Winter 2022 Reading Challenge Completion Post
Completion: 54 / 59 days (91.5%)
Work done:
- 君の名は → completed, 252 pages.
- 星の王子さま → 45 pages.
- NHK News → 9 articles.
Thoughts on the Winter 2022 challenge:
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I read my first ever novel in Japanese so for that alone I’m quite satisfied. 君の名は was a cool book, and even though I preferred the movie because I think the visual aspect is just too great, there were things that I really liked in the form of text. It was enjoyable, and I could stay committed everyday for the whole book, so I think that tells a lot.
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星の王子さま is kind of another story. As I mentioned several times already, I underestimated this book and the amount of hiragana words broke my motivation sometimes, because it took too long to parse everything. I thought it was going to be easier but it was a bit of a challenge, which is all good but… I think I wasn’t looking forward to reading it too much, and I might just drop it at this point. I’m not sure, it’s undecided. I wasn’t enjoying the process a whole lot. I might keep going, or I might come back to it at some point.
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Happy that many new people joined, and that the thread got a lot more attention than the previous ones, which were already very active. And also glad that many of you will stay and/or come back in the next one
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Also happy that my perception has changed from full-completion perfectionism to a read-more-than-usual mindset. Though I won’t lie, there’s still a small corner of my brain that is disappointed I missed 5 days, but it’s getting smaller and smaller each challenge. As I said the other day, I’m starting to see this more as a study log with friends than anything else, and I love it. As many of you, I really like the social aspect of this, and just coming back to see what you all have read or said is enough to make me do the same. It’s the magic of the daily updates, it keeps so many people going it’s so silly. It’s like, everyone is doing their best, I have to do my part, contribute a tiny bit, even though ultimately this is all for ourselves alone.
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I’m not sure what I want to do for the next one. I don’t have any physical book apart from 君の名は and 星の王子さま and I’m not sure if I’ll get another one. I’ll look around to see if there’s anything close to 君の名は in level, perhaps a tiny bit harder, that I’d like to read. But as always, something that is so easy for me to keep going is video games, so will most likely do that next again.
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I should probably have multiple resources going, so that if I don’t feel like doing something I don’t need to feel bad and do it when I can simply do something else. Reading NHK news when I didn’t feel like reading 星の王子さま was alright, buuuuuut… news aren’t particularly fun, to be honest. When I think of fun, I don’t think of reading a newspaper
. It was mostly a way to avoid the discomfort of reading the book, more than genuine interest. So next step, find a few resources I like (again) and rotate them.
Thank you all for the encouragement, participation and fun! These threads as always are a pleasure to be involved in, and they’ve made me read much more than I would do on my own. I completely share @Redglare 's sentiment, quoting:
I’m also really bad at doing things for myself, because if I’m not required to do something, I default to “I’ll do it later” perpetually. I feel like the challenge is a “silly”, artificial type of commitment that my brain surprisingly accepts, and puts the focus on something coming from the outside, instead of something coming from me. It might not be super healthy or sustainable long term, possibly, I don’t know, but as someone who struggles with mental health and anxiety at the moment, I think whatever works is welcome. Whatever drives me and gets me doing things is welcome, even if I’d love to eventually have the drive coming from myself as opposed to an external source. But you have to work with what you can at the moment 
. And this is what works well for me right now, so hoping to participate in these challenges as they come!
終わり