📚📚 Read every day challenge - Summer 2022 🏖 ☀

7月25日 (月)

It’s been four days, since I last posted, but I’ve been constantly reading and rereading the stories of the Lvl 0 graded reader free PDF. I am especially proud of myself, as I was on a short vacation (there was a music festival 600km from my home town). Every night in the hotel room I grabbed my smartphone e and read a story, and now on the Trai back I’m reporting my progress here. Much more difficult to do on a smartphone, but the key is constancy, so here we go. I’ll write about the stories in more detail once I am back home :slight_smile:

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Last weekend there was a music festival in my town (Karlsruhe) - maybe we went to the same one? :eyes:

Wow! You rock :+1:

During the festival, I occasionally took the opportunity to chill and read at the lake shore while listening to the band playing on the smaller stage across the lake :beach_umbrella: That was nice too!

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Thanks :blush:

Mine was in Köln (the Amphi Festival), so unfortunately not. Hope you had a great time at yours? We had a great time, though there could have been a little less sun and a little more Wind :hot_face:

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Yeah, I figured as much. Heck, most fic is like that, although a lot of English-language archives at least are making their way over to AO3. There’s some JP fic on AO3 too, so I’ll start there, and if I don’t manage to find any of the JP-language archives (which, I have zero confidence in my ability to do so), then that’s where I’ll stay lol

I have a few manga DJs, but I didn’t know about fic ones! I’ll have to check out those sites later. Before, I only knew about Otaku Republic, sister site of Manga Republic which can be just as expensive.

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:books: :video_game: :shallow_pan_of_food: :sunny: July 23

Played バリバリ for about half an hour.

:books: :video_game: :shallow_pan_of_food: :sunny: July 24

Read a few paragraphs of ビブリア before falling asleep after lunch and then at night I lasted about 10 minutes reading バリバリ before falling asleep… I really need to sleep better.
At least things should go back to normal after the weekend.

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Main Post

Finished reading through Nagatoro vol 2 and Yoru Cafe vol 2 yesterday. It was pretty good, also good contrast as Nagatoro doesn’t take up much of my time each day so I read two chapters when I feel like it. Whereas Yoru Cafe a chapter usually takes me around a hour or so to read, except for the shorter ones. It is pretty light reading, but I still gain plenty from it. Yoru Cafe 2 is also on koohi and of the 300 cards I generated each time I would have like 50 new words/expressions. A lot of these are unique words, but I just add words I don’t know or that might feel handy to know. There’s also some that are not that useful and I ignore them.

What I like about Yoru Cafe is that you can smell the teen drama coming, but the characters do get better out of it. The addition of Ryoma makes for a fun dynamic and I feel it ends on a positive and warm note. Throughout the volume there’s gentle reminders of what happened last time, which books have the room for.

I’ll be reading volume 3 of Nagatoro and Yoru Cafe starting today. After that I’m not quite sure what manga I’ll grab onto next, but I do know I’ll be reading Zenitendo again after Yoru Cafe. Almost forgot to mention, I managed to reach my initial goal of reading 5 books this year. I’m gonna try stretching it to 10 books. Manga wise I’m on my 30th volume, which is how much I had last year. So I feel like I’m making good progress there. I have played some Persona 4 Golden since, still doing some free time until the story picks up again there.

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Would have been really funny, though! :joy_cat:

Same here :sunny: Although I would have preferred some occasional light rain to wind - the festival was in a usually grassy area but you can probably imagine what happened to the grass in the last few weeks… The announcer called the festival “Germany’s largest dust cloud” :grin:

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I’m glad I could tell you of their existence :smiley:

Good luck with Ao3 and hope that Pixiv has something for you. Happy fic browsing!

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:tiger2: :books: The Tanuki Beach Resort: Date 20220725 :beach_umbrella: :raccoon:

Tanuki Scroll of 桜島大根 :onion:

Random article - Sakurajima Daikon! King of all radishes, it is the certified biggest variety of radish in the world!

Thought I’d translated something wrong, but no, these things can reach about 30kg and 50cm diameter. That’s a whole lot of radish. You could hollow them out and use them as little pods to sit in :laughing:

There is also a 世界一桜島大根コンテスト where big radishes compete to be the biggest radish ever, the biggest was 31.25kg. Super-daikon.

:beach_umbrella: Japanese found in the sand :beach_umbrella:

Learnthings

No new words today :frowning_face:

But who needs new words when you’ve got a whole load of daikon.

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Today: p. 88-97 of よつばと!.

Today I made use of that thread (よつばと!Vol 1 Discussion Thread (Beginner's Book Club)) when I got stumped along the way; the discussion of 適当に (てきとうに) to mean “make yourself comfortable” (p. 96, slightly different from p. 88) was particularly useful! So thanks for guiding me there.

New stuff

地球温暖化 (ちきゅうおんだんか): global warming
パチ: popping, blinking open
ムク: abruptly rising
置く (おく): to leave behind
意外 (いがい): unexpected, surprising
出てこい (でてこい): come out here!
ひょいと: suddenly, lightly, nimbly
一言 (ひとこと): a few words
効く (きく): to work, to function
冷え性 (ひえしょう): sensitivity to cold

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Oh - that explains a lot! When I visited Sakurajima, I saw a few signs all over showing radishes, but I couldn’t make heads nor tails of them. :face_with_monocle:

Also, Sakurajima (the volcano) broke out over the weekend, in case you are looking for some listening practice through news coverage…

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Again? I’m sure last time that Sakurajima came up in my reading searches it had only just erupted! Thanks for the heads up, I’ll go search for it for tomorrow’s listening. :volcano:

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Yeah, it’s one of Japan’s most active volcanoes. But those “eruptions” vary a lot in intensity. When I was there, almost every day smoke/ashes would come out, and that was also counted as eruption already. It’s a bit annoying, as these ashes cover everything in the area, even in Kagoshima, and they contain tiny but very sharp grains that grate on the cars’ windscreens and such.
But over the weekend, lava flowed down the side, and stones were spit out and landed as far as about 2.5 km from the crater. Now I understand why the island has shelters all over the place, and why the schoolchildren go to school wearing a helmet every day.

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:sunny: :beach_umbrella: Memoria’s Summer Readin’ :beach: :sunny:

Day 25:

I’ve played Zero Escape for about an hour after work today! I’m finally meeting some new characters. Looooove the premise so far. I’ve been able to live with the weird katakana issue, so I’ll see how it goes from here. I guess my only technical issue now is that Textractor isn’t picking up on anything when the game is in Novel mode… I should probably try to find another hook, but I’m scared I’ll mess it up again if I do :sob: I’ve got tomorrow off, so maybe I’ll play around with it… Novel mode seems important for getting full context.

:melting_face: :melting_face: :melting_face: I didn’t realize… that the English localization changed the solution for the code :melting_face: :melting_face: :melting_face: My brain is too tired for puzzle solving these days. I want plot and story! So I looked up a walkthrough and didn’t realize I would need one specifically for the JP version. Lesson learned, I guess… At least I was finally able to proceed! :confetti_ball:

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Home post :bookmark: July 25th :sunny:

・ わたしの幸せな結婚 4 (0% → 12%)

I did a tiny read.

Then I downloaded Steam on my new laptop and played a video game for four hours. Didn’t think it was actually going to work, this laptop is more powerful than I thought.

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I’ve been a bit dropped out of here because I needed a bit of a break for my health, but I’ve been reading Flowers more when I can and it’s… nice? Pretty good reading experience, but I hit the first of the mysteries and I can’t even begin to make sense of this.

Spoilers mostly so I can talk to AzusaChan haha

@AzusaChan So uhh, were you able to solve this? I’m not sure what kind of changes they had to make for this to work in English but it seems it’s about flower symbolism based on the girls’ names? 花言葉, which I just now learned is a concept that exists hahaha. Maybe if I was a native Japanese speaker it would occur to me to link these names to being similar to flowers, dunno. They’re not actually the same, like 花菱 is most of 花菱草 so… I sure don’t know those words heh. Unless I missed something in the reading you’re prompted with almost nothing at all, just given book titles then asked “alright, what’s this new girl’s name?” Reminds me of Silent Hill 3’s maxed riddle difficulty where you had to have extensive knowledge of the details of Shakespeare works and other stuff, haha. But also in a foreign language. I guess I might be using a guide more, heh. :face_with_spiral_eyes:

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Flowers spoilers

The flower language is a very important part of the series, especially when it comes to a certain character! I wasn’t too familiar with it either until I read the series haha.

The first mystery is about Erika and the books, right? Been a while since I played game one, I just remember the final solution had something to do with Wuthering Heights in English lol. But as far as being able to solve it, game 1 is kind of notorious for having overly complicated mysteries that no one can really solve. The other 3 games are definitely doable based on what you know but game 1 kind of overdoes it in the difficulty imo. For me, the mysteries are kind of a weak point in the series. The characters interactions were definitely my favorite part, especially after Suoh develops more. The first few chapters of game 1 is a pain for some people to read but definitely worth it for the pay off.

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Flowers spoilers

Oh yeah, sorry, the first one is figuring out Erika’s name from the pile of books. Each book corresponding to one of the main characters, with Wuthering Heights linking to hers. Currently in the midst of trying to read this big explanation about flower symbolism codes and dying a little hahaha. To be fair I’m sure it’s not helping me to solve mysteries that my brain is still being taxed by the language itself. Pretty sure I remember one of those lists of starter VNs saying you could read Flowers as a first VN which seems absolutely ridiculous to me. I’ve intentionally avoided things I know are hard but this is easily the hardest thing I’ve tried to read yet.

Reading explanations on the Steam forums like “The third book was The Life of Judas. This book is related to Suoh through the Genus of the Chinese Redbud. Suoh’s name stems from the Chinese Redbud, which is Hanazuou in Japanese. The Chinese Redbud is in the same Genus as the European Redbud Tree, which has another name, which is the Judas Tree” practically sounds like a parody of moon logic puzzles to me.

All the same, just wanted your perspective on the riddles. Thought they’d be a fun little bonus but if I have to look them up for this game, that’s fine. I haven’t gotten too much Erika yet, but I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen, for what it’s worth. Ready to see her interacting outside of the context of this puzzle that makes me feel dumb :melting_face:

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Flowers spoilers

I’ve seen Flowers listed as a starter VN on a lot of lists too and it’s always confused me too. I haven’t read it in jp yet but everything I hear about it makes it seem pretty complicated. The author loves to use a lot of obscure kanji and has really long sentences. I think the game is filled with 敬語 too? It is an all-girls “prestigious” school after all haha.

The explanation for the mystery does sound pretty intense. I think that one might be the “hardest” in the whole series, so at least it should get a little better? :joy:

Erika is a pretty fun character! She seems to be a fan favorite from everyone I’ve talked to. I’ll be interested in seeing who your favorites are by the end, mine changed a ton after I finished each volume.

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Today I finished two chapters in Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind for Nintendo Switch. The japanese is pretty easy to understand and there is lots of Furigana which is pretty rare for video games. Next I read 3 pages in the Kanzen Master Reading N2 book and got 2 of 3 answers right even though I probably understood half of the things written in the text. But no biggie I just need to study harder. Last 1 page of Short Stories in Japanese: New Penguin Parallel Text.

Sure but it will probably take me one week to finish the game. I will need to rush it because I want to play Xenoblade Chronicles 3 once it’s released.

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