📚📚 Read every day challenge - Winter 2022 ☃❄

:house:

Day 35. Read the other half of page 226 and also page 227 of Kiki. It’s finally the weekend… I’ll try to read a fair amount before it gets super busy again. Maybe even up to Chapter 11 (the last chapter)? I’m only going to get busier from here, so honestly I need to speed up and finish Kiki as quickly as possible so I can read some easier stuff (back to Zenitendou) without focusing so much on amount.

I mean, I really have dragged Kiki on for long enough :joy:. It’s a nice, wholesome story, but about ten months is a while, you know?

Edit: I’m kind of considering abandoning the rest of my Japanese studies just this weekend so I can have fun reading the rest of Chapter 10 tomorrow and Chapter 11 on Sunday. If I know I’m only going to do reading as my daily Japanese study (well, I’ll also need to do WK, but that doesn’t count), I’m sure I’ll be able to do that with no problems. And since I won’t be rushing to ‘have my daily reading intake,’ I can enjoy myself.

23 Likes

:tiger2: :books: Homepost - Tigerdate: 20220204 :books: :raccoon:


Tanuki Scroll XXXV: マウイの仕事 :crescent_moon:

Read today’s world folktale, from New Zealand!

It was a bit of an origin or creation story - how humans learnt to cook and how they discovered fire, also how New Zealand came into existence (it was fished out of the sea!), and capturing the sun and beating it with a stick until it agrees to rotate around the earth slower so that the crops can grow better :laughing:

☆ Learnings ☆

New Words

ニュージーランド ー New Zealand
(Not really a new word, but I don’t think I’ve seen it in Japanese before, surprised it uses ジ not ゼ but the katakanisation of words always surprises me)
あご骨「あごぼね」ー Jawbone. Also written as: 顎骨「がっこつ or あごぼね」

Bonus from the Traditional Colours of Japan book I bought awhile ago
Been reading this when I can, it’s a bit difficult Japanese-wise, but thankfully there’s furigana on some of the obscure stuff! It’s also weird how different it feels to read Japanese “physically” rather than just on a screen.

Some Words

「まん」ー Outdated kanji for 万: 10,000
染物「そめもの」ー Dyeing; Dyed goods (more common as: 染め物)
手鑑「てかがみ」ー Collection of handwriting; Model, Example

22 Likes

Summary Post

February 4
星の王子さま, p. 27-30.

23 Likes

Well that’s a scary sounding vegetable when it’s written all in hiragana. It’s time for me to study more kanji :laughing:

6 Likes

Day 35!

Chapter 4 of よつばと! today. I really enjoyed this chapter, Jumbo is hilarious. I got a little confused in the middle, but I’ve come to the conclusion that it was meant to be a bit random and chaotic! Since Jumbo is jumping to the wrong conclusions about why Yotsuba’s dad has a high school girl in his house….

(Home Post)

20 Likes

Home post :house:

Day 28:

I read two pages of よつばと! today :four_leaf_clover: It’s getting a bit easier :slightly_smiling_face:

Ah, I just realized my posts probably don’t look as good to people browsing in dark mode 😅


22 Likes
VNs

Oh, I totally get that :grin: I haven’t played it in any language yet, but from what I heard about it, I definitely don’t expect to be an easy read. I might still try it if I have some extra time, if just to see how hard it’s going to be, but I don’t have high hopes.

(I’m also not sure that I’ll have enough free time any time soon to invest in a long-ish and complicated game, let alone with the handicap of playing it in Japanese, i.e. at a much reduced speed and likely with incomplete understanding. But if I had the time, I would totally go for it, so whatever excuse I make up, in reality time is probably the main limiting factor. :caught_durtling:)

Besides, it’s not like I’m dead set on playing Danganronpa as my first VN in Japanese – it’s just that I have it in my Steam library in hopes of playing it some time, and it has Japanese support unlike many other VNs on Steam. So I’ll definitely play it at some point, and I might check it out soon just out of curiosity and totally not get sucked in for weeks/months making next to no progress :grin:

That’s actually a great idea, thanks!

I haven’t heard of it, but looks like something I might like, so I guess I’ll save it for later – when I have more experience :slight_smile: Thank you!

Personally, I don’t mind slice of life at all, as long as it doesn’t lean too much into the realm which VNs have a… reputation for :grin: But it’s a bit hard to find something that would be both enjoyable and (reasonably) easy to read.
E.g. your daily updates and screenshots of Summer Pockets have me quite intrigued by this particular game, but, say, Clannad or Little Busters don’t feel as enticing to me for some reason.
Aokana looks interesting, but apparently there’s some content that I’d prefer to avoid… And it seems to be so ubiquitous in romance VNs that it’s hard to find a good one without it.


Summary post

February 4 update:
Read chapter 11 of よつばと! today. Yotsuba was going her thing again, and it was hilarious. Sometimes I wonder how she gets away with her hijinks so easily. But they end up being both so funny and so innocent that I think I wouldn’t mind too much, too :grin:

19 Likes

Today has been chaos so much later update than usual. Today was 『マスクと共に』 which is a short blog post about corona policies and school. I thought this would be easy because it’s short but I honestly had to reread it a bit. The actual email from the school still puzzles me and I’m going to bring it up with my tutors next week. Learning opportunity, yeah?

I made the mistake @downtimes was referencing when I started out learning Japanese! I was reading a story about a rabbit who was told by an elephant he needed to eat 100 small にんじん to become big and strong but he made a mistake and at 100 large にんじん instead. In my head I was thinking "にん=人 and じん=人…he’s eating people?! :scream: "

22 Likes

last two days have been bumper reading days!

Yesterday I read from about 70-92% in 世界から猫が消えたなら… and it made me cry for most of that time :sob::sob::sob::sob: I stayed up a bit later than intended reading because I was very hooked but managed to find an okay stopping point in the end.

I’ll most likely read more of that (might finish it) before bed tonight but after work I needed to catch up on Kikis for the book club I’m in. We’ve just moved to reading whole chapters each time and while I technically had 2 weeks to do so I left it until now (the evening before) lol. I still find Kiki a struggle to read, not quite sure what it is about it tbh. I need to catch up on book clubs more generally, I’m weeks behind with ハイキュー😥

Also played a bit more Persona 4 today, but once again wasn’t able to get Game2Text working (again, more my laptop issues than anything wrong with the tool) so no pretty flashcards for anki but I played for an hour and am really enjoying it! I’ve played persona 5 before (with English subs) but this is my first time playing 4 and I’m really liking the slightly more spooky vibe it has already. Still not too far in, but this time the three main characters went inside a TV and met a strange fun クマ🐻 Still really surprisingly comprehensible! I do expect that it will get harder as it gets more into the plot but it’s still really nice to be playing something that I remember thinking about playing earlier in my Japanese learning journey and thinking it would be too hard and to have it feel really nice and enjoyable :smiling_face_with_three_hearts::smiling_face_with_three_hearts::smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

22 Likes

Summary post :bookmark:

February 4

本好きの下剋上 8
Progress: (48% → 49%)

It has been a super long day, I need to go sleep. And finally weekend again~ :durtle_the_explorer:

22 Likes
Another VN response

If nothing else, Summer Pockets blows them out of the water in production value and art style in my opinion (it’s so much more recent, to be fair), so I have that same feeling on my side. Little Busters actually doesn’t look that appealing to me but it’s SO commonly extremely praised that I want to give it a shot on reputation alone.

Yeah that’s totally fair. Some VNs go… very far, in various ways. I’ve certainly gone through some excessive stuff for the sake of the surrounding story. And I know very little about that game to be honest! I’m mainly just cross referencing what is in general really highly rated in the VN communities with what I perceive to be their difficulty. This does approach indirect spoiler territory, but if you’re trying to avoid particular content, VNDB tags might be useful for ensuring a work doesn’t have that. They seem pretty thorough. Best of luck anyway, with whatever you try :grin:


Summary post

You know… reading is hard.

I kinda managed? But Summer Pockets definitely took a turn for the tiring, today. Perhaps this screenshot can illustrate:

To be fair, this is a reference to a quote, and this sentence isn’t THAT bad when you know what’s going on, but those are 2 allegedly N1 grammar points sandwiched together in one sentence. I already knew ざる, and べからず isn’t so bad if you already know べき. Still, it’s more indicative of how all of this was written than I’d like. Combine that with sentences that use words like 抜き手 (jisho defines as a traditional swimming overarm stroke) and with onomatopeia used as verbs which I had to search that sound effect site for because they’re not on Jisho and, well, oof. Both of those were in the same sentence, and plenty more like it was elsewhere. I can puzzle through this stuff with resources on hand and a lot of time but it really makes one wonder just how many years it’s going to take to approach anything near real independent reading comfort, you know?

I don’t mean to be a downer, this isn’t really despair-posting; I’m going to go right back to reading Zoo later tonight or something and keep going at it. But this language sure is a lot, isn’t it? I picked this VN because it’s on the easier side :sweat:

24 Likes

That’s going to vary a ton by content, too. I can read cheap mystery thriller paperbacks with very little dictionary help (or none if I don’t care about how to pronounce certain kanji compounds) but if you saw my rant the other day, my current non-pulpy crime novel is taking a ton of dictionary lookups and time spent puzzling through sentences to just hang on.
And I’ve said elsewhere too that years is a bad measure compared to hours/pages. I personally track both and note them into my (private) study log. It kind of helps me to instead of being like “let’s see where I’m at in 3 months” to say “let’s see where I am in 1000 pages”.

But I get it. Completely.

16 Likes

Oh yeah that’s totally true, it’s just even something that is for all purposes “be a young boy spending vacation with some girls on an island” which you’d hope would be as simple and everyday in terminology as it could get, it takes no time at all to run into wildly specific words, or something like 猪突猛進 (headlong/foolhardy/reckless 4 kanji compound I saw today). Elsewhere would be even worse, but the well here is far from drying up, haha.

Oh yeah, I’m just kinda using that as shorthand for how much time this is gonna take me. Thus far at least I’m still managing to pour a pretty high amount of time into this – but for any sort of meaningful tracking purposes, I’m thinking about time spent or amount read only. But in a general, overall sense the “when” matters, y’know?

I feel you though. And I mean, I mostly knew to expect this? I think the sheer quantity of extremely specific odd words and degree to which it’s using stuff like sound effects everywhere is catching me off, just more than I anticipated, but I didn’t expect anything native to be easy so I don’t mean to make it sound like my expectations were too short, you know?

9 Likes

So the nice thing about super specific words with kanji is that they actually become way less problematic over time. Consider 猪突猛進ちょとつもうしん - to me at a glance this reads kind of like “reckless advancement” which lines up with the definitions you provided. Why did I think that? 猪 is a wild boar and I know 突 from 唐突 (abrubt); 猛 I know from 猛烈 (intense) and 進 from 進む/邁進/etc. I would have totally botched the pronunciation, but in the context of a sentence I would have shrugged and moved on because the feeling/meaning of the word comes through.
So I can’t really say when this started happening but after so much repetition and having so many other words in your arsenal one day you start just kinda vaguely ‘getting’ it from context. I hope this sounds as positive as I’m intending it. :sweat_smile:

Sound effects I have no idea on. Godspeed. :joy:

11 Likes

If you ever read 鬼滅の刃 you also get a character who is pretty much the literal embodiment of this word and yells it constantly lol. One way to learn it hahha.

82386074

12 Likes

That looks like a lot of fun! Never know where these words are gonna show up I guess. Is this character always a boar or do they just… do a head replacement during the charge?

Meant to say this earlier, but I’m glad you’re enjoying the game! Someday you have to try Persona 3 – I think it’s actually my favorite, and certainly the spookiest.

To be fair, I directly typed the jisho definitions, but going by the Japanese definitions it seems it can refer to the actual charge itself too, so you’re probably just outright correct. Much appreciate the explanation! I know about this conceptually but it’s been both a little hard to trust myself since sometimes they get weird, and I’m probably addicted to dictionary use; I’m in a stage where I still need to cement the reading of just about everything, so it’s hard for me to let any of that go, heh. But I suppose trusting context comes more naturally when you aren’t doubting your understand of everything else as much as I currently kind of have to (also in this specific case I didn’t know the boar kanji yet).

9 Likes

Another way to look at it is how long is it going to take 'til reading is fun enough that you often want to do it?

In my experience that happens much much much earlier (you may already be there!) and starts a bit of a feedback loop where even the answer to your original question might happen sooner than you expect (and even if it doesn’t – who cares, you’re having fun). The more you read means the more you get used to it which means the more circumstances you’re able to read and enjoy it which means the more you read, etc.

Kind of like an asymptote! The line might never reach 0, but it sure makes a lot of progress towards it fast, and it’d be a pity to overlook that just because of how far away the infinite goal is
image

13 Likes

Summary post

Day 35: February 4th

365日にっぽんのいろ図鑑
Time spent: 13 min
Today’s color: 若草色 (わかくさいろ) - bright green; chartreuse green

I love this color, it’s plant color! :seedling: New growth, full of energy :muscle:

Good words
  • 新緑 (しんりょく) - fresh verdure; new green leaves
  • 黄緑 (きみどり) - pea green; yellow-green
  • 淀み (よどみ) - faltering; hesitation; pause
  • 清々しい (すがすがしい) - refreshing (e.g. feeling, scene, wind, morning air); brisk; bracing; fresh; refreshed
  • 例える (たとえる) - to compare (something) to; to liken; to speak figuratively; to use a simile; to use a metaphor
  • 新枕 (にいまくら) - bridal bed
  • 枕詞 (まくらことば) - pillow word; decorative word used prefixally in classical Japanese literature​ (what a cute word to describe this idea)
  • 若菜 (わかな) - young greens; young herbs
  • 摘み (つまみ) - picking; harvesting
  • 無病息災 (むびょうそくさい) - sound health​

まいにち暦生活 日本の暮らしを楽しむ365のコツ
Time spent: 7 min

Today’s reading was about 立春大吉 (りっしゅんだいきち), which is perfectly symmetrical so it looks the same from the front or from the back. You write this on a piece of paper and hang on your gate - when oni come in, they look back over their shoulders, read it, think “oh, I must not have actually gone in yet” and go back out xD Oni aren’t the brightest bulbs in the box, are they

What else did I read?
海のどうぶつが可愛すぎて!
Amount read: 5 pages
Time spent: 29 min

Learned about differences between ハクジラ and ヒゲクジラ today hee hee, moustache whales. One difference is apparently that ハクジラ have a single blowhole while ヒゲクジラ have two?

Please enjoy these dolphins saying ください :laughing: Idk why I find this so cute haha

Today's whales
And today's words~
  • 抜粋 (ばっすい) - extract; excerpt; selection
  • ちぎる - to tear to pieces; to tear to shreds; to tear up​
  • オキアミ - krill
  • がばっと - suddenly; all of a sudden; quickly; emphatically; energetically​
  • 伸び縮み (のびちぢみ) - expansion and contraction; elasticity; flexibility
  • 肺呼吸 (はいこきゅう) - pulmonary respiration
  • 声帯 (せいたい) - vocal cords
  • くっきり - distinctly (standing out); clearly; in sharp relief; boldly
  • 素早い (すばやい) - quick; swift; nimble; agile
  • 活発 (かっぱつ) - lively; active; vigorous; animated; brisk
  • だんだら - (with) broad horizontal stripes of different colors; unevenness
  • 縞模様 (しまもよう) - striped pattern
  • 縞々 (しましま) - striped; stripes

Can relate, especially with regard to needing to/wanting to cement the readings - my memory for meanings is >>>>> than my memory for readings and that bothers me, so my solution is to look everything up all the time (even when I’m pretty sure I know roughly what it means) and hope it eventually sticks. It’s…time-consuming lol. I don’t really know what else to do though. …Feels wrong to just gloss over it without knowing how to read it. Especially since reading is my only form of “study,” really

24 Likes

Oh certainly, that is a great point! I agree. I guess how I’d personally describe it is: people definitely can get in the middle of this and get lost in the weeds of forgetting what it was that they started learning the language for. And honestly the fact I can even fake my way through what I can is kind of amazing to me. While I’m commenting on the enormity of that, tone is hard online, and I’m mostly just remarking on it with awe (ok maybe slight frustration mixed in), but it’s not like I’m feeling defeated about it or anything.

I’m already having fun, but I’d qualify that by saying if people truly grow to love the very learning process as much as some of them make it sound… I don’t think that’s totally me. I’m learning Japanese in part because I’m excited about so much Japanese media, and reading that is absolutely fun! (Listening is umm, for the most part well below the fun threshhold but I’m trying haha). But the fun basically scales with how much I’m successfully comprehending. I don’t hate outside lookups, they’re not ruining the fun, but the real pleasure is in the act of understanding the art, so the more I become able to speed up and get stumped less, the greater the enjoyment will become. Plus, more options will open at that point.

So I very much think you’re right, and I’m totally sticking with it because I do want to keep reading! But it’s exactly because my goal is reading that I’m talking about how soon I can do that better.

11 Likes

Home post

Day 34:

日本語: I read some of ミステリークロック, some of 機動強襲型令嬢アリシア物語1, and a bit of からかい上手の高木さん.
Read-aloud: We read a chapter of ふしぎの国のバード (and finished v6).

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.

23 Likes