Chapter 19 of レンタルおにいちゃん today. Only 6 unknown words in the whole chapter, so that felt good!
I usually prioritise my book club reading on Saturdays… but since I only have one chapter left of this series I might finish it tomorrow and leave my book club reading stuff until afterward
To be honest, even as early as I am with it, it seems like a really hard book to try and turn into a film. Can’t really imagine how they would do it without it just being entirely voiceover or something and that doesn’t sound great. I will probably watch it at some point out of curiousity though!
This 100%! I have such a massive list of things that I want to read/play/watch etc. But they aren’t going anywhere I guess and by the time we get to them we will be that little bit better at Japanese which is a nice side effect!
Have you seen Kumirei’s Yomichan add-ons that add WK level/JLPT tags to Yomichan lookups? It took me a bit to find that info for kanji, but if you click on a kanji in a word in Yomichan and scroll down, it’ll tell you its WK level if it’s on here. WK has made some additions and such since then, so the add-on isn’t perfectly reliable, but I’ve gotten excellent use out of it so far.
365日にっぽんのいろ図鑑
Time spent: 14 min
Today’s color: 藍鼠 (あいねず) - indigo gray
Learned some good new stuff from this today
間 (あいだ) - obviously I knew this word, but I did not know that it could be used to mean “among a group” (for example, this color was popular among the common people in the Edo period)
いなせ - gallant; dashing; smart (the kanji are 鯔背)
め - used as a suffix to adjectives to mean “somewhat; -ish”
度重なる (たびかさなる) - to repeat; to be frequent
奢侈 (しゃし) - luxury; extravagance
大人びる (おとなびる) - to look (sound, behave) grown-up; to be adult-like; to mature
まいにち暦生活 日本の暮らしを楽しむ365のコツ
Time spent: 9 min
Today’s reading was all about ice floes - 流氷 (りゅうひょう). A cool word I learned today from this was 風物詩 (ふうぶつし) - feature of the season; something characteristic of a particular season.
What else did I read?
お前、タヌキにならねーか? Vol 1
Amount read: 22 pages
Time spent: 50 min
An extra long tanuki chapter today - a bully and her victim are forced to get to know each other better when こがね丸 casts a spell on them that causes them to turn into tanukis if they get too far away from each other. I think my favorite part of the chapter was near the end when こがね丸 comes out of the bushes again and he’s like “oh, they’re still hanging out together? the magic wore off a while ago” And then they finally try to show their parents what’s going on, only to find that it’s not happening anymore
Good words
目障り (めざわり) - eyesore; unpleasant sight; obstructing a view
ガリ勉 (がりべん) - person who studies very hard (at school); grind; swot; drudge
変質者 (へんしつしゃ) - degenerate; pervert; deviant
一睡 (いっすい) - wink of sleep; snooze; doze; nap
無断外泊 (むだんがいはく) - staying out overnight without giving notice; spending night(s) away from home without permission (leave)
決定権 (けっていけん) - right to decide; having say (in a decision)
ボロい - worn-out; crumbling
植え込み (うえこみ) - thick growth of plants; plantation; shrubbery; thicket
不審者 (ふしんしゃ) - suspicious person
隠し通す (かくしとおす) - to keep (something) a secret; to keep hidden (for ever); to continue to conceal
They’re really gorgeous books! All the illustrations are in color - from a quick glance-through, the しろくまにっき one seems to be mostly made up of single page “entries in the diary” without much-to-anything of an overarching storyline, while the やさしいしろくま one seems to have more of a story - kind of reminds me of a picture book. Will definitely update when I actually read them The author appears to have a Twitter too!
日本語: I read a fair amount of 伯爵と妖精 31, then realized I need to do the rest in one sitting (probably about 1.5 hours of reading). I didn’t have time for it yesterday (or today, sigh), so I switched to manga and read some of ダンジョン飯 1, some of DEATH NOTE 1, and a bit of からかい上手の高木さん 17. Read-aloud: We read a chapter of ふしぎの国のバード.
中国語
中国語: I read an intermediate entry on Mandarin Bean, one page of 擅长捉弄的高木同学, and a bit of 孩子最爱读的中国民间故事.
biohazard 0 HD Remaster is on sale on the Switch. Picked that up. One of the few RE/biohazard I haven’t played yet and I’m going in Japanese first. Should be interesting.
Today I read ten pages from ちゃお. I found a couple fun words, but I also did something different, and made a list of a bunch of boring (functional?) words and expressions that appear over and over again. I’ve already learnt a bunch of these words, but I thought it would be good to start to a list because it’s easy to mix them up. First, for the fun words:
こそこそ------sneakily; secretly; stealthily (onomatopoeic or mimetic word)
戛戛------かつかつ------clicking; clopping; clacking (onomatopoeic or mimetic word)
second, for the functional words/expressions:
Summary
だから------so; therefore
でも------but; however
なら------if; in case
じゃ無い------じゃない------is not; am not; are not
じゃん------isn’t it?; don’t you think?
ちょっと------a little; a bit; slightly
えっと------let me see; well; errr
ん------yes; yeah; uh huh
みたい-------like; sort of; similar to
けど------but; however
ても------even if; even though
あんな------that sort of; that kind of
だったら------if it’s the case
You make me want to continue Air sometime soon xD I started it but never got further than just a few screens in, so maybe that will be my next read after Kimi no Na Wa!
Day 24: January 27
魔女の宅急便 - 0,5 page
Only read half a page the day before yesterday, did not read yesterday (Persona 5 Royal is taking away all of my free time…)
A bit of a late post, but I read four more pages of 風つよ today! I didn’t have as much time as I would’ve liked but (honestly I spent a lot of time making myself not buy the new pokemon game but we’ll see how long that actually lasts)
Some things aren’t happening quite as I expected, and I’m really not sure whether it’s actually different or if I’ve just forgotten like these pages talked about ハイジ’s knee injury and we haven’t even brought up the hakone ekiden yet, and we still haven’t met 王子!! I really didn’t think these things were so separated but who knows
Anyway I’m still liking it a lot! Hopefully tomorrow I’ll have time to read more
Cool words
誘導尋問 - leading question
ぶっ飛ばす - to knock down, to send flying, to drive away
暗黙 - tacit, implicit
指標 - index, indicator
Thank you :') you were right, it’s been pretty manageable! Even the absence of furigana isn’t so bad most of the time
This is very relatable tbh I think a lot of my greatest progress has come with fighting through things that are definitely way above my level that I’m super interested in, something about it just hits different so whatever works!
I haven’t read a whole lot of manga yet to be fair, so maybe there’s some truly absurd fonts out there, but I have to say those seem a lot rougher than most I’ve seen and I absolutely don’t blame you for holding off on it That font with the circles is really something.
Have finished the first volume of the today’s special Shirokuma Café. Some of the puns are really good. Loved the whole 肉食 草食 ロールキャベツ discussion, with the nice double meaning for men in japan ^^. Also liked the whole 469MA 969MA shenanigans and mixups. but since it relies heavily on prior knowledge or 語呂合わせ to be funny some of them are hard to grasp for me or fall flat since I have to look them up…
So today I decided to put the vol2 and vol3 on the backburner and start with Slam Dunk. Slam Dunk surprised me by how wordy it is in the first two chapters. I thought it would be more “showing rather than talking”. I mean nothing much is happening for now but it’s still a lot of ヤンキー shouting at each other filling pages and pages of dialog and beating each other up. Except for one really really nice double spread page of him trying to dunk it has no relation to basketball at all . At least some parts are decently funny.
For Solanin: I have the complete edition with both books and the after thingy all in one. And I just finished the first books worth. What a cliffhanger. Overall it has been picking up steam in the last 3 chapters. The first few chapters felt like an introduction of each character per chapter but now shi* really starts to go down. Can’t wait to read on.
What I noticed: The time it takes for me to finish a chapter of solanin varies greatly. The last one was pretty wordy and I had to make a ton of flashcards, so it took me 1h to read. The one today had pretty simple language (only 2 lookups) and was done in like 10 mins. Don’t know what to make of that
Either way I enjoy reading all your updates; keep them coming. I will try to post another update next week, however, it’s dependent on how smooth the move of my parents goes.
I love Solanin, definitely one of my favorite manga of all time! Inio Asano uses simple conversations, abstract conversations and sometimes just his drawings to convey his meaning. That does not really help if you want to read one chapter and take around the same time for every chapter xD
I’m really curious about your overall reaction when you finish reading it. I can really recommend seeing the movie (or just this scene) after you’ve completed it.
Which is why I’m thinking of stopping my detailed record of my study habits. I originally started as a way to justify spending ~$50 on a children’s kanji dictionary from Gakken, saying once I had studied 100 hours I could order it. Then there were more things that were above my level but I really wanted anyway. But now I’ve gotten to the point where my accumulated hours exceed my book budget anyway.
Also, not having to always pay attention to the time would be nice, it will leave me more time to post in the forums , and I can always start again if I want to make any comparisons with my study habits of the last year or so.
So, maybe soon I’ll be posting a little more frequently here!
And I wanted to say thanks to @rikaiwisdom and @windupbird for reading books I’m interested in and posting word lists! I’ve been sneakily copy/pasting them into a document for potential SRS before reading the book myself.
Oh, had I known they were very useful for some of you I’d have kept posting them :o I’m just being super lazy lately . I’ll try to resume it and post them frequently.