Day 42:
日本語: I read a fair amount of 機動強襲型令嬢アリシア物語１ and a bit of ミステリークロック.
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.
Day 43:
日本語: I read a fair amount of ミステリークロック.
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.
Read-aloud: We read about half of the second story.
And another week completed! The remaining days are starting to look few.
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Fighting a similar battle here. The boiler is malfunctioning and we have been freezing here at times. Unfortunately, every time we get a technician out here the boiler is performing flawlessly. It’s malfunctioning again tonight. Leaving it off for a couple hours seams to have reset the boiler into a working order but the temp dropped a lot.
I was having a pretty easy time with it for the first 30 pages. Got to a section, on Thursday, that appears to be mixing time/location/reality, spent an hour reading and re-reading the same 3 pages before switching to an episode of Terrace House Aloha State (JA subs). I’ll come back to reading it again soon.
About to close out this Japanese Film Festival 2022 interest survey.
February 13 
Home Post
Alright, today was more normal 
I read some more ヴァニタス手記! I’ve been enjoying it a lot, actually; it’s absolutely gorgeous. There’s so much detail in basically every single panel, it’s wild. Honestly, I didn’t tend to read a whole lot of manga before I started studying Japanese (I generally stuck to anime and only really picked up manga if I really enjoyed a show and wanted more), but I think this might be converting me 
I just adore the way it’s all laid out, really. (And as gorgeous as it all is there’s still goofs and that’s the best combination)
Difficulty-wise, ヴァニタスの手記 is… strange lmao. Like 90% of the time it’s pretty simple, few to no lookups, not very dense, etc. but the other 10%? Oh boy, it hits with a vengeance I’ll be vibing just reading along no issue and suddenly I’m like “woah, what even are any of the words you just said”
All in all, I’m really glad I decided to give it a go! I expected it to be lot… weightier? of a read than it is, but it’s mostly just slow because I’m looking at all the pretty backgrounds 
失念 - forgetting, lapse of memory
爆睡 - fast asleep (like “crashed,” I love this lmao)
居合わせる - to happen to be present
もみ消す - to stub out, to cover up, to suppress
伯爵 - count, earl (bc we’re in ~France~)
礼儀知らず - rude, mannerless
名を騙る - to impersonate someone, to go under a false name
Oof spot on 
yes I’ve looked up this same conjunction variation like three times this session for no reason, and? I’ve gotta make sure I know One day I’ll have faith in my memory maybe
Over the last three days I’ve read sixteen pages of ちゃお、four pages of ぴこぷり, eight pages of Death Note, and nine pages of The Way of the HouseHusband. A few new words I learnt are:
肌身離さず------はだみはなさず------(carrying) close to one’s person; next to the skin
ギリギリ------grinding (sound); grating; gnashing
素潜り------すもぐり------skin diving; free diving
Day 2 - February 13
1 episode of Shirokuma Cafe with Japanese subtitles.
Couldn’t find the time/energy to crack open a manga today, but I read the subtitles for a whole episode, so… good enough haha. Wasn’t the most in-depth reading since I watched it straight through without stopping to look things up, but I understood a surprising amount, and the pacing was really beginner friendly. I actually enjoyed it which was nice. Previously I’ve tried watching K-ON (which didn’t have subtitles and is now no longer on Netflix :/) and Mitsuboshi Colors, but I just really don’t enjoy ‘cute girls doing cute things.’ I’ll be glad when I can start watching sports anime and more complex slice of life stuff.
Woop woop!
I’ve been at the challenge for a whole month now! Missed one day during our holiday trip, but I’m actually glad I managed to keep up otherwise. I definitely would have missed many more days if it wasn’t for the challenge.
Reading material wise I finished all the side stories of 時をかける少女 on February 11th (or was it the 10th?), so that book is officially finished now <3
To be honest, I was pretty disappointed about the latter half of the book. The first half was more action packed than I thought (so much so, that it caught me off guard) and the latter half was the complete opposite. Everything was basically resolved in one to two big and long dialogues and all that happened in between was “going to school”. I don’t necessarily mind dialogue focused story telling but it just felt a little weird?
The first half felt like setting up the time/space leaping as a system… then in the second half there’s the whole storyline “he’s a person of the future and there are these cool/weird science things in the future” (explaining time leaping and other stuff) which felt a bit like setting up another system… but then nothing happens with those systems and the story is just over?
To me it felt a bit like I had played through a game tutorial explaining all the game systems to me, but then the main game was cut. There seemed to be so many possibilities and stories that could have been told with those systems but then just nothing happens. I guess that’s why I’m a fan of longer series, because they can play more with different aspects of the world they set up.
Oh well, overall it was still a fun ride! And in a way it’s also just cool how I can experience this in a language I sometimes think I barely understand 
Sooo what’s coming now? I’m currently trying to catch up to the デスノート book club and once I do I’ll have to decide. I still have another volume of 黒魔女さんが通る on my kindle (I think the Cinderella one, so volume 4) so that’s pretty likely I guess?
Wholeheartedly agree with everything you said! The other members of the book club also generally thought along the same lines iirc. And no, I don’t think this is due to it being a standalone (short) book! We have read standalone books (200 - 300 pages) in the Intermediate book club, and they were amazing and well-balanced and interesting and everything. I think 時をかける少女 is just an example of a bad author. 
Day 45! I read pages 144-146 of 銭天堂 today. I have the whole day off tomorrow, so I will try my best to get more reading than usual done, although I do have other priorities.
I agree with the discussion above but admit that I kind of put that down to it being a kids’ book. I absolutely recommend it to people as it’s hard to find a book with more accessible language that even gets close to a normal book plot. It’s imperfect but it acts as a good gateway book, I suppose.
Today’s reading was https://meaning-book.com/blog/20190307161307.html
They compared the phrase to the English expression ‘eagle eyes’ and saying someone has ‘eager eyes’ but I’m not sure sure either of those actually fit that well after reading their explanation and example sentences using the idiom. It seems to carry a more negative meaning and imply fault finding which the English expressions do not.
Just finished reading volume 7 of Spy x Family. My phone was charging upstairs today so I read without looking up anything on phone during reading, afterwards I went over some spots again when it was fully charged. This volume has a nice variety of different stories, for one continuing where volume 6 leaves things off and having a bit of a Damian focus, before leading up to the next big arc. This put me a bit in a weird spot as a new arc has started, but I looked through volume 8 and it stops mid fight. So rather than jumping right in, I think it’s probably better to pause it till volume 9 releases. I can’t find much about the release schedule, except a line on the shonenjump+ website that lists it on april 4.
Anyway I made some pics you can look through in the details below.
I’ll think up of something new to read for tomorrow, probably something from the big pile of kindle manga.
Homepost - Tigerdate: 20220214 
Tanuki Scroll XLV: 鬼を退治した男の子 
Read today’s Hyakumonogatari, from Kagoshima Prefecture!
About a boy driving out a demon from the village.
ハッピーバレンタインデー！！
☆ Learnings ☆
退治「たいじ」ー Extermination (of pests/bandits/demons); Eradication; Renounce thy worldly desires to focus on the teachings of Buddha.
ずれ ー Gap; Lag; Slippage
利口「りこう」ー Clever; Wise; Bright; Sharp; Well-behaved
しめしめ ー All right!; Good!
天井裏「てんじょううら」ー (the gap) above the ceiling, so, the attic / loft - but it doesn’t necessarily have to be an accessible room, can just be an empty cavity between the ceiling and roof.
ピョンピョン ー Hopping; Skipping
ドタバタ ー Noisily running around; with heavy feet; in a fluster
イワシ「鰯 / 鰮 (Rare)」ー Sardine; Pilchard
Today I read five pages from なかよし. I learnt a lot of space terms, here are a few.
銀河------ぎんが------Milky Way, galaxy
宇宙------うちゅう------universe; cosmos; space
惑星------わくせい------planet
Happy Valentine’s Day, friends.
Summer Pockets: Today had a few bits that almost lost me (just… a little lost in what strings of hiragana were doing I guess, I dunno. Odd sentences), but it also featured a lot of just sitting back and casually reading! ~2700 characters and ~235 lines, not too bad for me. Very low key, mostly in between little scenes talking about cooking and stuff.
ベランダパリングルスの仲間 acquired. 
Zoo 2: Continuing to roll through this at a pace I’m super happy with, at 15% and page 27 after only like 3 days of reading it. This story has gotten increasingly comfortable despite the rocky start; suppose I learned all of its relevant words by now. I’m finding it maybe a little easier to incidentally pick up regularly encountered brand new kanji words in the wild, I think. 
And over time my experiences are shifting to more and more instances where I look up things and go “oh it’s that word again!” instead of everything feeling new and scary all the time. Good feelings.
I’m off to hopefully try the previously mentioned karaoke later!
Monobeno
I’m really shocked but reading it seems to get easier and easier every day seriously I may even finish reading it this year. Today I finished the third chapter there are still 25 more chapters to read. But I’m not just reading it I always also speak all the lines out loud. People may think I’m crazy but I think my pronunciation will improve that way.
A Town Where You Live Vol.1
It has some interesting situations lol. Just sat down and read 70 pages I would actually read more but I’m doing a course at a university right now and there is lots I have to read for it every day. If I read too much on a day I get bored of reading and have to do something else
There are a few book clubs that do read aloud sessions as well, if you’re interested in that? (It’s much more fun with more people than just one person alone, I think. Some clubs also read manga with assigned roles, that’s also super entertaining!)
February 14 update:
Finished volume 3 of よつばと！ today. Instead of reaching some conclusion on Jumbo’s infatuation with Asagi (unbeknownst to the latter, presumably), the manga decided to have everyone else, including the kids, capitalize on it – up to the point of blackmail It’s quite funny, but it feels like this situation isn’t going away any time soon, so I hope it’ll be played out creatively at least. So far I felt like the jokes based around Jumbo-Asagi were some of the weakest in the series (besides maybe the panel where he came all dressed up to their first failed rendezvous “arranged” by Yotsuba – that one was quite a whirlwind of emotions).
Yesterday I read all of this week’s assignment of 大聖堂 - this is the first time that I managed to read that amount in one day! 
Yesterday and today I read the second episode of しあわせのパン - almost done with it. I also reached the 50% mark today. That means I might be able to finish the book around the weekend or slightly afterwards, which leaves me with enough time to watch the movie in the film festival.
Day 45!
Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! 
I read Chapter 14 of 極主夫道 today - it took me a little while since there was no vocab in the bookclub sheet yet and there isn’t much furigana! But I did it, and I filled in the vocab sheet too 
