📚📚 Read every day challenge - Summer 2022 🏖 ☀

Woke up and finished the Hobbit (English). Next I’m reading Prince Caspian.

Edit. I remembered I bought Danganronpa. I’m gonna play that for Japanese reading xD

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July 21-23rd - Day 14-16 - Home

Setting aside 天気の図鑑 after finishing the first chapter.

Read a teacher’s blog on not being strict with teaching native children kanji writing.

Read and finished Chapter 1 of 夜カフェ.

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Home post

REDC
Week 4

July 23
Loopers


Played for a bit more than an hour. So far my first experience with VNs is proving to be a blast, barely noticed the hour passing which is a great sign. I wanted to keep playing, which was surprising to me since I had already been playing for a while and also got quite a number of new anki cards, but it was already late and it had a timely scene change so I saved there and called it a day. More tomorrow, most likely.

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:green_heart: Home :green_heart:

ジョジョの奇妙な冒険21

48 - 102

ANUBIS and the folly of thinking stands only work in a certain way…

I wanted to read the whole Anubis part but I literally started falling asleep lol.

Please enjoy a relatable Jotaro

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July 23 :blossom: Home Post

Club time! :tada: I read this week’s chapter of ルーパーズ which went really smoothly I think. It’s a lot of fun so far! I’m enjoying the story and the characters, and it’s cool going through and talking about it together :grin:

I also started chapter 17 of 海辺(うみべ)のカフカ with the intent of reading it in a sitting as I’ve generally been doing with the chapters, but then my brain said no, you’re sleepy now :joy: So just 9 pages but that’s okay, it was a productive reading day regardless!

book buying digression

Well there are about a billion books I wanna buy so I’ve made a deal with myself that if I do some of the upcoming book clubs then that’s my excuse for a book order :joy: I’m not sure yet if I’ll do Spice and Wolf, but I’m definitely gonna be doing the natively mystery book club, with how many interesting nominations there are :eyes:

That’s where the complications come though lmao; in the past I’ve gotten stuff from mandarake, and that’s been great, but that’s definitely geared more towards manga and light novels. Now that I’m wanting to get more novels, I’m looking at cdjapan which I haven’t used before so :sparkles: mystery :sparkles: though it seems pretty comparable for the most part, just some price differences which makes sense. But the current top pick for the mystery book club is only available by proxy which complicates things but is probably fine? There’s enough stuff I want that mandarake doesn’t have that it’s probably worth it :man_shrugging: (and still cheaper than amazon for sure lmao)

So yeah this is mostly just me rambling haha, but if anyone has any particular advice about cdjapan or anything I’d certainly be interested to hear it!

On that note, if anyone has recommendations for books I should look into getting I’m always down for that, not like I already have so many things I want to read :laughing:

Congrats, that’s awesome!! :tada:

Ahh congrats, you made it!! A world of infinite possibilities awaits :laughing:

Yay, I’m so glad! ルーパーズ has been a lot of fun so far :blush:

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There’s an ongoing discussion about that in the extensive reading thread right now! Also if the book I think is gonna win wins eBay might also have some used copies since it’s an older book (1980s).

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Day 22

Spent the afternoon browsing my local Japanese book store with my very patient husband in tow. Bought a few children’s manga with sweet pastel pictures, cute and funny slice of life animal stories, and simple grammar/familiar kanji. Still waaay above my reading level (sigh), but they seem doable with my handy-dandy dictionary and grammar guide :face_with_monocle:

I read so much just trying to pick out my books that my brain hurts :persevere: My mom has them now because she wants to wrap them for my birthday (on Monday :joy: She’s a hoot). But I’ll post pictures when I get them back!

I’m counting this as my reading today, though I may end up reading a bit of カリスタルハンータズ本2 later tonight. We’ll see! :woman_shrugging:t2:

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Home

I need new polos for work, and wow was finding some a real pain in the tuckus, but I finally did. Was out for much of the day, though. That, plus that I ended up buying a book at B&N when I hadn’t planned to and started reading it (also when I hadn’t planned to) means that I didn’t read very much in JP today. (It’s a queer fantasy though, like, how could I not)

I was partway through ch 2 of 強者の同盟, but I actually decided to start over today. It’s been almost a year since I started it (early Sept last year), and I can definitely understand more now than I could then (I started WK et. al. a month after that), so, yeah, I decided to see how much easier it would be. Not that I’m sure that I’ll even really know though lol I don’t exactly remember how trying to read it the first time went.

Anyway, I read 3 pages, leaving off on pg 9. We start off with the team hanging out at a mall (ショッピングビル), and Jungo’s buying the strawberry special crêpe (“strawberry whipped cream & triple berry sauce & vanilla ice cream special,” geez, what a mouthful) for Subaru for some as-yet-unspecified reason. Kabei-sensei used the word ピンクピンクしい to describe the crêpe, which I’m pretty sure isn’t “actually” a word, but I don’t know enough about how adjectives work to know how that differs from just calling it ピンク色の. (Also, though I know I’ve come across at least a couple different ones before, I don’t know any doubled adjectives off the top of my head to try to suss it out.)

And I should probably stop lying on the floor so much, because my hip hurts now.

Some vocab of note:

引きつる (ひきつる) [自ラ五] to stiffen (e.g. of a face); to freeze; to grow tight (e.g. of a voice)
ぶら下がる (ぶらさがる) [自ラ五] Encountered in the literal sense today, it means “to hang down (from); to dangle; to swing; to be suspended.”

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:spiral_calendar: Day 23: July 23rd :whale: :motor_boat:

Finally, it’s Saturday, a day with nothing to do but read Japanese material install drip irrigation out back.

spacer:deciduous_tree: ちいさな森のオオカミちゃん Volume 2 (88% ➨ 100%)

spacer:cat2: おじさまと猫 Volume 6 (81% ➨ 90%)

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Summary post

Back with another update! Had another very busy week, but I haven’t broken my streak yet!

Reading in Spanish

I finished the local history parallel text book that I was reading! I picked out a young adult book called Antes de Ser Libres by Julia Alvarez to read next. So far, it’s going well! It’s relatively short (184 pages), so should be a fairly quick read. The story is interesting, albeit sometimes a little dark. The language is pretty clear and straightforward.

As far as Japanese goes, I got quite a bit done! I translated three Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling shows in one week. Here is my post about their July 16 show, the July 17 show, and the July 18 show. All in all, I’m not exactly sure how many thousands of characters it was, but I think it was somewhere in the range of 8-9,000.

So, over the past three weeks, I translated seven shows and one press conference, for a total of about 25,000 characters. If an average page of text in Japanese is 400 characters, that’s the equivalent of translating 62.5 pages of text. Not bad when you’re very much still a beginner!

I talk about this in that last post, but I also ended up reading this Tokyo Sports article after a screencap of a DeepL translation of it (which went viral on wrestling twitter) seemed a little bit fishy. As it turned out, I was right to be suspicious, because that wasn’t what the article said at all :sweat_smile:.

Of course, that didn’t stop wrestling reporter Dave Meltzer from reporting the misinformation regardless… I really wish that English-speaking reporters who don’t know any Japanese wouldn’t report on articles from the Japanese wrestling scene if they have to rely on machine translation to do so.

In any case, I’m happy that my Japanese is at least good enough that I can start to debunk a lot of these rumors myself. That’s a pretty important milestone.

Here’s a photo from the July 18 show that I thought was pretty incredible. This is Hikari Noa hitting her finisher, the Blizzard Suplex, on Yuki Arai. Arai’s comment after losing this match is what prompted the article that started the rumors.

Only one show to translate this week! And it’s not an especially long one! Looking forward to that :blush:.

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

Day 24:

Alriiight, we’re back to playing Zero Escape :confetti_ball: After learning how other people use Textractor, it became a much smoother experience… Until I got stuck on the tutorial and quit the game in frustration :sunglasses: I’d been playing for 40 minutes, though, and was already planning on stopping for the day. Very happy to be playing again!! This is the type of game that will keep my reading motivation pretty high.

zero escape woes

I feel like I’m probably doing something wrong but I can’t get the keys for the briefcases to work??? I even ended up checking a walkthrough to see if I was missing something, but the codes that are supposed to work don’t work, and I can’t open them!!! I’ve clicked on everything in the room, examined everything, and still it doesn’t work aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Maybe if I was doing this in English I wouldn’t get stuck like this :rage:. I’m probably gonna keep following a walkthrough because the last thing I’m in the mood for when getting home from work is to Struggle. I’ll try this again tomorrow…

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Started reading a little bit of Tugumi. Not sure if I’m just not in the mood or if it’s not for me. Regardless I’m just reading 3 or 4 pages a day for the book club so it’s not like a giant time sink or anything.

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Home Post

After having caught up (i.e. having reached the current week’s starting point) with Kafka, I read the current week’s assignment. Then I switched back to Saikawa&Moe, read the penultimate week’s assignment, and yesterday, at the start of the new week, I finished it off! :tada: My first finished book for the month, and such a big boi :grin: My bookwalker stats is happy. I also tracked my reading speed for the last part, and it was at 14.1 pages per hour on average.

As the next book club will only start next weekend, I turned to vol. 2 of Flesh & Blood. Looking forward to more sea adventures! :sailboat: :pirate_flag:

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I believe this is my first post for this challenge. I don’t think I even added myself to the participant list :sweat_smile: But I don’t really have time to update daily like I used to so I’ll just do more casual updates when I have a moment.

I read chapters 19 through 22 of 極主夫道 3. Line Manga had the first two volumes available for free for a limited time, and I later realized they have up to chapter 72 available for free daily reading.

The catch is you can only read one chapter a day, but that’s actually a little perk for me because it’s a nice little incentive to read a little everyday. And with that particular manga being episodic, it’s easier to wait a day to continue.

I started Tugumi yesterday (technically today because it was after midnight). I only got a couple pages into it, but I mostly skimmed it so I could look up kanji I didn’t know.

My idea is to do a few pages a day and then read the chapter when the discussion officially starts. The reading isn’t hard at all to understand, but having to constantly look up kanji can be off-putting, so this helps. The nice thing also is there isn’t many vocab I don’t know, so as long as I look up the reading, I can get through the chapter pretty quickly.

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home post

I finished the last lesson in my grammar book :tada:

Read more 鹿の王.

And I came across the kanji for かんぬき (a bolt on a door) for the first time :joy:

This is a great kanji. I don’t think it needs to go in Anki. I’m not going to forget this one.

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I read one page of the prefectures book, plus read over chapter 3 of Shadows house properly (so am reading ahead again). Was planning to start Tugumi tonight but have an early start in the morning.

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:green_heart: Home :green_heart:

ジョジョの奇妙な冒険21

103 - 147

I’ve finished the Anubis chapters! They were different from what I remembered, but in a good way. I just need to remember to share the word I learned sometime. I want to share it with the related panels, which is why I keep forgetting.

Doujin page count

89

Wowzers, I really read a lot on Sunday!

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:slightly_smiling_face: We spent the morning investigating under the kitchen for possible sources of a fly infestation. Owning a house seriously cuts into Japanese reading time.

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Read to p. 88 in よつばと!today.

New words/expressions

ごらん: look!
迷惑 (めいわく): trouble, nuisance
かっこ: appearance
ばかにされる: to be made fun of
気にするな: don’t worry about it
よくある事 (よくあること): common occurrence
てきとう: suitable, proper
なぐさめ: comfort, consolation
ごまかし:deception

There’s a bit at the end of the chapter that I’m not quite getting. After a hilarious incident, Fuuka apologizes and then has a crisis about how she made a fool of herself and was made fun of by her sister. She and Yotsuba’s father have the following exchange:

Father: よくある事だ。
Narration: テキトーななぐさめ
Fuuka: そうですよね!
Narration: ごまかし

The narrated comments are confusing to me. I understand the first to mean “the father is offering appropriate words of comfort” and the second to mean “Fuuka pretends to be comforted”. But maybe not? It seems that てきとう can mean both “suitable, proper” and “perfunctory, half-hearted,” so I think I’m missing some important nuances here.

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:infinity: :video_game: July 24 :video_game: :infinity:
(home post)

Loopers :infinity: 5% → 11% ( 6% )

I live a lot of my life by momentum. I get going on a task or habit, and then as long as I keep doing it (and nothing big interrupts) I’m good at continuing with something. The weakest points in the chain is when I finish something and have to start the next thing. (Finish one novel in my reading habit and the needing to start the next. Finish one kind of project and needing to start the next in line.)

Meaning that the weakest point in my habits are when I’m switching, and joining book clubs and reading at book club speeds inherently forces a lot of switching. Read one chapter of X, be super hype but have to wait until next week. Read one chapter of Y, be super hype and wait. Read book Z while waiting for next book club week to start. New book club week starts and I have to switch.

This is probably the main reason I didn’t read Friday and Saturday (July 22-23). Because I was supposed to switch to my clubs again and I didn’t jump in quickly enough, so it was too easy to put off.

If I wasn’t currently in two book clubs, I’m not sure I would have noticed this pattern so clearly. But awareness is the first step. This also kinda explains my drive to start a new book/manga in Japanese on the same day I finish one. I had no idea why I felt so compelled to do that, but now I understand. My subconscious was much more aware of how this pattern worked, than I was consciously.

This might seem like maybe book clubs aren’t the best fit for me, and that is true. Because taking constant breaks while reading something and then needing to switch between books when I might want to keep reading what I’m reading… Yeah, not the best. BUT, the discussions, speculations/predictions, and the social aspect of knowing I’m reading something along with other people… those things are turning out to be absolutely golden.

So I might never become like some of the members I see that seem to join almost every book club here (and they tend to read a lot quicker than I so easier to keep up). Or maybe I’ll join just enough that I’m switching what I’m reading almost every day, so I don’t get too much momentum with any one book. :joy:


Anyway, I read Loopers today. Very much still in the slow start face of this story, but it is interesting so far.

I really wish I had something a bit more reliable than the % the game gives me for how much I’ve read/done. Because this chapter that I read today was more than double the length of the prologue, but only 1% longer. They basically just took 100% and divided it by the number of chapters, despite the chapters being of (sometimes significant) different lengths.

I’ll make do with what I have though. ^^


If I remember correctly this was talked about in the Yotsubato book club for volume one, so you might want to check that.

The way I read it was that the father kinda thought he was giving a suitable response (considering his personality, he would think that would be good, imo), while Fuuka wasn’t satisfied with it (nothing probably could) but agreed because she didn’t want to keep dwelling on the incident.

But I’m reading that from how I’d feel in that situation as Fuuka. Hopefully you can find more info in the book club thread. :sweat_smile:

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