📚📚 Read every day challenge - Winter 2022 ☃❄

:house:

Day 4 — Read pages 29-32 of 銭天堂. It took me about 15 minutes, and I finished the first story. (For those not familiar with the book, it’s comprised of a few stories, each with its own adventure brought on by a sweet from the mysterious candy shop.)

I was supposed to start reading Kiki today, but I ran out of time, so I just read 銭天堂 instead lol. Oh well, I can read Kiki tomorrow.

Also, for some reason, I was expecting 銭天堂 to be slightly creepy with negative endings (for the protagonist) but it’s quite lighthearted, actually. :thinking:

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Day 4 complete! Today’s article was pretty short, 「こんな友達とは縁を切る」結婚式をドタキャンした友人から連絡が…!?→「コロナ禍の結婚式で友人と絶縁した話」作者インタビュー. Very modern topic but probably not something I would normally choose for myself. Google News has been chucking lots of Japanese articles at me again now that I’m reading them again. It’s…hit or miss.

Edit: I just realized there’s an awful lot of kanji in that title and we have a scattering of levels in this thread. Basically it’s an interview with the creator of a comic made on the topic of Corona-era weddings and the social troubles it brings.

Some words I looked up

寄り添う - to get close; to snuggle up (was used in a metaphorical sense)
新郎新婦 - bride and groom
執筆 - writing as a profession

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Well yesterday I had a big acheivement as I finished the Crayon Shinchan game on the Switch I said I would count as reading time! (so no more gaming-as-reading for me because I really don’t think this Rilakkuma game I’m playing counts…). It’s the first game I’ve played all the way through in japanese and I had a fairly good idea of what was going on…some of the time? so I’m feeling pretty pleased with myself. It seems designed to be played multiple times, because at the end it said that if you play again you keep the in-game currency you’ve acquired and any of the challenges you completed won’t need to be completed again, so presumably they’re expecting that you’ll focus on different aspects next time. Excited to go back to it in the summer when I have a few more months of grammar and vocabulary under my belt and give it another go.

Oh I had this in my reading today! It was a piece about traditional kimono dyes so that would make sense.

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Day 4 complete :slight_smile:
I started Volume 2 of レンタルお兄ちゃん. I was planning to read the first half of the first chapter since they are quite long chapters, but I was enjoying it too much to stop so I read the whole chapter!

Thats probably a good thing though, since its my birthday tomorrow so I’ll probably only be able to squeeze in a little bit of reading time because I’m going to be out all day.
I’m going to a cat cafe for lunch as a birthday treat :blush:

(Home Post)

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Happy birthday for tomorrow and cuddle all the kitties!

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:tiger2: :books: Homepost - Tigerdate: 20220104 :books: :raccoon:


Tanuki Scroll IV: 鬼の腕 :muscle:

Read today’s Hyakumonogatari [百物語] about a stingy rich guy making people work for little rice, employing a guy who has super massive biceps that drink sake (not the guy, the arms drink it) to replace them, and then the rich guy cutting of these arms to make them work for him (and giving these severed arms sake).

Moral of the story: don’t be stingy. And definitely don’t cut off people’s sake-drinking-demon-arms and make them work for weak, diluted sake, they will get their revenge, they need their sake.
《酒を飲ませろ! 酒を飲ませろ!》
I love this stuff, it’s mad :rofl:

It’s also 石の日! Stone day! Because い(1) and し(4) makes 石.
Yes, it’s return of the day-puns
Stones are supposed to have mystical powers so if you make a wish while holding a stone today it may come true!
(Or better, visit a shrine and touch a stone statue like a 狛犬 [こまいぬ] - legendary lion-dogs)

☆ Learnings ☆

New Words (there are a lot today)

なにわ 「難波」 ー An old name for the Osaka region
けち/ケチ ー Stingyness
小僧 「こぞう」 ー Youngster; boy. Brat.
ぞうり 「草履」 ー Traditional Japanese sandals. (I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this before, but I don’t feel I recognise it)
名案 「めいあん」 ー Good idea.
大番頭 「おおばんとう」 ー Head clerk
一人一人 「ひとりひとり」 ー One by one (for people); each (person).
うっかり ー Carelessly; Thoughtlessly
くの字 「くのじ」 ー The hiragana く, but here it’s used to be “to bend over (while sitting) in a く shape”, so, to be bent double.
おかず 「お菜」 ー A side dish (to accompany rice for example)
塩鮭 「しおざけ」 ー Salted salmon
ニッコリ ー Smiling broadly
力こぶ 「ちからこぶ」 ー Big biceps
チョロチョロ ー Trickling (of water)

Forgotten Meanings

なにしろ (at any rate; anyway)

Forgotten Readings

大工 「だいく」(Carpenter)

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Summary Post

January 4
君の名は , 10 pages.

Random words
  • 神主 = かんぬし (chief) Shinto priest.
  • 電動 = でんどう electric (as in a vehicle).
  • 抗議 = こうぎ protest, objection.
  • 盛大 = せいだい magnificent, prosperous.
  • 巫女 = みこ Miko, shrine maiden. (I really like this word and its kanji.)
  • ひたすら = doing nothing but, earnest, determined (works as an adverb and adjective).
  • 老若男女 = ろうにゃくなんにょ men and women of all ages (I also love this word).
  • 唾液 = だえき saliva.
  • 放置 = ほうち leave as is, leave alone (the word is a noun and する動詞).

Indeed :slightly_smiling_face: . At the same time, so far it’s proven to be very nice to bind the memory with the Japanese descriptions of the scenes. Of course I know what is happening, but as long as I still put the effort into reading it all and looking up what I don’t understand, it’s good to be exposed to how it’s described in Japanese, regardless. I’m honestly enjoying it a lot :smiley: .

This is literally me. I can’t help it; if there’s furigana, I’ll read it, no matter what. My eyes just drift there. Many people love furigana and find it really beneficial, but in my case I prefer to completely get rid of it because it didn’t feel super useful to me (other than your usual occasional furigana for specific words). Of course this might very well be because I already had a decent grasp on most kanji you encounter when reading, and knowing most of the readings makes the lookups much quicker and less tedious. But I also had concerns of not internalising kanji so I preferred the no-furigana route. I would say experiment! :slight_smile: It depends on how frequently you look up things; if you do constant lookups, it can get extremely boring very quick, and in this case I’d rather have furigana than quit whatever I’m reading.

I’m also a fan of doing handwritten lookups when I encounter kanji I don’t recognise. Sometimes it’s kanji I’ve forgotten, and other times kanji I don’t know. It’s fun, and the Japanese IME on PC has a really accurate handwriting function.

Having said that it’s worth noting that I don’t know a ton of vocabulary, I just know a lot of the kanji readings so it’s often easy to look up things. But I still look up so many things, I have so much vocabulary to learn.

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Thanks for the write-up, I definitely wouldn’t have gotten that from the title. I can see “Corona”, “Interview” and I recognize some of the kanji, but that’s it. I’m surprised by the varied levels in this thread as well. It’s very encouraging.

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Looking forward to them :slight_smile:

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In the last three days, I’ve read Chapter 6 of 極主夫道, which means I can keep up with BC pace of 2 chapters per week, as long as I read 30-60 minutes everyday.

Home post

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Yesterday and today I read this week’s assignment of 笑わない数学者 - it’s somehow really good to read another book of that series. Everything seems somehow familiar, even the vocab does not feel that unknown or hard. Plus, we are starting some interesting speculations in the reading thread, which is big fun!

I also started another project :grin: A Japanese friend of mine moved to Germany almost a year ago, and he is interested in European culture and churches and stuff. So I suggested that we could read one of my favorite books together - Ken Follet’s The Pillars of the Earth, which is the book from which I got most of my knowledge about churches and architecture. My idea was that we could read it together in Japanese, but he suggested he could read it in English instead. So now we are doing a Japanese-English study tandem :joy_cat: I’m super curious how this goes, and I have no idea of his level of English.
Today I started to read the prologue (which is the part we agreed on for this week), and boi this is haaard! A ton of unknown variables that are waiting for me… and the English is not better, I just checked the page or so I read today. We will probably be slowly chugging away at this monster of a book for the next two years or so :rofl: Although I hope that it will get a bit better once we move on from the prologue to the action part.

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Main Post

January 4th
Page 10 of the Naruto Manga has a lot of dialogue, so I just went through panel 1. I noticed “上” in the sentences. They were talking about the graduation test and one of the characters mentioned something about losing weight I believe.

Question about reading manga

I have a question, but let me know if I should make a separate thread for this instead. I’ve been noticing weird formatting in the speech bubbles in which there is a lot of blank space sometimes.

For example, there is a huge blank space between the が and 何 that this character says. Should I interpret this as a period, comma, or just a pause in their speech?


Extra Question: Does he start his second speech bubble with a small っ before using a big つ later in the sentence?

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I’m going to be reading よつばと! later (of course), but I already have a success for the day to report! I just read my first full sentence by parsing out the grammar on my own! I had to look up the kanji/vocab still, but it felt so good to apply some super basic grammar stuff to a random sentence! :smiley: :white_check_mark:

Jan
01 02
03 04 05 06 07 08 09
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
31
Feb
01 02 03 04 05 06
07 08 09 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28

:fallen_leaf: Shenmue Tree (a Journal / Study Log!)

Natively.com - Shenmue
I have started よつばと!over the past few days, and it’s my first manga ever!. I’d also be super appreciative of any interested soul that wants to stop by and join the fun in my Journal / Study log. I always need guidance as I post what I’ve been attempting to read each day!

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Today I read 80 pages and finished the first volume of Candy and Cigarettes 1 my first manga volume this year. It was full of words I didn’t know, thus not that easy to read.

Tomorrow I will probably read 本陣殺人事件 to not fall behind in the book club.

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Yes you are right.

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Summary post :bookmark:

January 4
・かがみの孤城. I read the third week (it was shorter than the previous weeks), and a tiny bit of week four. I might have added too many new words to my srs today :caught_durtling:

Progress: (15% → 21%)

So, from looking at the last few days that I’ve been reading this book, I can say it’s not that hard in terms of vocab or grammar or too crazy sentences or anything like that. What seems to slow me down is… losing focus and going off to do something else (:sweat_smile:). Hopefully, I can improve that somehow.


Yay! More people reading the kagami book :eyes: :sparkles:

I highly recommend using koohi to learn the words in the book, either by srsing them before you read or as you come across them. I do a mix of the two. The vocab list for the book can be found here.

If you’re not familiar with koohi, I would also recommend limiting the frequency to whatever suits you at your current level. In other words, if learning all the words is too much work, try learning the words that appear with high frequency first, for example at least 10 times in the book, and then 9 times, and so forth.

Just ask if you have any questions :durtle_the_explorer:

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To add to @Natsuha 's answer - the って is pronounced a bit differently than just て. It’s also a grammar construct, see Maggie Sensei article here.

Also I don’t know this channel aside from bumping into it while browsing youtube, but it seems read-aloud manga is a thing. Any video starting with 漫画 will be one of those I believe. I can’t vouch for…literally anything about that channel so it may all be terrible stories, no idea. BUT! Listening to how native speakers would read it could be helpful internalizing patterns of speech. I do this with books sometimes by listening to audiobooks while reading the text.

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I think the main reason the blank spaces are there, is because they want to divide the sentence in the most “natural” way, i.e. after a particle like those you mentioned. It’s not necessarily a pause or comma.

(Sometimes there’s not proper punctuation and a sentence can continue across bubbles, so it can get confusing at times too. It’s usually context dependent.)

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Summary post

January 4 update:
Read chapter 6 of よつばと! 1. This one was especially heavy on slang/kana-only phrases, to the point that a couple of them I failed to dissect into intelligible chunks (I don’t really mind, though – the general idea seemed to be clear enough). One chapter left to go! After that I think I’ll take a short break from よつば and read something else for a change – probably 時をかける少女.

@Redglare, thanks for mentioning Koohi! Looks like it has vocab lists for quite a few books, and the idea of SRSing the most frequent words from specific books to ease reading them sounds very attractive.

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Jan 4 update :snowflake: summary post

I haven’t done as much reading today (2 parts of Kona’s Big Adventure), but a little is still something, right? I got distracted by the sudden urge to start using Anki again for vocab I find when reading that’s not on WK. But of course then I was spending more time messing with Anki than actually reading! I’ll update this post if I end up reading any more

Edit: I ended up reading more 亜人, which I started back in December. It’s harder than anything else I’ve read but not so difficult I can’t get through it

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