📚📚 Read every day challenge - Summer 2022 🏖 ☀

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Because I’m a mess, and also I wanted something cute, I picked up 君に届け today. I read episodes 0 and 1, which make up a little more than half of the first volume. I didn’t read most of the hand-written stuff though because sensei’s handwriting tends to be difficult for me to read.

I also read 2 pages of 強者の同盟, leaving off on pg 11. Apparently Jungo and Subaru had had a game of 1-on-1 (basketball) after practice, and if Jungo lost, he had to treat Subaru to a crêpe from this crêperie. And clearly Jungo lost lol

Anyway, in yesterday’s section, he ran into a classmate from middle school, Akao Azusa (who will be another of the main characters in this story), who goes to an all-girls’ high school in the city and whom he rarely sees anymore because their schedules and routes are different. Pretty much as soon as he’s sat down, Kouhei starts grilling him about her.

Kouhei: Who was that girl you were just talking to? Do you like her? Is she your girlfriend?
Jungo: You’re an idiot.

lol Jungo’s like, maybe you would only talk to a girl because you wanna date her. 女子とひと言ふた言話しただけでイコール彼女のわけあるか.

Some vocab of note:

座右の銘 (ざゆうのめい) [noun] favorite motto; pet saying
不快感を与える (ふかいかんをあたえる) [expression; 一] to jar; to grate; to make uncomfortable
いやいや [adverb] unwillingly; grudgingly; reluctantly
うちとける [自一] to open one’s heart; to throw off reserve; to be frank
ビリ [noun] last (on the list); (at the) bottom; (in) last position
うぬぼれる [自一] to be conceited
恩返し (おんがえし) [noun, する verb (自)] requital of a favor; repayment (of an obligation, kindness, etc.)
人気 (ひとけ) [noun] sign of life; human presence. Often as 人気がない or 人気のない.
ぶっちゃけ [adverb, colloquialism] frankly; honestly speaking; to tell the truth; to put it bluntly
白々しい (しらじらしい) [い-adj.] with feigned ignorance; pretending not to know; disingenuous. It also has the literal meaning of “pure white; very clear,” though, so possibly ピンクピンクしい is pinker than just ピンク色?

These two are definitely going on my list! I’m fairly involved in fandom, so knowing all the Japanese terms would be cool, and possibly useful once I start reading fic in JP. And I love colors. One of my folders in Shirabe Jisho is just for all the color words I come across.

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If you go looking for Japanese fic, just a warning, according to one of my friends, a lot of it is in password locked archives that you often need to be decent at producing Japanese in order to get access to. This probably varies heavily depending on the fandom, so you might get luckier with some, but, just be aware that there might be times where the vast majority of fan content is getting shared in underground communities that you might not know how to find.

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Seconding this for online stuff. I’ve had issues too where sometimes it’s answers that can be written in kana or kanji and you just have to try a lot of combos. Also sometimes the answer is even in romaji or English, but that’s rarer I find.

Alternatively, doujin can be fun to buy! For new, there’s toranoana, melonbooks/fromagebooks, and booth. MB/FB may not have international shipping though. For used there’s mandadrake (yes international) and suruguya (proxy needed). Listings will say what age/gender they’re pushed for and you can also find fanfic listed as 小説(しょうせつ). you can find short (usually less than 15 pages) ones in anthropologies and there are also some mixed manga/fanfic ones as well, but those are pretty rare. I think I’ve only bought 2-3 accidently in that format (I consider most Japanese fanfic beyond my attention span rn).

Of course though, there are also full fanfic and previews on pixiv as well.

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JMdict/EDICT (which is the underlying dictionary for yomichan and most other free dictionary apps) does accept user suggestions for new entries, so if you had the time and inclination you could try submitting one or two of the more common ones to see if they’re interested in adding entries for that kind of vocab. (It’s a bit of work to produce a proposed entry that’s good quality and fits the editorial guidelines, so I mention it only as “if that’s something that would be interesting and that you would want to do”.)

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That’s good to know! Though I feel like for a lot of language like this, it’d probably be difficult to add it. For one thing, there is quite a lot of it, and some of it has the tendency to change :sweat_smile:. But also these words are almost never defined in standard English dictionaries, either. Here’s a list of pro wrestling jargon, to illustrate the kind of task we’re talking about here.

It would be an interesting project for someone to attempt, though. It’d save a lot of fans a lot of trouble attempting to puzzle things out through google searches, and it would probably cut down on machine mistranslations of Japanese wrestling stuff. Maybe if my Japanese was advanced and I didn’t have to do so much googling myself, I’d try to add at least a few and see if they’d accept them.

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Got a 3 month Audible trial. I am debating reading along with books and just listening after the fact for listening practice.

There’s also less pressure to keep up with the speaker.

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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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