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 
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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 
July 30th 
・ 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 
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 
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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 
The correct opinion 
… 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 
More importantly though, it will determine who you spend the next portion of your time with, so choose wisely
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July 30
(home post)
Orange 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. 
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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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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? 
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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| REDC | 月 | 火 | 水 | 木 | 金 | 土 | 日 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 . 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? )
It’s mostly manga but I also got three novels.
More specific book breakdown
- Volumes 10-20 of 暁のヨナ (I figured why not reread but from where the anime leaves off)
- つぐみ and キッチン (yay Banana Yoshimoto + 1st book club book!)
- 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)
- ホリミヤ (vol. 1)
- まいりました、入間くん (vol. 27)
- 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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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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So I’m trying to read 闇祓 again, promised myself I’d try 5 pages a day. WHY IS THIS BOOK SO HARD. It’s the same author as かがみの孤城 but between the plot (which is pretty rough for me to read, emotional oof) and the writing style I swear I feel like my brain is broken.
Maybe someone sanity check me, but both of these sentences took me several re-reads to parse and that’s just plain unusual for me with a run of the mill novel at this point:
古参の社員が多いこの会社の中にあって圧倒的に若い管理職だ。
My rough attempt at translation:In a company so full of long tenured employees, they were overwhelming young.
肩幅が広くて声も大きく、いかにも体育会系といった雰囲気に気後れするものを感じ、営業現場のたたき上げの課長から見れば、企画部出身の自分は生っちょろい存在だと思われそうで、鈴井は最初から彼には苦手意識があった。
His shoulder were wide and his voice loud, his gym bro air was daunting. From the point of view of such a man who raised himself up through the ranks at work, Suzui from the Planning Department, was overly carefree. Suzui knew from the start they would have a rough relationship.
Do I have some sort of block with this book? Is it the writing style? Am I going crazy? 
ごんぎつね is probably my favorite Japanese children’s story. Definitely gave me feels.
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July 30 
Home Post
Well I got really invested in バディミッションBOND and ended up playing later than I should’ve (whoops lmao) so I don’t have time to dump my feelings right now but I have a lot of them! It was a great reading day and a lot happened, but I have to go to bed now
Glad to see we all have good taste
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Day 30: July 30th 
Looks like today gets to be my primary book club day this week. That said, I’m also making up for little reading time during the past week.
キラキラ100％ Volume 3 (38% ➨ 50%)
👧 からかい上手の(元)高木さん Volume 5 (24% ➨ 31%)
Considering the aspects Chi inherited from her mother, I’d hate to see what Takagi was like that this age.
ふらいんぐうぃっち Volume 11 (71% ➨ 83%)
シャドーハウス Volume 1 (15% ➨ 23%)
くノ一ツバキの胸の内 Volume 3 (52% ➨ 67%)
orange Volume 1 (76% ➨ 100%)
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Imagine reading a series in a monthly comic book where it’s one month between chapters!
Or for those of us reading Flying Witch, waiting a year for each volume.
Or for those of us reading Yotsuba, waiting three to five years for another volume…
(It’s probably no coincidence that all of my book club manga nominations have been completed series!)
Edit: It’s always interesting to see how my post titles change from preview to posted.
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Home
ジョジョの奇妙な冒険22
64 - 140
I was able to push myself a lot yesterday 
I am not a fan of the Seth (and/or Polnareff) chapters lol. On the bright side, a certain spoilered character doesn’t use advanced Japanese, so he’s usually easy to understand at least. I’m excited to be done with them soon, hopefully today.
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I’ll give it a try, but bear in mind I haven’t had my morning coffee yet, so take everything with a grain of salt.
I think you’re just overlooking a word here: 管理職
My rough attempt at translation: In a company with many senior employees. (he was an?/ there were?) overwhelmingly young manager(s).
I’m losing a little who is who here. I’m assuming Suzui is from the Planning Department and the other person is the section manager, but not confident. Also not confident who has the loud voice etc. Is it the section chief or Suzui? Also who has the 苦手意識. Other than that, all is clear
Yomichan says 体育会系 means sports-minded. So my attempt: With wide shoulders and a loud voice, and indeed a daunting sports-minded air, from the point of view of someone who rose through the ranks in the company to be section manager, he seemed to think of Suzui from the Planning Department as half-hearted/naive, and. as for Suzui, he knew from the start he would be hard to deal with/not good enough.
Not a straightforward sentence by any means. I hope context clears it up.
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Day 31:
Played some more Zero Escape, which means I’m officially halfway done with the challenge 
Next time I’ll try to find a different hook for the game… I’ve been trying to power through the escape room segments without texthooker, but I’m missing tons of information. @natarin @Scylie I picked the room where サンタ is because you guys enabled me and I have no regrets 
Funky little dude who should borrow a sweater from someone before he catches a cold.
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long reply
Well, if the monthly magazine had a few series I was following and it was the quickest way to get the latest chapter… I could see myself subscribing. Because it would still be better than waiting for the manga volume if I was that invested. xD
At least both Yotsuba& and Flying Witch are both slice of life, so cliffhangers and overarching stories aren’t left hanging, no? (I haven’t read Flying Witch yet, so not as sure about that one.) Obviously, one would want an eventual satisfying ending, but it isn’t as problematic if every story is self contained. /She says and still she wishes she could have the next volume of the Hotel manga because it is so sweet and wholesome and fun. So who is she to talk? xD
Honestly, I mostly read completed things, because with those not finished yet, you’ll never know if they will be completed. Not as big a problem with slice of life (depending on how it is set up), because there isn’t an overarching narrative you want an answer to. But anything story focused?
There are reasons I never got into popular shounen series, first because even the manga chapters often began to feel like filler episodes after a while (can’t resolve the plot too quick! Then you need to come up with more plot!) And second, because the more popular they got, the more they just continued and continued and seldom does something sustained by popularity get a good end, because they tend to end when the popularity goes away (and it will, it always does) and then it abruptly ends because the publisher doesn’t want it anymore… So you’re left with either a rushed ending that doesn’t conclude this epic saga that has been going on for ages; or you get no ending at all.
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Unless my memory fails me, I don’t think there are any major cliffhangers between volumes (or maybe once? Thinking of the basketball scene here…) but of course we are gradually introduced to the world with its people and places, and those often reappear in later chapters and develop further. If that’s what you call an overarching story, then there are quite a few. (But it’s not like “How will it continueeee 
” but rather “Oh hey, they’re back! 
” if that makes sense)
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I wouldn’t necessarily call that overarching story. Orange is a slice of life (kinda) that very much have an overarching story. (In fact, it wasn’t until I was finishing volume 1 I could really see how it might be called slice of life because the story seemed so important.)
I’d put Orange on the story heavy slice of life side.
And the other side is where things never change at all (I can’t come up with a manga example for this, mostly because I don’t enjoy this at all); a pure slice of life side one might call it. (Examples would be most American sitcoms. Things happen in an episode and by the end they are back to the status quo, and next episode it is like the previous one(s) never happened. Also a lot of children’s cartoons work like this.)
Most slice of life will fall somewhere on that spectrum. School Rumble (which I’ve only seen the anime of) falls somewhere in the middle, but that is more because of reader/watcher hopes/wants, than it actually developing its story. It is far too easy to get invested in any of the main characters managing to actually confess to those they are interested in, but the anime never lets it happen. So at the end of most episodes (or 2-3 episode arcs) we’re back to square one. Very frustratingly so in School Rumbles case. (Which made me check on the ending for the full manga run and decide not to bother…)
This is just my perception of the genre though. And while I like the genre, I like it better towards the story side of the spectrum, where there are developments as the story progresses and where callbacks can and will be made. Where there is a progression of time and changes that come with that. Which sounds like what you described for Flying Witch, and it makes me excited to get around to the 3 volumes of that I already own. (So much good stuff to read. 
)
And then there is Orange that is almost more a story that has slice of life elements or a slice of life structure. Although I’ll see if I still feel the same a couple of volumes from now. ^^
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