📚📚 Read every day challenge - Winter 2022 ☃❄

:house:

Day 22: Read pages 189-190 of Kiki. Page 189 was confusing for me and I spent longer there, but page 190 was fairly easy.
Although I didn’t read as much as I hoped to read, I’m still on track to be at page 200 before February!

I hadn’t heard of Nesquik until recently, but I’m very familiar with Milo. It’s extremely popular in Malaysia and loads of Australians love it as well.

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So I’m terrible at translating but roughly,

Yuu is quiet/subdued, but their will is strong. It feels like they’ll disappear soon. For myself, I wanted to be like them, with a place to return to.

is how I interpret it if I try to keep tenses consistent with how I’d parse it in English. Maybe someone with more formal grammar study will do a better job at explaining :sweat_smile:

Also, I’m currently at the airport but still doing my daily reading! :pray: Something quite short, though: 「たくあん」と「たくわん」の違いは? | 1分で読める!! [ 違いは? ]
I think 違い articles might be my staple while I travel…

Words

糠床 - salted rice bran, for use in pickling
発祥 - origin
天日干し - sun drying
米糠 - rice bran
発酵 - fermentation
黄褐色 - yellowish brown (is this word in your color book @windupbird? :sweat_smile:
僧侶 - priest/monk
表音式仮名遣い - “phonetic kana usage”

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So the dictionary of intermediate japanese grammar has a whole section on this topic: Tense switching.
I took some important excerpts from there:

DOIJG
"Usually a series of past events are narrated in the past tenses. But primarily in written Japanese discourse that narrates a past event, past tenses often switch to nonpast tenses. […] Logically speaking, the author could have written every sentence in the past tense. Nevertheless, the author sometimes used the past tense and sometimes the nonpast tense. […] [The nonpast tense] sentences describe a circumstance that surrounds Shigo, the main character of the story. The rest of the sentences [in the past tense] describe […] whatever Shigo did or felt in the given circumstances. To put it in general terms, tense switching is a strategy available to the writer to differentiate a stage and a set of chronological events that occur in that stage. […] . So, important, dramatic information is described in the past tense, whereas relatively unimportant circumstantial information is described in the nonpast tense. The use of such nonpast tenses has an effect of creating a vivid sense of immediateness for the reader.

Principle of Tense switching:
A part of a past event (often a state rather than an action) can be described using the nonpast tense, if the writer perceives it to be relatively unimportant circumstantial information that has no dircet bearing upon the major story line."

I edited it down a bit but that is the basic gist explained there. Hope this helps your understanding.

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:tiger2: :books: Homepost - Tigerdate: 20220122 :books: :raccoon:


Tanuki Scroll XXII: じゃあじゃ山の大蛇 :snake:

Read today’s Hyakumonogatari from Hyogo Prefecture!

About a man who goes into the mountains to hunt for a monstrous snake, and the snake’s wife who turns up to get revenge.

☆ Learnings ☆

New Words

力自慢「ちからじまん」ー Boasting of one’s strength
一仕事「ひとしごと」ー Task; doing a bit of work; Hard work
グーグー ー Snoring (onomatopoeia)
いびき「鼾」ー Snoring (the act of snoring)
くわ「鍬」ー Garden hoe
仇討ち「あだうち」ー Vengeance; Revenge
ペロペロ ー Licking; Lapping up (onomatopoeia)
ミシミシ ー Groaning; Creaking (under physical stress) (onomatopoeia)

Forgotten Readings

大蛇だいじゃ」(Big Boss Snake)

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Summary Post

January 22
君の名は , 9 pages.


I’ve been reading a bit more relaxed these last couple of days, not trying to comprehend absolutely everything. I was starting to feel just a tiny bit burnt out recently, working on the text quite thoroughly, and I needed a little break for my brain I think. Which is funny because I still work quite a bit looking up words and grammar here and there, but without the pressure of having to add things to the SRS. I think I’ve been feeling the pressure of having to add new words everyday, as a way of perhaps measuring my progress. I need to be careful not to fall into the SRS trap, to mindlessly add words for the sake of it and forget them in the future.

But anyways, I’ve been pretty happy with my progress so far. I’ve only felt this way very few days, and normally I think I’m learning a lot. I think it gets very overwhelming for me when the text gets significantly harder, and it has become harder again. I always do my lookups in a J-J dictionary first, and bilingual second. Sometimes the JP definition is easy to understand, and the bilingual dictionary helps reinforce it with a (many times somewhat inaccurate) translation; sometimes the JP definition is awfully hard and the bilingual dictionary is there to hold my hand and whisper words of love into my ears. The whole process gets very tiring when the text gets harder and there are many unknown words to look up and/or add to the SRS. But otherwise, when the level is just right, it’s honestly a pleasure and I love it.

I will probably continue to read this way until it gets easier again.

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Day 22!
I read the first half of Chapter 6 of 三ツ星カラーズ today. The ABBC has been reading this together at a rate of half a chapter per week. I usually end up reading the whole chapter in one go anyway, but I’ve not got a huge amount of free time today so the half-chapter was just the right amount of reading for me to squeeze in today!

(Home Post)

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Thank you so much for this! It’s fascinating how different this would be perceived if you did it in English (where anything in the past stays in the past tense, and everything present stays in present tense, and NEVER shall the two meet, lest others judge you as a poor writer). I’ve thought about trying to write simple, short stories in Japanese as practice, and this is the element that’s really been preventing me from giving it a go. I’ll have to write this down somewhere for reference until it’s something I naturally get the hang of.

Doraemon Arigatou

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Day 20 + 21

  • 君の名は。page 134-136

I’ve had a rough week feeling a bit ill and having a harder time at work. Instead of forcing myself to read, on the 20th of January I did not read and on the 21st I read only half a page. Today I read three more pages. Sometimes is choosing rest over pushing yourself is a bigger win in itself, it definitely felt like that :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

I still read more than half a novel and it is not even the end of January! I hope I can finish the book before the end of this challenge, but we will see :blush:

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Interesting, I didn’t realize nestle chocolate milk products were such a varied experience :joy: now THIS is what I’m learning Japanese for huh, it all comes down to learning what Milo is, thank you 錆喰(さびく)いビスコ

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Since I have been lurking here for about a week, I finally decided to make my calender post. Sadly my ordered stuff did not arrive before the 07.01 so I started a bit late on the 08.

Jan
:x: :x:
:x: :x: :x: :x: :x: :o: :o:
:o: :o: :o: :o: :o: :o: :o:
:o: :o: :o: :o: :o: :o: :o:
:o: :o: :o: :o: :o: :o: :o:
:o:
Feb
:o: :o: :o: :o: :x: :o:
:o: :o: :o: :o: :o: :o: :o:
:o: :o: :o: :o: :o: :o: :o:
:o: :o: :o: :o: :o: :o: :o:
:o:

Feels good to be doing something with japanese again after being inactive for 1 1/2 years with it.

The things I read/read(past tense ^^):
First I started with よつばと vol 14 as a refresher before jumping into the new volume 15 that came with the order. Yotsuba was a breeze to read through, like always. Such a good manga.

I also ordered しろくまカフェ todays special 1-3. Currently I read a chapter every morning. The manga is suprisingly hard for me. So much special vocabulary that I didn’t know and too low context to infer much :confused: . The new years chapter 旧正月 or the coffe making chapter…

In the evening, if I find time, I work my way through ソラニン. It’s a good read but I have to look up quite a bit of vocabulary there too. In addition the vocabulary I forgot during my time away from japanese is haunting me in the extreme. I often have a lingering feeling that I SHOULD KNOW a word. Learning useful vocabulary though: マグロ 性交のときに自らは体を動かさず、ただ寝転がっている相手 who knew…

The last item in the haul was the complete Slam Dunk new editions (20 volumes instead of 32 but normal size). As soon as the other mangas are done I’m really looking forward to binging the series in 2 weeks or so. After that we will see. I have still some unread novels/lns and probably finally finsh kino no tabi 1. Or maybe a game in japanese?

I will not post every day but probably update my status once a week.
So よろしくね。

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I got the first three volumes of Yamada kun and the Seven Witches free digitally on bookwalker. They may offer them again for free in the future.

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Summary post :bookmark:

January 22

笑わない数学者 (32% → 41%)
Yay, read through the previous week’s assignment. I feel like I spent most of the day just reading, went kinda slow. Was a bit confused about some of the characters, and while rereading isn’t my favorite thing to do, it was worth it. I’m happy I completed this chapter today, now I’m not behind anymore :sparkles:


@downtimes ようこそ! :durtle_hello:

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I adore Yotsubato, such a nice time. And welcome, glad to have you!


Summary post

Summer Pockets: As always, chilling. Close to 2 hours read today, I think. No doubt everything I’ve read in the last few days combined is meant to take an hour or less for natives, but regardless, they really ease you into the small island life. The heat bearing down, the sounds (and lack thereof!), the missing amenities someone from the city would expect, and on and on. I’m in the mood to chill at this pace, so I’m cool with it. I think I’m nearly on the cusp of meeting my next significant character, but today was all wandering, observing, and thinking. So, a whole day of narration.

Which, while full of words I don’t know, still isn’t so bad. I’m pretty confident that, short of the (I think small) chance of specific characters speaking incomprehensibly, I’ve seen enough to feel like I’m ready for what this VN has. I can tell there are so many more unfamiliar kanji – Ace Attorney favored using a lot of katakana and shied away from more kanji than needed to make it simple to parse – but with Yomichan, it’s no big deal.

Today’s screenshot shows you the lovely nighttime colors, but it’s also a sentence I wanted to highlight. I admittedly had to recheck a couple things that I should’ve learned and still only half-remember, and I know it’s nothing crazy, but it’s one of those times where there’s enough going on in this sentence grammatically/expression-wise that I sort of just took a moment to appreciate that this is totally understandable to me at this stage. I know there’s a lot more to learn, but for where I am, I’m pleased with this.

Coolest new word that came up is チンする, meaning “to microwave,” because it comes from the sound of the microwave timer. I like that.

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Just to let you know that there are at least two N2 grammar points in this sentence :joy_cat:

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Home Post

Read chapter 13/14 of 時をかける少女. According to kindle that’s past the 50% mark! :tada:
I found chapter 13 a bit confusing but that was because the character herself was confused and worried for a bit, but that cleared up. It also makes sense now why they talked about leaping time AND space as separate in the previous chapters. I’d say the groundwork is mostly laid out, so I’m curious where we will go from here on! :sheep:

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Summary post

January 22 update:
Read 5 pages of 時をかける少女 today, i.e. chapter 15. Most of it was more or less Kazuko’s internal monologue, and then, as things finally started to happen, the chapter very inconveniently ended right in the middle of an important conversation. I still decided to stop for today for a variety of reasons, but I feel like tomorrow I might not be as successful at maintaining moderation :joy:

On another note, Death Note book club started today. I read half of this week’s assignment, which wasn’t all that much, to be honest. By the time I got to reading it, the vocab sheet was already populated with a whole lot of words, and this made reading a lot faster than it would be with dictionary lookups. Thanks to those who volunteered to compile it – it’s super convenient!

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I just sit down and started reading and without noticing it I read the remaining 150 pages of はじめての虐殺 and finished the first volume.

Even though I finished five manga volumes this year I didn’t even make a dent in my backlog it actually increased because I bought four visual novels and a videogame in the same time frame. What should I read tomorrow continue a series I started or start something new.

Read some more lines from the Demonbane visual novel I didn’t encounter any N1 grammar points yet but lots of N1 vocabulary.

demonbane 1

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Haha, I love to hear it, thank you. I think I just have a smattering of knowledge from all over the place, but I’ll take the confidence boost :grin:

It’s the power of learning by just reading stuff! I’m guessing ものの and どころか – the first one I think I posted here about learning not too long ago, thanks Ace Attorney. The latter I distinctly remember from Satori Reader.

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Yep, those are the two :+1:

On a more serious note: If that’s your grammar level in general, you shouldn’t be worried about reading any book whatsoever…

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Today I read Yotubato and got to the milk delivery saga (chapter 39 and 40). I blew all my old records out of the water by reading 70 pages in one sitting! I just had to know what was going to happen. :joy:

priceless

がんばって

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