📚📚 Read every day challenge - Winter 2022 ☃❄

Tonight I read eight pages from Death Note. I also completed translating the recipe for どんぶり from my 食戟のソーマ (Food Wars) Cook Book. Here are a couple of the words I learnt.

菜箸------さいばし------long chopsticks (for cooking, serving, etc.)

盛り------もり------serving (of food); helping (noun, used as a suffix, Counter)

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:house:

Day 33: Just read page 224 today. So many things to do still haha… I’m so tired.

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Today’s reading was 『次の波が気になるぅ〜』 which is a blog post. Very short, but not necessarily easy for it. I had to focus more to understand because it was less direct writing than a simple factual articles. I should probably try to do more of these as they are more challenging and what I’m ultimately looking to refine my own skills on.

As for what it was about - the concept of waves of change and what ‘wave’ we are currently in.

Some words I looked up

うねり - large wave
様式 - style of doing s.t.
変革 - transform into s.t. new
脱産業社会 - “post industrial society”

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Yesterday was quite a remarkable day. New event in TWSD popped out and I decided to translate it myself. Unfortunately, Jade and Sebek speak in such exquisite manner so I wasn’t able to understand most of their replies, but I got the overall direction of the story and most part of other guys dialogue.
I will try to return to it later, in order to decipher all grammar and some tricky words.
Learning て、ている and past forms really helped.

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Day 28: February 1

  • 君の名は。page 188-190 (75%)

Day 29: February 2

  • 君の名は。page 190-210 (83%)
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Home post :house:

Day 26:

I read two pages of よつばと! today :smiley:

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:tiger2: :books: Homepost - Tigerdate: 20220202020220202 :books: :raccoon:


Tanuki Scroll XXXIII: 渡辺綱と酒呑童子 :japanese_ogre:

Read today’s Hyakumonogatari, from Kyoto Prefecture!

About Watanabe no Tsuna [渡辺綱] and Shuten-Doji [酒呑童子].

Shuten-Doji is just ~TOO. DAMN. HOT.~ all the women are sending him marriage proposal letters:

≪ お願いです! わたしと結婚してくださいぃぃ~ ≫

He puts all the letters in a chest and burns them, but the combined feelings that all the women poured into those letters twists the smoke into a spirit and curses Shuten-Doji with the face of an ogre. He flees to the mountains and becomes a demon, then plans a siege on Kyoto.

In comes Watanabe no Tsuna to save the day and severs Shuten-Doji’s arm, but this just makes Shuten-Doji all the more determind. So now, by the Emperor’s request, in comes Minamoto no Yorimistu [源頼光], the strongest in the city, to go to the mountain and slaughter the demon with his* four loyal retainers: the previously mentioned Watanabe no Tsuna [渡辺綱], Urabe no Suetake [部季武], Usui Sadamitsu [碓井貞光] and Sakata no Kintoki [坂田金時] - aka, Kintaro [金太郎], Golden Boy.

They manage to trick the demons into drinking some magic alcohol that weakens them and behead Shuten-Doji, however his head flies off into the clouds shouting about his revenge, and thus the legends of his head swooping down to drink people’s alcohol is born.

*

*In a lot of modern renditions (especially games, including Nioh 2!) Minamoto no Yorimitsu is depicted as a woman. Minamoto no Yorimitsu was also known as Minamoto no Raikō and there’s sometimes discrepancies between the two: that they were actually two people - brother and sister - or that Raikō was Yorimitsu’s true female name (or vice versa). It’s kinda hard to find much about it as searching for it comes up with a lot of game-related info. Pretty much all historic info stuff I’ve read refers to him being a man, so I’m not sure were or how it started, but it’s pretty cool anyway.

I thought I hadn’t learnt any Japanese from Nioh 2, but I could vaguely recall some of the kanji names of the warriors, especially 源頼光. So yay! (Suppose it also helps that I already know about about these legends).

Also, sorry this got kinda long, I love this sorta stuff, historic figures having legends about them fighting demons is just too. awesome.

☆ Learnings ☆

New Words

ほれぼれ「惚れ惚れ」ー Fondly; with adoration
色男「いろおとこ」ー Lover; Player/Stud; ~ Sexy Man ~
からびつ「唐櫃」ー Six-Legged Chinese-style chest
生意気「なまいき」ー Impudent; Audacious; Cheeky; Cocky

Historic Places
丹波の国「たんばのくに」ー Tanba Province, now part of Kyoto Prefecture.
羅生門「らしょうもん」ー Rashomon
A gateway built at the end of Suzuka Avenue in Kyoto. Though, here (for the story) the kanji is: 羅生門, the kanji for the actual gate is: 羅城門 「らじょうもん」the story (which derives from 15thC Noh play) is altered as a pun. Here’s a copy-paste:

“The title is a pun, which involves the Rajōmon (羅城門) outer castle gate but Kanze (the author) changed it by using the kanji shō for “life” rather than the original jō for “castle” (note that 羅城門 was originally read raseimon and 生 can also be read as sei .)”

Not sure what we can do with this information but maybe it’ll come up one day in a pop quiz that’ll determine the fate of the world… Rashomon is also a Kurosawa film but different story, and I recognise the name from that but never saw the name in kanji.

Folklore Things
神便鬼毒酒「じんべんきどくしゅ」ー A magical potion said to increase a human’s power 5-fold, but make a demon weak and numb.

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Since everyone posts their updates at different times of the day, I thought it’d be fun to do a poll on everyone’s time zones. Note: The votes are public so everyone can see what you chose.

What’s your approximate time zone?
  • Asia :earth_asia:
  • Europe/Africa :earth_africa:
  • America :earth_americas:
  • Durtling Reading from space :durtle: :rocket:

0 voters

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Summary Post

February 2
星の王子さま, p. 14-17


I completely underestimated this book. I was expecting it to be easy to read but it’s kicking my butt a lot :joy: . There’s a lot of vocabulary I don’t know, the hiragana is proving to be a pain, and also the narration in polite です・ます is definitely a change, which I like. But I’m having a lot of fun with it so it’s fine. But yeah, 4 pages is the most I can do in a full hour, for now at least. 4 pages were enough to find the 20 unknown words I try to aim for every day (though not always possible, of course).

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Summary post :bookmark:

February 2

本好きの下剋上 8
Progress: (43% → 45%)

The introduction of new characters is bringing new perspectives to the characters we’re already familiar with :eyes: Like the super OP old lady who has known the shinkanchou since he was a kid and keeps calling him 坊ちゃま. :joy:
Him, with a big frown: “As I keep saying, can you please stop calling me that?”
OP old lady: “After you’ve gotten married” (Everyone knows that’s not gonna happen, so she’s not going to stop calling him 坊ちゃま).
Mayne: tries her best not to roll on the floor laughing

笑わない数学者
Progress: 42% → 44%

Managed to understand descriptive part :durtle_noice: Now I’m on ch. 5 part 3. I dunno how many parts there are. Maybe @NicoleIsEnough knows? :eyes:

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I did not know, but luckily I have a book where I can check such things :wink: Chapter 5 is divided into 6 parts.

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Thanks for checking! :high_touch:

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I’ve been meaning to ask this for a while now. Could you share what exactly your setup for VNs looks like? I remember you mentioning Yomichan, which is a browser plugin, right? Did you somehow hook it up directly with VNs, or do you use the browser in parallel with reading a VN? If the latter, do you somehow copy the text from the VN, or how exactly do the instant lookups work?


Summary post

February 2 update:
Read chapter 9 of よつばと! today. よつば is always funny, often in unusual ways, but this chapter was a ride :rofl: I haven’t seen anything this ridiculous in a while.

I'll let this picture speak for itself

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Really appreciate everyone’s nice comments! Glad you’re enjoying the screenshots, cause I certainly like posting them. :grin:

Love to see it! Having more people playing this stuff is exciting for me. And I can’t wait to hear what you think over time, such a good series. The digital root was kind of a weird concept for me, so I’m glad you were able to follow the description in Japanese, haha.

Summary post

From a reading perspective, middle of the road, kind of? Nothing too despair-inducing, though I’d say I struggled more than average. It was, surprisingly, conversational stuff this time. Some of those blocks of kana still throw me off… it’s hard to describe; I should’ve taken a screenshot of the kind of line I mean, but there are times when it’s just a mass of なんs and particles and the like and it’s hard to directly turn that into words – I think there’s a certain layer of intuition for those kinds of sounds and conversational indirectness that I just don’t have yet. Perhaps even mixed in with sentence parts that serve more to replicate real life fillers or otherwise soften the text moreso than add meaning. Does that make sense?

All that said, today was an exciting mixup, and I ended up with a bunch of screenshots I wanted to share as I went along… I’m just going to collapse this section and indulge myself for those interested, because as you’ll see, it’s a bit of a special occasion.

Today's experience

First, I came across this image and wanted to share it early. It’s the former mountain path in the evening light – I love what this VN does with times of day. It’s, as you may expect, a very summer-oriented experience, but the altered vibes of otherwise familiar places make me think how cool it would be to see this art in other seasons.

But then I realized I couldn’t just share that, because I came across an upside-down man.

And then, of course, we played ping pong.

It actually entirely slipped my mind that this visual novel has minigames, so this was a fun surprise. It’s totally optional, but on a first play at least, I had fun. You can see those circles behind him – basically a ball comes at the screen and you click the circle it’s heading towards, scoring better based on your timing. The circles change in size, shift around, and grow to 5 instead of 3. It’s a simplistic clicking timing game, but it’s fun. I’ve always loved rhythm games, sunk tons of my life into Rock Band and Guitar Hero and the like.

I did well, apparently, I think! I did hit the ball a whole lot of times, and he seems impressed. For now the plot is starting to move on, but I suppose I’ll be coming back to this in the future.

Oh yeah, I should add a word. Definitely 死力を尽くす (しりょくをつくす), to make frantic efforts. Also the name of the ping pong mode I played haha.

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Oh yeah, sorry, you posted this as I was typing my update. Instructions I followed are here if you get interested in doing it, but the overview of how it works is:

I use textractor, a text hooking program to directly extract the game’s script as it plays. Then I use a browser addon clipboard inserter combined with a page someone has set up for this purpose to automatically copy and paste the text from the texthooker into my browser. From there, yeah, it’s Yomichan for quick hover lookups, and I have Yomichan configured so that at the click of a single button, it creates an Anki card for the word along with the sentence it was mined from. All of that takes a little bit of upfront setup, but once you’ve done that, there’s really only a minute of opening everything along with my game, and otherwise I don’t have to think about anything at all (though when you start a new game, getting the texthooking right can be slightly finnicky).

(I should also note texthooking doesn’t always work – you may or may not be able to find people talking about this prior to getting a game? Some of it’s engine related so I want to say the more gameplay heavy ones don’t, but I’m honestly not sure. I get the impression it at least works frequently enough to be the go-to thing people learning from visual novels do most of the time, anyway. Ace Attorney didn’t work with this setup so I instead had to rely on game2text, one of those programs that just analyzes the image and does its best. It performed… well enough to be helpful, but I definitely had to clean up a lot of its results and/or do a little manual searching too)

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Summary Post

Day 33: Today I read 8 pages of よつば&!and finished chapter 24 :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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I technically live in America, but my sleep schedule is very messed up to the point where it would be a healthy sleep schedule if I lived in Australia :sweat_smile:

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Today I finished the first of 28 chapters in ものべの visual novel. I’m really enjoying it. It’s not that hard but there are still lots of words to look up and add into SRS.

Also read 60 pages of Domestic Girlfriend vol. 3 manga I may update this post with a vocabulary list tomorrow.

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Day 33!
I read chapter 3 of よつばと! today.
It was a fairly smooth read. Had to look up a few bits of vocab, but not a huge amount.
What I’m finding most difficult, is that Yotsuba’s speech is often written mostly in kana, so it sometimes takes me a little while to work out what some words are, because I’m more used to seeing their kanji version!

(Home Post)

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I picked Asia, but I’m in Australia :earth_asia:

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