📚📚 Read every day challenge - Summer 2022 🏖 ☀

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ジョジョの奇妙な冒険22

53 - 63

I reread a bit like I mentioned yesterday. I had a bit of a mental block yesterday and just had problems getting myself started on tasks after work (work was pretty productive). Hopefully I won’t hit that again today, but we’ll see how it is after I try to clear my reviews

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Wow, such high praise! And from a former teacher and librarian! Thank you so much :blush:
We’ll keep doing our absolute best to keep the story quality as high as possible :muscle:

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:spiral_calendar: Day 29: July 29th :whale: :shark:

spacer:stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes: からかい上手の高木さん Volume 7 (67% ➨ 77%)

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:tiger2: :books: The Tanuki Beach Resort: Date 20220730 :beach_umbrella: :raccoon:

Tanuki Scroll of BMW・K100 :motorcycle:

Random article - about a motorbike from the 80s-90s.

Reading car/bike specs is hard enough in English with all the big, cool sounding words for all the parts, Japanese supercharges that so much katakana

:beach_umbrella: Japanese found in the sand :beach_umbrella:

Motörwörds

排気量「はいきりょう」ー Engine displacement
気筒「きとう」ー Cylinder
空冷「くうれい」ー Air-cooled
水冷「すいれい」ー Water-cooled
電子制御「でんしせいぎょ」ー Electronically controlled
燃料噴射「ねんりょうふんしゃ」ー Fuel injection
クラッチ ー Clutch
騒音「そうおん」ー Noise pollution

Bike Classes
自動二輪車「じどうにりんしゃ」 ー Motorbike

Though this is more of a term for Japanese traffic laws, and is a vehicle class. For two-wheeled vehicles there are the following classes:

原動機付自転車「げんどうきつきじてんしゃ」- Motorbikes under 50cc (Basically just mopeds)
小型自動二輪車「こがたじどうにりんしゃ」ー Motorbikes in the 50cc - 125cc range
自動二輪車「じどうにりんしゃ」ー Motorbikes in the 50cc - 400cc range
大型自動二輪車「おおがたじどうにりんしゃ」ー Motorbikes above 400cc (aka supernyoom)

But confusingly, in the wiki article the bike is 987cc and is referred to as 自動二輪車 :person_shrugging:


Reply

I’ve not seen 天の川 before, so this is all great to know!
Thank you!

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Today: p. 127-131 of よつば&! These pages were bewildering until I realized that I was mixing up Fuuka and Yotsuba’s dad; somehow they look similar to me, and so for the first bit I thought that Jumbo was yelling random accusations at Fuuka, which was funny but very confusing. Once I sorted that out it made a lot more sense, although the “there’s a beautiful teenage girl in your house so you must be doing something inappropriate with her” joke is…well, I’m never a fan. Still, there was plenty of nice new vocab here.

New stuff

渡す (わたす): to transfer, to hand over
でかい: huge
うわ: yikes
犯罪者 (はんさいしゃ): criminal
未確認 (みかくにん): unidentified, unconfirmed
未確認飛行物体 (みかくにんひこうぶったい): UFO
発見 (はっけん): discovery
落ち着ける (おちつける): to calm down
手前 (てめえ): you (rough, masculine)
なんだとお: what the hell?
やるか: let’s do this

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July 30th!

Today I read Chapter 3 and 4 of Shadows House. I practised using the literary form with my tutor yesterday, so I was really excited to see it turn up in Chapter 3 on some pages from an instruction manual :slight_smile:

I also read the next chapter of Mitsuboshi Colors. It was a fun, zany chapter with cute outfits!

(Home Post)

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Day 29 :heavy_check_mark: :crab: :

化身 ~ a page or so

Day 30 :heavy_check_mark: :crab: :

化身 ~ 12-17%

Yesterday I left my reading till late again, and it shows :joy: Today went better though. I’ll put my content comments in spoiler tags in case someone else wants to read it, but I’ll say here that, for a horror story, it still hasn’t creeped me out at all. In fact, the narrator has adjusted so well to his environment, that when he started devising a way to escape the lake I was surprised he even wanted to. :rofl: The title is beginning to make sense: It’s been years since he fell in that lake, and he’s adjusting …biologically so to speak. I’ll not spoil too much, but he’s gradually turning into something not exactly human. The feeling so far is very relaxed however, it all feels, somehow, right. I’m about halfway through the story though, so there’s definitely more in store.

I’ve encountered many interesting words and expressions so far. I’ll list some below:

用を足す - to do one’s business (as in, to go to the toilet)
板挟み - to be stuck between a rock and a hard place, being in a dilemma
片膝を突く - to kneel down on one knee
根比べ - test of endurance
選り好み - to be fastidious, particular about something
歯を食いしばる - to clench one’s teeth, to bear up in tragedy
脳裏をよぎる - to cross one’s mind
腹を括る - to prepare oneself for the worst
毛むくじゃら - densely covered in thick hair
踊り食い - eating live seafood while it still moves
試行錯誤 - trial and error
軍配を上げる - to declare someone the winner (from the referee raising his fan towards the winner in Sumo)
なすすべもない - having no choice, at a loss for what to do

And a proverb:
郷に入っては郷に従え - When in Rome, do as the Romans do

I also learned about 絵馬, literally horse pictures, small wooden plaques with written prayers or wishes, left hanging at shrines by worshippers. [1]

In other news, the Tugumi book club has started, but seeing as I have trouble keeping up with my own book, I’ve been neglecting another book started ages ago, and the mystery book club is starting in about a week, I thought I’d better not add even more reading to my schedule for now. Tugumi will have to wait. :slightly_frowning_face:


  1. image ↩︎

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Today I read quite a bit across the board, finished the first chapter of TUGUMI, finished orange vol. 1 and started this week’s reading of Kafka.


Awww, that’s a pity that you’re not reading with us! I found the first chapter to be very nice and promising. You need to read it later on for sure! (Unless I later change my mind about it, of course)

On an unrelated note, in the listening challenge @lucylavelle pointed me to the 博多豚骨ラーメンズ anime which I totally love :heart_eyes_cat: It’s about Hakata, hitmen and sigh baseball. But even better than the anime is the fact that there is a book series! To my utter surprise it’s not even called “Light Novel”, and to my even greater surprise it has won a prize (which is aimed at Light Novels :woman_shrugging:). And even better than this is the fact that the series is currently discounted on Bookwalker :grin: So of course I couldn’t resist, bought the first volume and read the prologue, which describes the background of one of the main characters, and all of a sudden everything makes so much more sense :woman_facepalming: I’m stupid like that.

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Oh stop, now you’re making me want to go read it at once! And I’ll enjoy it too, and then I’ll almost go crazy when I don’t have time to keep up with all my real and made-up deadlines. why do summers make it so difficult to keep to a schedule?

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:grin:

To be fair, I will skip the mystery club for the exact same reason - too many book clubs and other books to read. My secret plan to conquer this is to learn to read faster :joy_cat:

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Today I just managed to read 1 page of the Shin Kanzen Master Reading N2 book.

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Home post :bookmark: July 30th :beach_umbrella:

・ わたしの幸せな結婚 5 (17% → 34%)

Hn? I somehow read the same amount as yesterday. I’m going to try finishing this book by the end of tomorrow. Dekiru kashira. A super nyoom is required, but I think it’ll be daijoubu. Today was a super sunny day, so I’m all good. Might need extra coffee, just in case.

Book/plot thoughts: Turns out cult leader is one step ahead of army people. At this rate, they’ll convince the common people that they’ll want to have abilities too and that the army are evil. Army people thought no information of importance would leak to the public, but now it might be too late to clean up the mess. Did I mention in the last update that the emperor was kidnapped? 行方不明. So now the crown prince’s plan is to have him and Miyo stay at the palace to strengthen defense. This move might lead to 背水の陣. But hopefully no more kidnapping. Arata is kinda sus, we still don’t know how he handled the encounter with cult leader in the previous volume and seems like he hasn’t spoken up about it either. He is Miyo’s personal guard while they’re at the imperial palace, so this is kinda awawawa :eyes: :sweat_drops: Also! I’m happy there’s more ゆり江 in this book, she is like sunshine and puppies.

I’m possessed by Sleepyglare xD. Sleep sleep time :zzz:

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Read a few pages of 十角館の殺人. No time for more ;_;


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Yeahh that’s plan B! Would prefer to keep up with the schedule though, that’s just somehow the most fun :laughing:

The correct opinion :eyes: :joy:

… I don’t think it does? Though I’m also not that far into the game yet so I wouldn’t be able to say fore sure :melting_face: More importantly though, it will determine who you spend the next portion of your time with, so choose wisely :joy:

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:tangerine: :books: July 30 :books: :tangerine:
(home post)

Orange :tangerine: page 147 → 188 (42 pages)

For my own sanity, I decided to tackle this week’s Orange chapter early. And this means I finished off* volume 1 of Orange. And I got to mark Orange volume 1 complete on bookmeter.

*actually, there is one chapter of an unrelated story (1 chapter out of 5 for the whole story), that I haven’t read yet. But as soon as I finish Night Café 1 and I’m up to date with all clubs, I’ll go ahead and read it.

Felt good to finish off a volume of something. That is kinda the problem with reading along with a lot of clubs, it takes a lot longer to finish something since I only read a chapter/a certain number of pages each week. At least Orange seems to mostly do 4 chapters per volume (unless there are multiple shorter chapters), so it still only takes a month to finish.


Thanks @Memoria. I really appreciate the call out.

Honestly, so grateful to you all who’ve cheered on my achievement. Especially, when something is so long coming, when it has been achieved piece by piece over a long period of time. When you finally arrive, it is far too easy to almost blow it off. Because there wasn’t this one big effort done over a short time, but instead a long slow slog… Somehow it is so hard to value that long slog.

And while I might not always do it this well when stress and overwhelm overflows, I now know I can. And maybe next time, I’ll get to it a little bit earlier. And maybe eventually, I’ll recognize the feeling as it appears. That pit of the stomach instant reaction of “oh no, things are getting out of hand”.

But anyway, for this instance, you all called it out, and I appreciate that so much. :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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Summary Post

July 30th
What did I read?: Flying Witch Vol 11
How much did I read?: 19 pages
How long did it take me?: 21 min

Wow, have I really not read anything since the 24th? Oops
I did listening on most of the other days, but I took the last 2 days off from the challenges completely. I just really needed to get something done for work and not worry about literally anything else until that thing was done and the deadline was met. Sometimes you just gotta clear out all the brain clutter and focus singlemindedly on a task until it is done (at least, you do if you’re me lol).

Anyway, finally getting back into it at least a little bit with the Flying Witch chapter for the week! I’m really behind on Orange now but I don’t feel like having emotions today lol

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This is such an Orange mood.

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Summary post

Checking in again with another update! I didn’t have as many shows to translate last week, but I did manage to finish Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling’s July 23 show (post about it here).

Here’s a photo from the show. This is this is the “fired idol” Maki Itoh doing a move that’s referred to as a Kokeshi, where she falls and hits her opponent with her head. Itoh was supposedly fired from being an idol because her head was too big, so as a wrestler, she often attacks with her head as her main weapon. The wrestler in the blue, Yuki Kamifuku, or Kamiyu, is Itoh’s tag partner in the match, and Raku (an idol and train enthusiast) in yellow is one of their opponents.

I also started reading the 新日本プロレス英語入門 book that I mentioned in my previous post! I started reading it yesterday, since I didn’t have a show translation to work on, and to my surprise I read, uh, the first 64 pages?

Granted, I was reading very much extensively and not intensively, so I did a lot of skimming over details I didn’t really care about, and didn’t really pause to look much up except for a handful of words that I was really curious about. But still, pretty amazing!

I have nowhere near this level of fluency with non-wrestling stuff, but this book is sort of uniquely suited for my strengths and weaknesses. I have very high kanji recognition, moderate vocab (specifically in this area), and relatively low grammar. Not to mention a high level of familiarity with the subject, so context is usually pretty clear to me.

The section I read/skimmed though mostly consisted of wrestler profiles. There were quite a few interesting details in there, haha. I talked about the ones that stood out to me here. Read this post to see how they handled the translations for moves like “Manifest Destiny” and “El Pinche Loco”, and how they chose to explain a wrestler’s nickname being “Dirty Daddy” to the Japanese-speaking audience.

The next section is a few interviews with wrestlers, presented in a parallel text format, but I’m going to skip this chapter for now and read the glossary next.

I also acquired a new book! This one is a picture book of a rather famous story. I found this particular edition of the book because I saw it on a list of picture books with beautiful art and thus appeal to adults. Will people laugh if I say that the reason why I decided to buy it is because of wrestling? :sweat_smile:

Here’s the book on Amazon: ごんぎつね (日本の童話名作選)

I tried reading the first couple pages just to see what it was like. I could understand more than I expected, but I was missing some key vocabulary that made it hard to understand some parts. With picture books like this, I enjoy not looking up words and just watching my understanding grow and evolve with time. It lets me get more enjoyment out of the books, since I can reread them multiple times and get more out of them each time.

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Home post

REDC
Week 5

July 30
Chrono Trigger
ルーパーズ


Turned out being quite a productive day. Played a couple hours of Chrono Trigger and read half of chapter 3 of ルーパーズ. Surprisingly I’m not especially worn out, I think I’m finally building a lot of stamina and resilience after all the fighting I do with the J-J dictionaries :joy: . But well I guess not only that, listening everyday as well and naturally increasing the amount I do lately has given me a lot of tolerance to “language learning” discomfort, which I’m really grateful for. Lately I can’t even describe it as language discomfort either, it went back to a sense of curiosity I want to know more about. Slowly increasing the vocabulary I know and also decreasing the difficulty of the content I consume I feel has been crucial. While I still bite off more than I can chew occasionally, I haven’t felt overwhelmed in a while. It’s so hard to choose fitting content that you’re interested in when you self study, though. But I guess now I’m becoming more and more able to judge if something is going to be worth the fight or if it’s going to be futile. Now what’s really cool is that things that used to be futile are becoming accessible and ahhh it’s a great thing.

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Hey everyone!

I’m overly excited to report that I’ve acquired 19 new books! I finally ordered an Amazon.jp order of physical Japanese books and I have a BOOK HAUL of epic proportions!! (Can you tell I’m very excited? :joy:)

Obligatory picture

It’s mostly manga but I also got three novels.

More specific book breakdown
  1. Volumes 10-20 of 暁のヨナ (I figured why not reread but from where the anime leaves off)
  2. つぐみ and キッチン (yay Banana Yoshimoto + 1st book club book!)
  3. ゆっくりおやすみ、樹の下で (I’ve never actually done a full furigana novel, just four novels without it so I hope it’s as easy I expect haha)
  4. ホリミヤ (vol. 1)
  5. まいりました、入間くん (vol. 27)
  6. キングダム (vol. 16, 31, 46 because favorite arcs)

Anyway, that’s very fun! It was surprisingly cheap for the number of books - only about 10,000円 for 19 books - way cheaper than buying them outside of Japan!

And in actual reading challenge related news, I’m about 25% of the way through ティアムーン帝国物語 (4) which I’m enjoying a lot!

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Home

Okay so part of me not reading much these past few days was that I was tired and/or my brain just wasn’t up to it when I had the time to, but part of it was that I was just writing a ton of fic?? Just today I wrote like 2500 words??? I dunno how many people would consider that a lot, but it definitely is for me. I’m not sure that I’ve ever written this much in a day before. (And this is two separate >1k-word fics, neither of which are even finished yet, and the majority of my finished fics are <1k words.) And over the past three days before today, I wrote something like 3k words. What is this.

I started ch 2 of 強者の同盟 and read 4 pages, leaving off on pg 24. Jungo’s family has a cat, and, like all cat owners, he’s got a bunch of pictures of it on his phone. He’s also got a bunch relating to club activities. In third year of MS at least, he wasn’t afraid to use his height and his standing as a top volleyball player and one of the few in the school who could make it to Nationals to, like, intimidate teachers and get what he wanted—though, in this case it was in order to protect one of his friends, Hacchi; no idea if he’d do it in other situations, too. But Hacchi (Hatta Chiiko) is the third main character in this story, so we’ve now met all the major players! Also, she calls him Takajun, it’s cute.

Some vocab of note:

食らう (くらう) [他ア五] to receive (e.g. a blow)
強張る (こわばる) [自ラ五] to stiffen; to become stiff

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