📚📚 Read every day challenge - Winter 2022 ☃❄

Summary post

Day 20: January 20th

365日にっぽんのいろ図鑑
Time spent: 22 min
Today’s color: 薄鈍色 (うすにびいろ) - a light bluish grey

I like this color a lot. …It was a color of mourning in the Heian period so I’m not exactly sure what that says about me :sweat_smile: But it feels like a very calm, introspective color.
A nice sentence from today: 独特の静けさは、人を悼むのみならず、自分の心と向き合うこととも親しいでしょう。

Some good words
  • 僧服 (そうふく) - priest’s garb
  • 僧侶 (そうりょ) - priest, monk
  • 静けさ (しずけさ) - stillness; silence; quiet; hush; calm; serenity
  • 悼む (いたむ) - to grieve over; to mourn; to lament
  • のみならず - a grammary thing meaning not only; besides; as well as

まいにち暦生活 日本の暮らしを楽しむ365のコツ
Time spent: 9 min

Today is 大寒, the coldest day of the year :cold_face: Seems about right It’s also the first day of 款冬華 (ふきのはなさく), another one of the 72 microseasons - this is when the フキノトウ (edible flower buds of the fuki (Petasites japonicus) plant) start to sprout from beneath the snow.

What else did I read?
お前、タヌキにならねーか? Vol 1
Amount read: 8 pages
Time spent: 22 min

ahem :raccoon:
So, I’ve only read the first chapter so far, is that a bit premature to dub this the best manga ever
I really love it already xD This is kind of a dream scenario for me, tbh - like, you don’t want to live as a human anymore, do you want to come be a tanuki instead? Heck yes I do, take me away to frolic in the mountains of Japan, cute tanuki man :heart: :sparkles: I am kind of upset that this is not a real-life option

Perhaps one of the best perks of tanuki life

Like…I’m supposed to get fat? Sign me up, man. Sign me the heck up!

This is really cute and I love this :heart:
Please share screenshots of pink haired fashion model guy if/when you meet him, I am intrigued

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Oh! You know, yeah, I think I know what you mean conceptually but I haven’t actually read those enough to see the exact term used. My knowledge (besides cultural osmosis) would be more from films and the like.

ううん…実はあまりない

It’s actually really rare for stuff to make me outright cry, almost to the bad opposite extreme, so my tears might be a little figurative, but I welcome the game to try.

(I literally don’t output ever yet so I don’t feel confident that even those couple words aren’t unnatural haha)

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We’re all learners here. :slight_smile: I’m rarely confident in my output sounding totally natural but I just try to roll with it in the hopes it will get better with time and practice. :sweat_smile:

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January 20 :snowflake: Home Post

Today’s a very sleepy day; I didn’t get to sit down to read until I was already pretty much dead so I didn’t get very far :joy: I struggled through like a page of 錆喰(さびく)いビスコ (and processed probably none of it lmao) then swapped over to ラストゲーム which was marginally easier for my tired brain, so I read like 8 pages there too. No worries, today was just a long day, so I’m gonna try to read a lot more tomorrow! Weekend :sparkles: But for now, off to bed for sure.

Random tangent about ミロ's name

So yesterday in 錆喰(さびく)いビスコ, ビスコ asked if ミロ’s name came from “that cocoa thing” and it turned out yeah it does, 「(つよ)()のミロ」, and I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about :joy: So I looked it up and Milo is a Nestle thing apparently?

image

I’ve very much never seen this in my life :joy: Not a thing in America apparently, but an interesting cultural thing to come across in the middle of 錆喰(さびく)いビスコ.

BUT because life is super weird, I went to walmart today and randomly found Milo, so of course I bought some :joy: I think maybe not the standard kind, I just got like a can? Idk but I had to follow through on this series of events, it was too perfect.

A couple words for funsies

入道雲(にゅうどうぐも) - cumulonimbus, giant columns of clouds (in summer)
千切(ちぎ)(ぐも) - scattered clouds
高原(こうげん) - plateau (love that a plateau is just a tall plain?? you’re so right japanese)
()ざわり - texture of food

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Summary Post

Day 20: Today I read all of chapter 22 of よつば&!Only thing that confused me in this chapter is that I think Jumbo called Miura-chan a Lamborghini?? …I feel like I must have missed something

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I was super confused by this, too! Luckily, in the book club thread, @windupbird posted the answer. I had certainly never heard of the car.

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Home post

Day 19:

日本語: I read a bit of 伯爵と妖精 31.

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.

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I feel like you should remind yourself of this regularly whenever the frustration starts! It sounds great but I cry over everything so probably should go anywhere near an actual crying game. :joy:

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ooooooh, this sounds so lovely. Excited to hear more about it! I feel like it will probably end up on my ‘want to play list’ at some point lol.

I feel like your super power is finding cute manga! Which works out well for the rest of us :raccoon:

Will do! I’m not sure I will meet him on this playthrough but further play throughs are inevitable at this point haha.

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:house:

Day 21! I didn’t read, nor post yesterday… because of both busyness and bad time management. But I’m not being too harsh on myself since this month has been a big improvement in terms of reading consistently and progression.
Today I read page 188 of Kiki. I’ll be working half the day tomorrow but should be able to read a fair amount in the afternoon.

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Today’s article was 誰も助けてはくれない――雪道で動けなくなった1人の教師は投げやりになり「それなら、皆困ればいい」(全文表示)|Jタウンネット - it’s a woman’s story about her car being stuck on a snowy road and her gratitude towards a young man who helped her. Honestly this was probably the easiest article I’ve read so far in this challenge. I didn’t have much to look up and all I did was largely guessable. A nice change of pace from yesterday where I ended up giving up on the history paragraph. I tried again at night but it was still absolutely exhausting to read and not even interesting…

Some words I looked up

連なる - to stretch out in a row
ヘトヘト - totally exhausted
降雪 - this means snow fall but I did not expect the reading
四輪駆動 - 4WD

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:tiger2: :books: Homepost - Tigerdate: 20220121 :books: :raccoon:


Tanuki Scroll XXI: タヌキ憑(つ)き :raccoon:

Read today’s 百物語 from Kyoto Prefecture!

About the ghost of a tanuki that possess an おばあちゃん. She starts to develop the qualities of a tanuki (mostly the eating everything part) and they have to get the priest in the exorcise the spirit with the power of ワンワンちゃん. Moral of the story - if you find a dead animal you should bury it, otherwise the spirit may latch onto you!

Also, the other day’s reading was about Kagoshima prefecture and the volcano Sakurajima, well the google hivemind’s obviously been watching because it suggested a video to me today of it erupting (in 2019!), thought I’d share because it’s pretty insane:

☆ Learnings ☆

New Words

山里「やまざと」ー Mountain Village (I could work this one out, but I don’t think I’ve seen it before)
柴刈り「しばかり」ー Firewood gathering
ミイラー Mummy (as in, a preserved corpse)
エサ「餌」ー Bait; Animal Feed; Fodder; Lure
四つん這い「よつんばい」ー On all fours; On your hands and knees
バリバリー Crunching; Munching; Tearing; Ripping (onomatopoeia)
わんわんー Doggy (It’s also the noise a dog makes which I’ve seen a lot before, I didn’t know it could mean dog as well though)

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Started reading a new book today - コーヒーの絵本. I’m a bit of a coffee nerd and I bought this book hoping it would give me the vocabulary to start being able to talk about coffee more fluently in Japanese. I’d put it to one side intending to read it before we go next time but then got chatting to someone on HelloTalk who works as a barista so it’s time to level up my coffee chat.


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Help I think I am also possessed by a tanuki.

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That’s super cool! I’ll be curious to hear how the book is.

I'll hide coffee talk

Mind if I ask about your coffee? The beans I use aren’t TOO fancy since I’m still trying to manage price, but I do order some whole to grind myself. That said, I think I get some nice coffee with the grinder and how I make it. Used to use a chemex pourover for a while and that was nice, but once I tried an aeropress, that’s probably my favorite at home coffee I’ve had. Simple but really nice.

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Me too… me too :raccoon:

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Update post for 20/1 - 21/1 | Home post here!

I ended up reading 100 pages of レンタルおにいちゃん Vol.4 yesterday, because I just needed to finish it. I’m very happy with the ending we got, especially the way the last handful of pages closed out. I’m glad I finished reading this series at a point where I could mostly follow along without looking up too much and figure out a lot through context, as I don’t feel like I missed out on a lot of the character development that was pivotal to how the last couple of chapters played out.

This left me in a bit of a conundrum today as to what I was going to read, as honestly I didn’t expect to finish Vol.2 by the end of February! :sweat_smile: I will return to よつばと! soon, but I wanted to switch up to reading some stuff not on a screen, so I scanned my bookshelves and picked out these.

Got 19 pages through カードキャプターさくら クリアカード編 Vol.1, and I’m so glad there was a double page spread TL;DR recap of the original series at the start, because although I re-read it all in English last year with the intention of starting クリアカード編 this year, it was a good way adjust into that ‘new manga’ phase before starting the main story proper.

れつ!ハイキュー?! Vol.1 is something I’ll be reading slowly, maybe one page a day or so, as it’s a short 4-panel comic re-telling of the main ハイキュー!! series but in joke/gag format, so follows canon but diverges for the joke. I think I’m going to re-start ハイキュー!! to read alongside this, because from reading the first page of れつ! it lifts a lot of the dialogue straight from the original manga; nice confirmation that I remember the vocab I had to study before as I didn’t struggle to understand the first page much at all.

I’ve also played more Animal Crossing over the last couple of days, and I suppose it doesn’t really count but I played a bit of Mario Kart in Japanese yesterday whilst waiting for some food to cook.

Some words from the last couple of days!

勘違い - かんちが - misunderstanding; mistaken idea; wrong guess
心境 - しんきょう - state of mind; mental state; mental attitude
就活 - しゅうかつ - job hunting (abbreviation of 就職活動)
がき - brat; kid; urchin; little devil

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Summary post

January 21 update:
Read 5 pages of 時をかける少女 today (chapter 14, I guess). Looks like this is where the climax of the story is about to start, so it was a bit hard to stop myself from reading a bunch more instead of wrapping up my day and going to sleep :sweat_smile:

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Summary Post

January 21
君の名は , 7 pages.


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Home Post

Hehe, I read two chapters of 時をかける少女, then wanted to make my post here and @BadWeather had just made theirs and that motivated me to pick up the book again to read one more chapter! I think that’s uhhh chapter 10, 11 and 12 then? (There are no chapter numbers and I lost count, oops) It was mostly talking to the teacher, but at the very end the second time leap happened! So exited for the next chapter!

edit: also I was a little drained today and was considering not reading at all, but I thought I’d read at least a chapter to keep the streak up… but once I started is was actually quite chill and then I got hooked by the thread to read even a little more! You guys have too much of a good influence on my reading habits :heart: :sheep:

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