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 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。
Today is 大寒, the coldest day of the year 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
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 I am kind of upset that this is not a real-life option
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)
We’re all learners here. 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.
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 I struggled through like a page of 錆喰いビスコ (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 But for now, off to bed for sure.
Random tangent about ミロ's name
So yesterday in 錆喰いビスコ, ビスコ asked if ミロ’s name came from “that cocoa thing” and it turned out yeah it does, 「強い子のミロ」, and I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about So I looked it up and Milo is a Nestle thing apparently?
I’ve very much never seen this in my life Not a thing in America apparently, but an interesting cultural thing to come across in the middle of 錆喰いビスコ.
BUT because life is super weird, I went to walmart today and randomly found Milo, so of course I bought some 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 - cumulonimbus, giant columns of clouds (in summer)
千切れ雲 - scattered clouds
高原 - plateau (love that a plateau is just a tall plain?? you’re so right japanese)
歯ざわり - texture of food
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
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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! 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
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
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