July 16, Sun of Week 3 of Summer Q3 2023 
aDoJG/Basic : ～さ, ～さま
予言の島 Ch.2 - 2
うたわれるもの : 散るゆく者への子守唄
My boyfriend found out I have a few volumes of fullmetal alchemist so he encouraged me to read one of those. It’s definitely on the harder end for me though so it went rather slow and is the only volume I finished this week.
I also forgot to read コンビニ人間 this week. 
Oops. I’ll try to double up this coming week. It shouldn’t be difficult as long as I remember to do it.
I’ve also been reading a lot in English since I bought a bit from the rightstuf bday sale and a number of preorders are being delivered… That backlog is getting bad too. 
７月１０日
鋼の錬金術師 2 Ch 5 This was the heartbreaking bit with the chimera… Oof. It’s sooo painful.
７月１１日
チェンソーマン Ch 135
７月１２日
マギ１５Ch 139-142
７月１３日
鋼の錬金術師 2 Ch 6-7
７月１４日
鋼の錬金術師 2 Ch 8
７月１５日
リビングの松永さん 5 Ch 17
16 July (home post)
「見える子ちゃん」の9巻を終わりました。
「よつばと」の4話もちょっと読みました。
次、D.N.Angelを始めます。
New weekend, new book club assignments!
Read this week’s assignments for ちいさな森のオオカミちゃん 1 and for 日本語基本文法辞典 (なさい、ね、に、に、に、に、に、に 
)
Tried to read the first chapter of スーパーの裏でヤニ吸うふたり but it definitely wasn’t as easy as a よつばと！, so I will keep it for tomorrow when I have more time.
This is an accurate depiction of に.
July 15th!
I was travelling yesterday, and forgot to pack something to read, and didn’t have a laptop with me. I tried to use the bookwalker app on my phone but had trouble logging in for some reason, and tbh that would have been a nightmare anyway since my phone screen is pretty small!
But I was determined not to break my streak, so I read a few articles on NHK easy news on my phone.
July 16th!
Today I read chapter 5 of ちいさな森のオオカミちゃん. The ABBC assignment for this week is just the first half of the chapter, but I prefer to read in full chapters when I can so I read a week ahead.
  Date |
book | time / pages  |
|---|---|---|
| 14/7 |  |
41min |
| 15/7 | |
23min/ 127話 |
| 16/7 |  |
1:24h → 100% |
| Home post🏡 |
Powered through to finally finish the short biographies graded reader! It was a cute little book, I really enjoyed it 
I read a smidge more ハサミ男 today and am not sure I’ll have any extra time so leaving it at this for now. Minor eyebrow raising scene, no spoilers at all but I’ll put it under a detail hider.
So one of the cop was talking to the 心理学分析 person and they were discussing “profiling” and the “profiler” was saying that it was not about understanding the motives of the criminal or anything, but by using statistics to links certain crimes to race/age/other appearance based things. He then said it didn’t work as well in Japan because Japan is a homogeneous society. They also kept calling serial killings 無動機 which they are not…
I… Uh. No. Like some of it, sure, yes - there is an element of “what age might they be?” to profiling but generally it was just a terrible explanation. Profiling is already pretty dicey as a science, but seeking the motives has always been a piece of it.
７月１６日
極限脱出 9時間9人9の扉 (11.9k characters)
Skipped a lot of already read text today but also re-read some along with a fair chunk of new text. It feels kind of eh to log that as read characters as it’s something I already went through like a month or two ago, but at the same time it’s repetition and I get another chance to grab words I forgot back then here and there, so I’ll still count everything. It’s not like I can flawlessly read and understand every single sentence anyway, there are some that still give me trouble, and I feel like going through them again helps.
This weekend has been Splatoon event time, so I played that a lot with friends today and it took me a while to get to Japanese. Still did another 4k characters in 硝子の塔の殺人, 6.88% so I’m crawling forward. Not so bad, but today did mix in some discussion of fancy medical technologies, more talk about mystery authors, a little more composition of the tower, etc.
I know I’m turning myself into the guy that brings up Umineko constantly (at least around the VN club heh), but it really strikes me how much I’m getting the vibes from that VN with this book. It makes some sense, both aim to do some amount of meta commentary on mysteries. You’ve got this unique, isolated location where a bunch of people have been called for an announcement from the disgustingly wealthy owner, an elderly man in somewhat poor health surrounded by his doctor and servants (guess that comes with being a wealthy old man heh). Further, (minor setup spoilers for each) both seem to contain a mystery the owner wants to challenge his guests to solve. And obviously it’s because it screams mystery setup that it touches on all these same points, but I have to stop myself from transposing some mental images from Umineko onto this, heh.
What really drove this comparison into my head was seeing all the talk of traditional, 本格 mysteries, and a bit of implied disdain for the supernatural in stories from the protagonist, heh. I only got halfway through Umineko before and need to return to it, but it goes wild into that stuff, talking at length about Knox’s 10 commandments and the like.
What’s really amusing about where Umineko goes with that is that it pits mystery and magic against each other – essentially everyone at the meeting is killed, allegedly by a witch. And on a sort of meta level one step above the story itself, are two people engaged in an argument between magic and mystery, where one is setting up the murders to be so impossible and unsolvable that the other can’t argue they were done by anything but the supernatural. It’s a game of deduction but not so much to find THE answer as it is to find ANY answer that conforms to reality as we conceive of it, heh.
Anyway, I’m still in the setup phase because of my slow reading, hoping to do a little more tonight, but I think this’ll be pretty fun when it takes off.
Whoops, forgot to post
July 15
Read only a little today; was doing homework (reading and translating a newspaper article— still counts!) and that killed my motivation to keep looking up any more kanji for the day so I just kept playing Pokémon lol
July 16
Only slightly more productive - weekends are my worst reading times it seems. Finished volume 1 of 名探偵コナン without too much difficulty, partially because I’ve seen these chapters animated far too many times already. Might have to see if I can pick up a few more volumes, though I’m a little hesitant to get too many— that’s a hell of a long series to get (financially) invested in
Today’s plan is to work on コンビニ人間 some more and finally start trying to struggle through 龍ヶ嬢七々々の埋蔵金 - first light novel here we go!
排除（はいじょ）- elimination (very much used in the context of “eliminating a target” here)
偽り（いつわり）- lie, fabrication
脅す（おどす）- to menace, to threaten
You may assume that these are from 名探偵コナン. They are not. Today’s vocab is all from Pokémon lol
7/16
Got a coffee from starbucks today and sat down in a library to put in some progress on コーヒーが冷めないうちに that I’ve been procrastinating on. Bad decision because I cried again 
. Onto the final short story and then I’d be done with my first Japanese book! Also finished コンビニ人間 reading for book club this week and was disappointingly eccentric and fun to read again.
Have fun with this week’s コンビニ。
Light novel is always so fun to read, typically easy language makes it stress-free as well. Haven’t read it before but hope you enjoy 龍ヶ嬢七々々の埋蔵金!
My 40 frantically-looked-up words in 8 pages begs to differ on the “easy language” part but we’ll get there!
Haha yeah felt! For me after finishing 1-2 異世界 (i know i know guilty pleasure for me) the dictionary usage went down a ton. I think definitely a learning curve there since it’s like a whole other set of vocabulary lol.
That’s the goal I’ve got two volumes of this plus one of the spin-off so if I don’t start picking the vocab up as I go then there’s gonna be a problem lol
Home Post
ちいさな森のオオカミちゃん
I read this weeks ABB assignment. Got some cool new words like:
７月１６日 (Home Post Link)
I was kinda hoping to read more today since I had it off, but ended up cleaning and then binging shows all day Maybe I knock out another volume of takagi at work tomorrow though, 
Read:
