📚📚 Read every day challenge - Winter 2022 ☃❄

Day 16.
I read Chapter 12 of レンタルおにいちゃん. This was really sweet chapter, I think its my favourite chapter from the series so far :slight_smile:

(Home Post)

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ゴールデンゴールド
Started reading this manga I don’t even know what this manga is about but it was free on bookwalker last year. It’s not that hard therefore I just sit down and read 40 pages.

I also started another manga but it was boring so I just dropped it after reading 5 pages.

Demonbane
Only read some lines from it but I saw nothing even coming near N1. But who knows it may become super hard soon but regardless it has some awesome writing.

Sorry no vocabulary list this time but I updated my last post with lots of useful words.

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January 11 - January 16

I’m terrible at updating but I did read every day so far! (more NO. 6 and Orange)
Very different difficulty levels, those two.
Orange feels pretty comfortable even when I’m tired and reading before bed, and I can get by with relatively few look ups. Meanwhile I’m still yomichan’ing my way through NO. 6 which still has so many words I don’t know & I’m progressing much more slowly because of it :turtle:
That’s pretty much what I was aiming for though so it’s all good. I’m enjoying both a lot, in different ways!

I was already reading regulary at the end of last year, but not every day - this challenge is a nice extra push for consistency. It’s working pretty well for me right now I think :slightly_smiling_face:

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Summary post

Day 16: January 16th

365日にっぽんのいろ図鑑
Time spent: 20 min
Today’s color: 鳶色 (とびいろ) - another reddish brown

Named for the black kite (鳶) - yet another pretty bird. It is apparently a Manly color for Men.

Some good words
  • 悠然 (ゆうぜん) - calm; composed; leisurely
  • 甲高い (かんだかい) - high-pitched; shrill
  • 生息 (せいそく) - inhabiting; living
  • 中型 (ちゅうがた) - medium size
  • 鷹 (たか) - hawk; falcon​
  • 人気ぶり (にんきぶり) - level of popularity
  • 男前 (おとこまえ) - manliness

まいにち暦生活 日本の暮らしを楽しむ365のコツ
Time spent: 11 min

Today’s reading talked about the clear winter sky and some stars you can see in the constellation Orion. It was trying to explain the position of each of the stars, and I learned an interesting expression: 向かって左 - on the left as one faces (it) (there is, correspondingly, 向かって右 as well).

What else did I read?
タヌキとキツネ
Amount read: 23 pages
Time spent: 35 min

Tanuki Cuteness Brigade alert! :raccoon: :raccoon: :raccoon:

Started a new book about a tanuki and a fox today. In terms of the format, it reminds me a lot of the shark books and the Koupen-chan book (for anyone that remembers those) - it’s kind of halfway between a manga and a picture book? I wish I knew what that type of book was called. I guess maybe it’s still manga but it doesn’t really have much of an overarching story and a lot of pages are just one illustration. Anyway, I keep picking up these kinds of books for some reason because they’re cute all the time and this is another one like that xD

Today I learned about what seems to be a rather messed-up Japanese folktale if the synopsis on Wikipedia is accurate - かちかち山 (the versions I found on Youtube seem to be a bit milder but I still think the rabbit is a bit of a sadist :sweat_smile:)

On a less gruesome note, here's baby tanuki and baby fox playing :3

And here are some words I learned
  • 行き来 (ゆきき) - coming and going; keeping in touch; visiting each other
  • とっぴんぱらりのぷう - a story-ending phrase (for folktales and such) used in Akita prefecture
  • おののく - to shake (from fear, cold, excitement, etc.); to shudder; to tremble​
  • 持て余す (もてあます) - to be too much for one; to find unmanageable; to be beyond one’s control; to not know what to do with
  • だらける - to be lazy; to be slack; to feel dull; to feel languid; to feel listless
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Home post

Day 15:

日本語: I read a lot of 伯爵と妖精 30 and finished it! I poked at a few other things (while knowing I’d start 伯爵と妖精 31 the next day): perhaps 4 pages of 機動強襲型令嬢アリシア物語1, perhaps 3 pages of 冷たい密室と博士たち, the character information and the first page of 獣の奏者 4.

中国語

中国語: I read an intermediate entry on Mandarin Bean and one page of 擅长捉弄的高木同学.

Another week successfully completed!

J A N
:books:
:clinking_glasses:
:woman_cartwheeling:
:roller_skate:
:green_circle:
:yellow_circle:
:red_circle:
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Main Post

January 16th:
Tried reading some random stuff while I was online today.
キャラデザ Character Design.

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Thank you, I needed this cuteness today. :relieved:

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January 16 :snowflake: Home Post

Well I went feral today and read almost 11 pages of 錆喰(さびく)いビスコ :flushed: Honestly don’t know how I pulled that off, but man am I more invested than ever. I did run into a few more complex sentences that I was able to just read without looking up anything, so that felt really good! I can definitely tell that reading this is drilling a lot of vocab into my brain, so that’s also great! That’s what I’m looking for :grin:

But plot-wise the mushroom and panda boys finally met!! It was even more chaotic than I could’ve anticipated :joy: Best of luck to them haha. There was also a scene with ミロ’s sister that was very reminiscent of the scene with ジャビ talking about like who will protect ビスコ when he dies and I have a lot of feelings, those parallels hurt me man

Anyway very productive reading day out of nowhere! Really just had to force myself to stop because I have work in the morning, I wanted to keep going :eyes:

Some cool words

反逆罪(はんぎゃくざい) - treason
違和感(いわかん) - uncomfortable feeling, unease
尊大(そんだい) - haughtiness, pomposity
(おど)す - to threaten (ビスコ showing up like “you can make medicine right? I threatened three people and they all told me to come here” lmao)
(はち)() - beehive, something full of holes (metaphorically like saying something’s swiss cheese)
(くび)をかしげる - to tilt one’s head to the side (I just think of puppies like ??? precious :pleading_face:)

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Summary Post

Day 16: Today I read 4 pages of よつば&!

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Today I read thirteen pages of Death note. (It was mostly looking up vocabulary, but I’m starting recognize and remember more). I also read one page of a ぴこぷり magazine, and I thought I’d share a cute manga panel on かき氷 (level 4 Wanikani :wink:).

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Home post

Day 10: I read three more pages of よつばと today, and struggled a bit with the explanation of how to use a swing:p

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:house:

Day 17! Today I read pages 182–184 of Kiki. Even though I spent most of the day at home today, there were a lot of other tasks I needed to prioritise, so here I am reading past midnight again :joy:
Too tired now to read more. I’ll aim for at least five pages tomorrow.

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So was telling my spouse about this chapter and he said there’s a similar thing in Ireland called Little Christmas, where women have their own Christmas after Epiphany because they’ve been too busy during actual Christmas to celebrate!

I’ve been out and about a bit for the last few days so picked up a Doraemon manga to read on the train. I got it as part of a job-lot on eBay last year - it’s volume 2 but I know enough about Doraemon to know what’s going on. Doraemon had a really bad singing voice but made everyone listen to him regardless, and it turned out that he’d got an insect caught in his wiring that had made him go wrong.

I’m working through the Minna No Nihongo Intermediate books at the moment and it’s so much easy to absorb the grammar because it’s everywhere! I had a class this morning and then used a japanese cookery book this afternoon to make a cake and it used the same grammar I’d studied in class.

That is an EXCELLENT picture. I’m a way off from monolingual cards yet but I’ve been trying to learn animal names through playing a mobile game that gives you pictures of animals and you have to enter the name in katakana (it’s called 動物クイズ - I’m on android).

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Main Post

New week, felt it was a good time to come with an update today. I read Look Back over the weekend. Took me like 2 hours including a tea break. It was just as good as last time I read it. In some ways even better as I figured out the main characters names are taken from the author. They’re very much a literal part of the artist. Yeah, it is very different from chainsawman, but also similar. Notably the eyes that feel like they went through things. Look Back feels like a window into Fujimoto’s life. Two constrasting parts that meet and grow of each other. Then there is also the emotional response from past events. It makes for quite a compelling read.

Difficulty wise, it wasn’t that bad. There was only furigana available for names, making it good practice to read some kanji in the wild without much help. Of course I still had to look up some words here and there. Length wise, it’s around a regular volume size with 144 pages. Not all of the pages had dialogue, some were just panels of art to convey visual information. Grammar and vocabulary was around my level. So it went better than expected.

Then I had to figure out what to read next… and I picked a cute :black_cat: manga I have on my kindle app. I have so many piled up and I haven’t read any yet, but this looks like a keeper. There’s also a few volumes out in English, for your friends to read maybe.

It’s about an office lady that has a big grumpy cat at home, that actually takes care of the household for her. Read two chapters and it’s pretty good so far. The office sections take me several passes to parse it well.

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Oh my gosh I am absolutely adding this to my to read list, looks like it has the potential to be amazing! :joy:

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Today’s reading was a blog post titled 深刻さと無償

Some words I looked up

肥満 - obesity
くす - to do all you can
拷問 - torture (This is already in my anki cards, I just haven’t reached it yet)
痩身 - slim figure. used as part of ‘weight loss surgery’
基礎疾患 - underlying disease
糖尿 - urinary glucose
摘出 - surgical removal
大ジョッキ - large beer
炭酸 - carbonation
委ねる - to entrust

It was a woman musing about a documentary on obesity that she watched with her daughter.

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:tiger2: :books: Homepost - Tigerdate: 20220117 :books: :raccoon:


Tanuki Scroll XVII: 千匹オオカミ :wolf:

Read today’s 百物語, from Yamanashi Prefecture!

About a merchant who encounters some wolves on his travels and escapes by hiding in a tree. The wolves speak (they can speak human and wolf… and cat it seems) and say that they’ll go get a big old cat (called 孫太郎ばあさん) to fetch the merchant down for them. The cat says it can’t climb the tree because it doesn’t have hands (but 孫太郎ばあさん… you have claws) so the wolves stack themselves on top of each other to make steps :wolf: :wolf: :wolf:

The merchant scrambles further up the tree but there’s a nest in the way so he stabs it with his short sword. But that’s no nest! It’s a big bear butt (!!) The bear rolls down the tree and the wolves attack it thinking it’s the merchant then run away in fear at the merchant’s apparent inhuman strength.

Gaming in Japanese

I played Nioh 2 last night for about an hour or so in Japanese.

Conclusion: I was not ready for this level of kanji :scream:

The game is basically a retelling of the three unifiers of Japan (mid-1500s to early 1600s) but including demons, magic, spirit animals and all that awesome fun stuff. There’s a load of historic figures and places and armour sets and weapons… so I knew it was most likely going to be hard going Japanese-wise, but even in the regular text parts there was very little hiragana (basically the only hiragana was grammar particles most of the time). All kanji, kanji everywhere, no furigana (though I did see some hiragana next to some of the more obscure names). I’ve played this game a lot but even then I got pretty confused.

It was hard not to get a little disheartened, knowing that even after all this time studying Japanese I’ve still got an insane high mountain to climb. I did manage to recognise quite a lot of the demon names, even if all the rest was highly confusing. But! Butttt, I did learn one fun thing from all this: すねこすり!

Cute little demon cats that like to rub against people’s legs and trip them up. The game just calls them “scampuss” in the English put I really like the Japanese word:

脛「すね - shin」+ 擦り 「こすり - rubbing」, and there’s a little ねこ hiding in the middle.

☆ Learnings ☆

New Words

ブスリ ー Onomatopoeia for the sound of something soft being stabbed

Places
甲斐の国「かいのくに」ー Kai Province, an old area of Japan that used to occupy the Yamanashi area (also just: 甲斐国)
静岡「しずおか」ー Shizuoka

Forgotten Meanings

このまま ー (Like this; as it is) [Rare kanji usage: この儘 / 此の儘]


The cuteness is too strong tanuki-friend! I cannot…

oh no

We’re surrounded!

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1月17日 ~ Day 17 / Back to Home

It feels good to be able to post completed readings back to back (technically a little later by 2 hours but fell asleep before I got to type up the summary, haha). But no one would know if I didn’t say anything right? This chapter is a few pages shorter than the others, but fast-paced thanks to the action. It looks like I’m already halfway done but I’m not quite ready to let it end. I should have a week left of content if I keep up at this pace though. Then I can decide if I want to look for the other volumes in the series.

Pocket Monsters Special Volume 1 - page 103 of 200 (13 pages total - chapter 7)

We finally get to see Team Rocket in action in this chapter, and if I didn’t already know from the fandom, it would’ve been a surprise to see Koga (still unnamed in this chapter) as a member of the organization. Then again, considering what potential skills he has being a poison-type handling ninja, it does make sense that Team Rocket would want to recruit him.

What I didn’t quite catch the last chapter but got clarified for me in this one is Kasumi’s Gyarados was originally a Koiking (the pre-evolved form), and it was through the medicine injected by Team Rocket that forced evolve it (didn’t catch originally) and rampage (did catch originally). We see the same thing happen with Koga’s Saihorn force evolved into Saidon with the medicine Koga injects it. Not only does its skills power up, but it appears immune to its normal type weaknesses.

I enjoyed seeing Kasumi and Red work together in this chapter. I wish they would stop needlessly injuring Kasumi, but they gotta paint Red as the hero so I guess that’s what the author had to do to give the protagonist the spotlight.

I think it’s awesome too how OP Pikachu is in the manga. In the anime, they tone Satoshi’s Pikachu’s ability for plot convenience and have it overcome unbelievable wins (vs Katsura’s Saidon) for the same reason, but their relationship improved significantly by the end of the first episode, so it’s harder to grow from there. At least in the manga, Red’s Pikachu seems to be annoyed to be in its current position, but it won’t ignore Red completely… less out of respect for Red and more for pride in its own power it feels like. I’m sure they’re destined to be the best of friends later, but I for now, I enjoy their relationship. How does Pikachu keep taking down all these rock/ground type Pokemon though?

I forgot to mention in the last chapter, but it’s interesting to see that Okido-hakase talks with a Kansai dialect. I forget the timing of the manga compared to the games and anime, (if I remember correctly, the games came first), but it makes me wonder if a neighboring region had already been established when the original games came out since the Kanto region is based on Japan’s eastern Kanto region, and someone like Okido-hakase (and also Masaki later on) has a dialect from the western region.

Vocab for Reference - New words are bolded

伏せる・ふせる・to lie flat (on the ground)
うじゃうじゃ・in swarms
引き下がる・ひきさがる・to back down; to give up
暗い・くらい・dark
思いっきり・おもいきり・to the best of one’s ability
機嫌・きげん・temper; mood; spirits
うろうろ・aimlessly
歯向かう・はむかう・to oppose; to defy​
捻り潰す・ひねりつぶす・to pinch and crush; to pinch out
一々・いちいち・every single; each and every
悪党・あくとう・scoundrel; rascal; villain
偉そう・えらそう・pompous; proud; conceited
堪る・たまる・to bear; to endure
泥だらけ・どろだらけ・covered in mud; mud-caked
触る・さわる・to touch; to feel
活躍・かつやく・great efforts
惜しい・おしい・regrettable; disappointing; unfortunate
崩れる・くずれる・to collapse; to crumble
偶然・ぐうぜん・by chance; unexpectedly; accidentally

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100% and it always help solidify it way more than just doing some JLPT exercises! What kind of cake did you make btw?

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Main Post
January 17th:
Read chapter 4 of それでも歩は寄せてくる.
The moment near the end when Ayumu almost says 大好き but stops himself and only says “大好-” actually caught me off guard and I had a good laugh about that. Also, realized that I could recognize the complete word even though it was cut off and I haven’t learned the second kanji. I guess I have anime to thank for that.
I think I’m further than I got on the English version of this right now. So, the rest will be new to me. Looking forward to it.

Vocab Learned

用事 (ようじErrand
夕飯 (ゆうはん) Dinner

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