January 1
・Starting off the winter challenge by reading 笑わない数学者, which is the third book in the Saikawa & Moe series. I somehow read the whole bulk of week 2 of the schedule we’re following in the book club in just one day.
Progress: (13% → 22%)
But hey, that means I have the rest of the week I can spend on catching up on the かがみの孤城 book club. I’m on week 1 at around 5%.
note to self: edit days completed in the table in the second post of the thread
edit: haha, I’ve gotten so used to my tiny daily updates it looks so big now that it’s not written in tiny anymore
Thank you @windupbird for setting up the thread! I really like how the opening post turned out
Pro tip for those who link back to their daily updates in their summary posts:
By editing the part of the url that is the “title of the thread” into just an “x”, the url becomes much shorter and the summary post will be a bit easier to edit later.
Thanks @Redglare and @windupbird for sharing your experience! You convinced me to try doing daily updates (or at least as regular as I have time/energy for). I’ll try to keep them concise, at least until I figure out what format I enjoy the most. I just realized that I spent about 30 minutes writing this post
January 1 update:
Today was a bit hectic, so I only managed to read half of chapter 4 of よつばと！ I must say, Jumbo is using quite some dense vocab when he gets emotional. One of his speech bubbles was 9 straight kanji with no okurigana or whatever grammar points – I didn’t even realize such phrases are possible
BTW, @chamellow, I think it’s quite likely that I continue with よつばと！ after vol.1, so looking forward to reading along with you!
And thanks @vonnutje for your advice, it applies to me perfectly I’ve been SRSing a lot of words I was finding while reading, which made the process extra tedious as well as possibly inefficient (since I’m likely running into the same words repeatedly). So I’ve been leaning towards the approach you described, and now I decided that I’ll give it a try. I’ll read for maybe a week or so without SRSing any new words, but still saving the words I look up (that I would otherwise SRS), and then will see how many of them I still remember. If I end up with a reasonable amount, I guess I’ll continue like this. Thanks again for helping flesh out my vague intention!
First day done! Woo! For the last few days I’ve been reading 呪術廻戦 - trying to get through the first 8 volumes before the limited time free period runs out on 6 January. I finished the last chapter of volume 4 today and then read volume 5. I only set aside an hour and a half to read but ended up reading for a bit over 2 hours, oddly enough because volume 5 on the whole was kind of disappointing as it was mainly fight scenes between quite newly introduced characters that I’m not really invested in yet so I kept reading on wanting to get back to the characters/plot I care about more. But I can’t complain, that is pretty much textbook shonen manga and I think the next volume will return to being more interesting.
Hahaha, that’s Jumbo! Me and some friends do a biweekly よつばと reading club (we’re currently finishing up volume 4) and there’s a lot of moments where we are like ‘are we not understanding the Japanese here or is Jumbo just saying something really weird again?’ I love よつばと so much, it’s such an enjoyable manga.
Today I read chapter 8 of Way of the Househusband and chapter 32 of Yotuba!
That’s ~39 pages, which might be the most pages I’ve read in a day so far. It feels ultra satisfying to read in chapters, rather than “however many pages I can get in before losing my brain or bedtime whichever comes first”.
Started off this challenge with a new Satori Reader story: Kona’s Big Adventure! I’ve been waiting to start it since I originally wanted to wait until I was done with Akiko’s Foreign Exchange, but I’m almost done with Akiko now and I’m ready to start something new
So far it’s pretty simple, it’s marked as intermediate but the two chapters (episodes?) I read were very easy to get through. I’ll probably read a bit more of it today
A silent participant of the fall challenge, I’d like to make a space to track my progress this time around. Even if its just another day of どうぶつの森, I still consider it daily reading practice. I’m hoping this challenge will motivate me to go beyond Animal Crossing and book club books.
Reading
Currently reading along with the When will Ayumu Make His Move offshoot club, the Mitsuboshi Colors club, and The Way of the House Husband club. I’m set to start Death Note club. Recently started よつばと！vol1 and Chainsaw Man vol1. I’d like to finish Tokyo Ghoul 1, One Punch Man 1, グランブルー１and the first 君の名は(manga edition). That’s a whole lot of first editions to wrap up!
Currently playing Animal Crossing on a daily basis but have started to mix in Biohazard 4 and 5. I’d like to start Eastward and No More Heroes 3.
I finished reading five pages of a girl’s magazine (manga style) called ちゃお. There were words for sound effects, proper nouns, and slang/shortened expressions, which made it a little more difficult. I came across a couple words I thought were interesting.
擦りむく–すりむく–to skin (one’s knee); to graze; to scratch
飛び下りる–とびおりる–to jump down; to jump off; to jump from; to jump out of
Depending on the difficulty of all the lack of kanji in the 1st grade readings, I might start with the 2nd grade books and move to 1st grade assuming I’ve covered a lot of vocab in WK and can more accurately guess the meaning of the hiragana in the stories. Right now the list looks a little large, but I just wanted to start with the books I have on hand now. My goal is to finish at least 2 of them and get through the kanji drills for both grades (that I can find).
Currently Reading
Pocket Monsters Special Vol 2
絶叫学級 転生 2
獣の奏者１
なぜ？どうして？みぢかなぎもん (1年生)
夜カフェ１
Finished
Pocket Monsters Special Vol 1
絶叫学級 転生 1
Day 1
I was really tired from the NYE party, so I spent most of the day sleeping and taking care of baby. Since it was a survival day, I decided to cut myself some slack. I got through the 5 NHK Easy News articles. The one about the sumo wrestlers was the hardest to sift through because it had kanji and sumo terms I wasn’t familiar with. It was good practice though.
We caught the last part of Charlie’s Angels 2 on cable after midnight, so we watched it in English (after watching Home Alone in Japanese - but it was a recording so it didn’t have subtitles). We had to keep it down because everyone else was asleep so we took turns reading out the Japanese subtitles sometimes. When we got tired of it, I just read the subtitles to myself. Surprisingly it was an easy read. Also saw a word that appeared recently in WK: 屋上 when the sign for Roof Access was displayed.
I did a little more I forgot how much fun ラストゲーム was like as soon as I finished the first volume apparently, so picking it back up today I got swept up and suddenly I’d finished a whole chapter so all in all a good day 1!
More fun words
ちやほや - to pamper, fawn over (柳 living it up at a 飲み会 )
振り回す - to wield, wave about, to manipulate; it was interesting bc it was in the context of getting like strung along in a relationship? at least from what I could tell
365日にっぽんのいろ図鑑
Time spent: 47 min
Today’s color: 銀朱 (ぎんしゅ) - vermillion, specifically the kind made artificially from the sulfuration of mercury
WOW so the colors book is way harder than I thought it would be I might have to change my game plan here, because if it takes me this long to read it every day, I’m not sure I’m going to have time to read anything else…
I did get some interesting words from this, though
まばゆい - dazzling; glaring; dazzlingly beautiful
断層 (だんそう) - fault (as in a fault line)
硫化 (りゅうか) - sulfuration
連想 (れんそう) - association (of ideas); being reminded (of something); suggestion
鮮烈 (せんれつ) - vivid; striking
神聖視 (しんせいし) - regarding as sacred
そびえ立つ (そびえたつ) - to tower over the surroundings
Actually, the other book had a little blurb about this color too, supplying me with these interesting words:
畏怖 (いふ) - awe; fear; dread; fright
崇敬 (すうけい) - reverence
まいにち暦生活 日本の暮らしを楽しむ365のコツ
Time spent: 22 min
Today I learned about 若水 わかみず - first water drawn from a well on New Year’s Day (although the book mentions that nowadays, 水道水 すいどうすい - tap water is also fine xD)
What else did I read?
囀る鳥は羽ばたかない Vol 1
Amount read: 2 pages
Time spent: 52 min, somehow
This was a rough re-entry It’s been months since I picked this up and in that time I forgot pretty much everything that was happening and I left off in the middle of a very wordy scene, so…yeah. That did not go great xD
I really like how the opening post turned out 
I’ve been SRSing a lot of words I was finding while reading, which made the process extra tedious as well as possibly inefficient (since I’m likely running into the same words repeatedly). So I’ve been leaning towards the approach you described, and now I decided that I’ll give it a try. I’ll read for maybe a week or so without SRSing any new words, but still saving the words I look up (that I would otherwise SRS), and then will see how many of them I still remember. If I end up with a reasonable amount, I guess I’ll continue like this. Thanks again for helping flesh out my vague intention!
I love よつばと so much, it’s such an enjoyable manga.
