Day 6 today, and I only read page 136 of Kiki, due to poor time management again . I’m waking up at 5:30am tomorrow and it’s nearly half past 11, oops.
I’m appreciating how straightforward and wholesome children’s books are. It’s like comfort reading, in a way.
A good half my posts get quick edits to fix typos even when I’m not tired Nothing to be sorry about!
Today’s article was 妊娠で職場に「存在が迷惑」と言われ…退職を迷う女性に届いた、ありえないメッセージ which is basically about マザハラ or ‘mother harassment’ – treating women in the workplace badly for being pregnant, planning to be pregnant, taking maternity leave, etc. It’s actually part article, part comic which seems to be a common format, but I’ve avoided it thus far because I didn’t think they’ll help my goal of learning how to express opinions more fluidly,
Some words I looked up
イクメン - a man who is good at child rearing. I strongly suspect this is a pun on イケメン
円満 - happy; amicable; peaceful
つわり - morning sickness
ノルマ - quota
足を引っ張る - to hold others back (from success)
I don’t think there’s such a setting, unfortunately. The easiest way to mark words as known is by going into grid mode. Then you can click through the words and trash them in bulk instead of one and one.
It’s possible to import/export words, but I’m not familiar with the process. I’m sure people over in the Koohi thread know how to do that if you’re interested
First update post, which I wanted to make on … Sunday I guess, things happened. Still I was able to keep reading a chapter every day. Was up early today and read my daily chapter for the today as well as the side chapters at the back of the volume. So I finished Spy x Family vol 4. It was good and I feel I have a much better grip on it. Have to look up quite a bit still in between reading, although I have to look at my search list to remember which ones. I did notice that Loid tends to use at least one 四字熟語 in every chapter, Anya uses a lot of hiragana even for loanwords and Yor is somewhere in between the two. The series is very good at alternating wholesome family fun with action packed panels. This volume is basically one arc, that the last volume hinted at. Don’t really wanna give away too much, as I think people should read it themselves. However I also wanted to add some pictures I took while reading in my posts and there’s many more panels worth taking pictures of.
Read today’s Hyakumonogatari [百物語] about a family struggling to survive and getting accused of stealing.
And yesss, it’s the narrator guy who gets really into it, his おばあちゃん voice is the best
Though saying that this story was pretty dark and tragic
Today is 色の日 (@windupbird !!)
Because い(1) + ろ(6) = 色
☆ Learnings ☆
New Words (lots of household words today!)
一家「いっか」ー A family; a household 竃 「かまど」ー A traditional wood/charcoal fuelled stove 湯沸かし「ゆわかし」ー Teakettle 後始末「あとしまつ」ー Cleaning up afterwards (in this instance, cleaning up after dinner); the settlement of a matter. 拭き掃除「ふきそうじ」ー Cleaning; Scrubbing 木履「ぼっくり」ー Girl’s lacquered wooden clogs (traditional footwear)
からかい上手の高木さん is free again on bookwalker (first 4 volumes)! So I will try to go through this series while reading a bit of 君の名は daily ^^
Now that I have read some manga and got used to reading, からかい上手の高木さん seems so easy! In just 10 minutes, I read the first 25 pages of the manga. Even though it is easy, I’m still glad I didn’t pick it up earlier because of the lack of kanji. Now I can easily break down sentences and search for words, but if you are not able to do that, the manga gets a lot harder to read.
So this is the guy! I only listened to a very short bit of it but it’s indeed good, his ばあちゃん voice is so on point!! I also like the solemn tone of the narrator . I definitely need to read these at some point.
Two more pages of 本陣殺人事件. I was so proud of myself and thought how much I already read from this book. Just to realize that I only read one chapter and I still need to read two whole chapters this week.
January 6 update:
Started reading 時をかける少女 again – read 2 pages today, which took almost an hour The vocabulary somehow seems easier this time around, even though only a few months have passed since my previous attempt. But still, as I expected, the amount of lookups grew quite a bit compared to よつばと! Not sure how long I’ll last at this rate – perhaps I’ll go back to the second volume of よつばと! in a few days.
That’s great to hear! Thanks for sharing, your approach seems much more viable than what I’ve been doing
I think I’ll try to set aside some regular time and stick to it rather than try to read “when I feel like it”, which in my case usually means “at the very last moment.” Right now it’s only thanks to this thread that I haven’t missed any days yet.
January 6
・かがみの孤城. I finished the fifth week. I’m liking this book more and more by the day.
Progress: (27% → 34%)
Regarding staying focused: The best way for me to read this book on my laptop is by reading out loud. It works superb - it’s fun and engaging, and as soon as I stumble upon a word I don’t know, I have no choice but to look it up. There’s no glossing over a word with an unknown reading when you’re trying to read all the sentences out loud, hehe.
Word of the day: 定期的
for having a funny pronunciation.
For most of the challenge, I’ve been reading ティアムーン帝国物語 volume 2 (I’ve read around 8 percent over the past few days) but for the last couple of days I’ve just been chipping away at some of my manga for a change of pace, like まいりました入間くん volume 24 and 蓮住荘のさんかく volume 1, which I also own in English and is about the cutest thing ever. It’s also very easy, which is a plus! Iruma is pretty easy, too, but it occasionally has parts that leave me frustrated because I can’t quite tell what the (clearly important) nuance is, even if I sort of understand the sentences. Anyway, it’s been nice to read something every day - it’s fun and is helping me keep up with watching an episode of anime daily, too!
Decided to read more 錆喰いビスコ today! I spent a while trying to figure out what カバ meant in the current context, like what, their cover’s blown? People called for backup? But no there were actually just literal sand hippos with guns chasing them through the desert because this book is a WILD ride so figuring that out made things a lot clearer. I’m realizing that the author messes with words a lot which is really cool from like a literary perspective, but it can definitely make my job harder. I think I’ve generally been able to figure things out though which is good!
I’m certainly enjoying the craziness The section I just finished ended with ビスコ picking up a dead hippo (described as one that five people would barely be able to lift) that had mushrooms in it from previous fighting and throwing it at their feet so it exploded into a giant mushroom that launched him, ジャビ, and the GIANT CRAB they’re riding over a huge border wall so yeah nothing really happening lmao; somehow fighting through all the unknown words isn’t so bad when I untangle stuff like that as a result.
Anyway I’m having fun with it so far! I still intend to continue ラストゲーム as well, so we’ll see when that actually happens very different reading experience from 錆喰いビスコ, that’s for sure.
Cool words
矢継ぎ早 - rapid succession
ジリ貧 - situation getting worse and worse
舞い上がる - to soar, be whirled up
Three different words talking about “clouds of sand”:
砂埃
砂煙
砂塵
Day 6!
I read the second half of Volume 2, Chapter 2 of レンタルおにいちゃん.
It took me a little longer than intended because today was my first day back at work after Christmas so I was a bit frazzled by the end of the work day.
But I was really pleased because I didn’t need to look up any words at all today, which I don’t think has ever happened before!
Just barely made it under the line today, left reading until I should have already been asleep (so this will be a short update), which is really annoying because once I started reading i didn’t want to stop so soon Things are already happening! I’m already loving this book so much, I need to make sure I give myself more time to read tomorrow!
鬼滅の刃 - currently reading volume 3, but I’ve also started going back through older volumes to breakdown sentences I don’t feel I got sufficiently.
ファイナルファンタジーIX (Final Fantasy IX) - playing through in Japanese, taking screenshots of sentences I don’t fully understand, and then afterwards writing them out in a notebook to do breakdowns.
Rough update so far:
Somehow I managed to defy all odds and I’ve just kept going since the last challenge, yesterday was day 128 I think.
My wrists are very painful so I won’t be able to reliably make updates, but I’ll be reading along with all your comments every now and then.
My default update will be 鬼滅の刃 everyday, although most days it will only be a few pages, some days just one.
Ohhh I’m delighted to hear that, just from the cover and little I know of 鏡の孤城 I’m really intrigued to try read it some day. Learn natively claims it’s a 27, compared with 鬼滅の刃’s 25. Maybe one day.
Alright, I’ll join in late too. I have been reading every day up to this point, and plan to for the foreseeable future – might as well hop in with the community and check out what you all are up to here and there.
My current reading tends to be somewhere between an hour and a half or two hours per day on the first Ace Attorney game, basically however long I spend before mining ~20 sentences. No hard schedule for this, but in the remaining time, I throw in a few pages of Zoo 1 by Otsuichi here and there. It’s my first real native Japanese book. I can handle it (with a lot of lookups), but I’m at that level where after 3 or 4 pages, I get pretty exhausted. Happy to be reading though, and this is perfect milestone timing, as just yesterday, I finished the first of the book’s short stories (roughly 40 pages in this edition). The first story was decently interesting, though certainly upsetting at times, with a lot more real serious depressing topics and not exactly the sort of “horror” I was expecting. I also wonder how much the excitement of reading a Japanese book is going to cloud my judgment for a bit, haha.
Today I started a little on the second story, Seven Rooms, which appears to be starting from two people mysteriously awakening in an (I assume locked, but we’re taking it slow) unfamiliar room…
Well, I could only make it through 1 page of よつばと! tonight - but it was a long page! Happy with my progress. Although I have the vol. 1 grammar guide, I only use it after trying to parse the sentences myself, and I usually have it already!
365日にっぽんのいろ図鑑
Time spent: 22 min
Today’s color: 鉄紺 (てつこん) - kind of a navy blue with a hint of green?
This is my favorite color, it’s so pretty The resoluteness of iron and the calm quiet of indigo come together to make this beautiful dignified color I think is sort of what the book said Words do be hard to translate
Some good stuff I learned
くろがね - an old word for iron (the kanji are 黒金, so it’s literally black gold)
帯びる (おびる) - to have a trace of; to be tinged with
藍染 (あいぞめ) - indigo dye
がかる - to have a trace of; to be tinged with (this book is into synonyms)
Today’s reading felt extremely appropriate: it was about today being 小寒 (しょうかん), which is basically the beginning of midwinter (寒の入り かんのいり). Supposedly, it’s when the winter cold starts to get intense…that was definitely the case where I am, I believe this was the first day this winter that the temperature has been in the single digits (Fahrenheit). It definitely dropped like 15 degrees since yesterday.
What else did I read?
囀る鳥は羽ばたかない Vol 1
Amount read: 22 pages
Time spent: 1 hour 8 min
I really didn’t intend to read that long but it kind of got away from me xD I feel like something just clicked today because I was very intrigued. Seriously, it was like some switch flipped in my brain and I didn’t want to stop. Yashiro freaking kills me lol
Oh he’s so soft Thank you for blessing us with this cat