📚📚 Read every day challenge - Summer 2023 🕶☀

[fallynleaf]

Summary post

I’m a few days late, but here’s my wrap-up post for the challenge!

July	月	火	水	木	金	土	日
Week 26
Week 27
Week 28
Week 29
Week 30
Week 31

Aug	月	火	水	木	金	土	日
Week 31
Week 32
Week 33
Week 34
Week 35

= Japanese
= Japanese and Spanish

Perfect score!

I’m switching focus to listening for the off-month, so you might see me posting over in that thread (though I’m bad at the actual posting part…).

As far as my translations go, I translated two Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling shows: the semifinals of the Tokyo Princess Cup tournament on August 12, and then the final on August 13. So I’m finally done translating that tournament! Hooray! It was fun but also a lot of work for me .

I’m a couple shows behind now because their next show had a lot of post-match comments, too (it was more than 14k characters total just across those three shows), and I’ve had a lot of other distractions going on in my life lately. My goal is to get caught up before Wrestle Princess next month.

Here’s a photo from the August 12 show. Mizuki is getting distracted by Sakisama’s rose (Sakisama often uses it to attack her opponents), while Mei Saint-Michel torments Mizuki’s tag partner Mahiro Kiryu.

In non-TJPW news, I actually managed to accomplish my goal of finishing Read Real Japanese Essays by the end of the month!

I didn’t have too much trouble with the essays overall, however the second to last one, 無常(むじょう)ということ by 平野啓一郎(ひらのけいいちろう) was by far the hardest one in the book. The others weren’t too bad, but this one would’ve been a bit out of reach for me without the translation help. There were quite a few literary expressions that I’d never encountered before.

In general, the literary expressions in this book were the ones that tripped me up the most, since most of my “reading” experience comes from reading transcribed comments from pro-wrestlers, so I have a lot more practice with spoken Japanese than written.

The last essay, 「文学者(ぶんがくしゃ)」の国(くに)に、ぼくがいる by リービ英雄(ひでお) was a fun one for me as a translator, because so much of it was about the difficulty of translating certain concepts from Japanese into English, as well as the other way around. I could relate! Though the kind of translation problems that I run into are quite different than the ones he talks about, haha! Especially being a writer myself, too, I was fascinated by the concept of a 文学者 and how it’s really its own thing without an exact equivalent in English.

My overall review of this book is that I enjoyed it a lot, and it gave me a sense of what to expect to struggle with when reading nonfiction books on my own. I’ve had some practice reading essays already, but it’s very different reading them online with lots of look-up tools easily available. I’m definitely going to stick to ebooks for the time being whenever possible, because having to manually look up as much as I would have had to look up to understand all of these essays without help would’ve bogged me down considerably.

I’m going to pick up Read Real Japanese Fiction again at some point, hopefully soon. Though it’s looking likely that most of the actual book reading I’ll be doing will be nonfiction, at least in the immediate future.

Concerning reading in Spanish:

I got 34% of the way through Las Malas. So about a third of the way through it. Not bad! I definitely went heavier on the Spanish reading for the first half of this challenge, then slowed way down after I finished the Aristóteles y Dante series.

And that’s a wrap for this challenge! See you all in the listen every day challenge thread!