book, a collection of short stories that are meant to have surprising endings, and a book that is indisputably above my current reading level. I read the first short story -「バス停」- which took me around 45 minutes. About two pages in I had the bright idea that this could be a good book to document my N3-N2 progress. So, on the last page I jotted some pencil notes down of my understanding of the narrative and I’m going to do that for each short story, then, after N3 I can read them all again and write a new summary, and the same after N2.

I did understand the characters - a new bus driver covering a route between a small mountain village and the main town, and an old lady who used the bus regularly for visiting town for shopping. She then seems to go missing and it’s mentioned that it seems like she could have died. Later the bus driver meets an elderly man who claims that after he hurt his leg the old lady was doing his shopping for him, hence her catching the bus. Then I’m not really clear on the stretch from this conversation to the end as it seems like a small period of time might pass - at the end there’s a description of the old man alighting from the bus and his body just disappearing into thin air (I think). So I’m not sure if the elderly woman and man were ghosts all along and that’s the surprise? The woman was described as having a demon like face at one point in a bumpy journey.

Anyway, I could be entirely off the mark in my comprehension and I can’t wait to re-read later in the year and laugh at myself. :sweat_smile:

Wed 6th - よつばと! Vol.2, Ch.8

Well look who’s finally starting Vol.2 of よつばと!after saying she was going to do it during the Winter challenge.

It was great to read this after yesterday’s headache. :sweat_smile: I loved Ena’s attempt at diffusing the mood after Miura told Yotsuba she was bad at drawing in this chapter, that whole scene was wonderfully comedic.

Think I’m going to stick to よつばと! for the next two days and maybe try another of the 5分後に意外な結末 short stories at the weekend. :thinking:

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July 6th - Day 01 - Home

Starting to read 天気の図鑑. I already read a few stories at the start, but it has been a while, so I will restart.


Forewords & Characters Intro - Done
Chapter 1 - 雲のはなし - Progress 2 (+2) / 21

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Since there were quite a few, thank you so much to everyone for the congratulations! Feeling good about what I’ve done and very happy to have you all here supporting :heart:

Summer Pockets as a first VN

Hmm, it’s got a lot of good points, but it’s hard to recommend for a few reasons.

One is simply the length, as you might have noticed, haha. I’d think most people would be best served starting with a short-ish VN, but I had a particular desire to read it. It’s a lot, but I suppose that’s already clear. The biggest downside is accessibility in getting it at all – if you buy it, it’s really expensive (something like 9000yen) and it’s also unusually hostile to players outside Japan. Like it checks your system time and everything. I found a means to bypass that but talking too specifically about getting around DRM might skirt a line on WK without taking it offsite? Fuck DRM though, heh.

That said! I think it’s a great read, it’s written at a level that I found good for my first (well other than Ace Attorney), and it plays great with the texthooker. Plus it’s nice that it’s a very modern one, above average in technical polish and the like. I’m running up against small irritations from Flowers in resolution and all that now, heh.

Home post

It’s Flowers time. Specifically, the spring (each of the four entries is based on a season). I continue to read things that are seasonal, and at the wrong time.

Content first impressions: I dig it. Lovely art, and I like the quiet, fragile, contemplative tone so far. It’s a solid contrast to Summer Pockets which had a totally energetic, outgoing vibe. Most of what I read was a girl stuck inside her head, beating herself up, and commenting on how pretty the girls around her are, haha. It was a nice prologue, but I didn’t move too much further, reading only a bit over 3000 characters, because…

Writing first impressions: Definitely feeling the challenge of starting something new. I’m also pretty sure this game’s writing is simply harder. They love kanji for words that don’t usually have it (筈 はず has a kanji, huh? and 為る as なる, all sorts of things I’ve never seen). The Catholic school slice of vocab teaching me words like 磔 (はりつけ, crucifixion) might not be immediately useful and certainly isn’t anything I’ve come across yet haha. But more than anything it’s just that sentences are a little denser than what I’ve been reading. Gotta brace myself for the のように, because we are making non-literal comparisons to everything all of the time.

You’re gonna put じっと in kanji like that?

I read slowly in part because I had to look up words in almost every sentence, but also just because I made myself slow down a little to make sure I was soaking it all up. The writing seems really nice and… flowery ( :wink: ), and often the difficulty is just making sure I can hold the whole sentence in my head, even when I definitely understand all of its parts. For example, lines like this are common:

美しい波となった歌声は春の陽を受けて輝くステンドグラスに反射し、緊張のためこわ張り着席している私たち新入生へと届いた。

You ask me, that’s a lot of information piled in there. To put a final pin in that point, a few lines in they hit me with another new N1 grammar point (たら最後, sort of an “if you do… negative result”). I expect to see a lot more of that stuff. Overall though, it’s a challenge, but I don’t feel too bad about it. I’m pretty confident I can comprehend and learn from this. My reading pace has taken a hard reset, but prior to Summer Pockets I have serious doubts about if I could’ve read this at all. I remain excited to continue.

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I’ve noticed this is a thing where they’re trying to give an old-timey or extra-formal-for-kicks vibe. It kind of makes sense given I mostly come across those in very old texts.

emphatic nod

It took me a few passes to take all that in, oof. Very ‘flowery’ language as you said.

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I have heard that Hatsumi (the author) does love to use a lot of unique kanji. She is kind of famous in some language learning communities for her use of very long noun-phrases/sentences overall as well but hopefully it gets easier as you read more. The start of something new always tends to be the hardest!

As for my own reading update, I finally finished the 生命のスペア VN after reading it every day for the past 6 weeks or so. It was the first jp VN I completed in full. It was a decent step up in difficulty compared to the manga/game scenarios I read prior but overall reading it wasn’t too bad. I think the story kind of dragged because I started to get really bored of it by the second half.
Hard to tell if the game itself was dragging on or if it is just because my jp reading speed is really slow. It was a game I was interested in initially though so I am glad I was able to read it! Since the VN club is starting soon, I’ll probably use this next week to read some manga while I wait. I had put all the manga I was reading on hold while I was doing the VN (I usually only focus on reading one thing at a time), so it’ll be good to catch up on that stuff.

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Home post

REDC
Week 2

July 6
Final Fantasy 7 → 30 min.

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:green_heart: Home :green_heart:

ジョジョの奇妙な冒険18

142 - 151

Last night I got so caught up in figuring out logistics that I looked up and it was already time for bed. I had really wanted to finish off this volume but I didn’t have time. :disappointed: I’ll definitely finish it tonight though. I only have 30-40 pages left.

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I always thought people just liked having their home posts linked to their current posts so people reading their current posts can refer to it when they liked. :woman_shrugging:t5: Well, I just bookmark my home post so when I open the forum to the home page, I click my profile icon and pick my latest bookmark.

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Oh that’s smart. I’m going to use bookmarking to find my previous day more easily now

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thank you all for the many replies as to why we link our home threads ^^ i wasn’t expecting that many answers! i’d started doing it because it seemed like everybody (well, many people) were doing it. i like the “so that others can consult the home thread and figure out what the heck i’m going on about” reason most :smiley:

that said: home! :wink:

i’m on page 94 now, solid progress. pretty sure mu confusion yesterday was indeed because they were talking about hypothetical situations.

Saeki and Touko are slowly getting closer. Saeki is totally in love with Touko, and doesn’t yet know about Touko’s policy to reject all confessions. and Touko is presenting a perfect and impenetrable facade. but Saeki is Touko’s closest companion, and would like to get a bit closer i think. it’s a complicated dance.

it’s kind of strange reading this while knowing what the outcome will be: in a year’s time they will be close friends, student council president and vice-president, number 1 and 2 of the year by grades, the perfect power-couple. except not a couple. Saeki will still be in love with Touko, and Touko will fall in love with Koito… in a way, there’s a lack of dramatic tension. on the other hand, there’s this careful dance of building friendship and trust…

mostly was okay with comprehension today. at one point a new section started, and i thought they’d timeskipped a year (we’re actually a year behind the point where the book starts currently), because the scene was so similar to one from the manga. but figured it out soon enough. and then there was that column of text, 22 kanji, not a single kana, that made me gulp :sweat_smile:

ahh, and i signed up on natively, and listed everything i’ve read so far. i like how it shows me the relative difficulty of what i’ve read :slight_smile:

and i’m thinking of taking a breather from やが君 at the end of this part. want to read something easier to relax my brain a bit, thinking about 隣の吸血鬼さん. i really enjoyed the anime for this, it’s cute and wholesome, i ought to enjoy it ^^

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:house:Home Post

Day 5

カリスタルハンータズ :dagger::gear::bow_and_arrow::sparkles::unicorn::facepunch:t2:

Progress - [|||||||79%] Read about halfway through chapter 3 because it’s looong and the last one in this volume!

New words/vocab :face_with_monocle:

なったよ (to become/it became)

I’ve had this manga for a while, but didn’t have the motivation to actually sit down and READ. Thankful for this challenge :heart: and all of you!

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I continue to be lower energy than usual, although I’m making efforts to cut out the things that are draining time and not bringing me any happiness in return. Such is life - always fine tuning!

As I was lower energy I read more 本好き, because it is a simpler read than 硝子の塔の殺人, although I do want to know the ending there. As expected this is a faster read, although the fantasy vocabulary is throwing some new words at me. The writing style is also not at all what I’m used to, but I don’t mind it. It reminds me of books I read as a kid, with the protagonist’s adventurous spirit and single minded goal. It’s cute.

edit: keep forgetting to say that I did complete my grammar point for the day!

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