Well yesterday I had a big acheivement as I finished the Crayon Shinchan game on the Switch I said I would count as reading time! (so no more gaming-as-reading for me because I really don’t think this Rilakkuma game I’m playing counts…). It’s the first game I’ve played all the way through in japanese and I had a fairly good idea of what was going on…some of the time? so I’m feeling pretty pleased with myself. It seems designed to be played multiple times, because at the end it said that if you play again you keep the in-game currency you’ve acquired and any of the challenges you completed won’t need to be completed again, so presumably they’re expecting that you’ll focus on different aspects next time. Excited to go back to it in the summer when I have a few more months of grammar and vocabulary under my belt and give it another go.
Oh I had this in my reading today! It was a piece about traditional kimono dyes so that would make sense.
Day 4 complete
I started Volume 2 of レンタルお兄ちゃん. I was planning to read the first half of the first chapter since they are quite long chapters, but I was enjoying it too much to stop so I read the whole chapter!
Thats probably a good thing though, since its my birthday tomorrow so I’ll probably only be able to squeeze in a little bit of reading time because I’m going to be out all day.
I’m going to a cat cafe for lunch as a birthday treat
Read today’s Hyakumonogatari [百物語] about a stingy rich guy making people work for little rice, employing a guy who has super massive biceps that drink sake (not the guy, the arms drink it) to replace them, and then the rich guy cutting of these arms to make them work for him (and giving these severed arms sake).
Moral of the story: don’t be stingy. And definitely don’t cut off people’s sake-drinking-demon-arms and make them work for weak, diluted sake, they will get their revenge, they need their sake.
《酒を飲ませろ！ 酒を飲ませろ！》
I love this stuff, it’s mad
It’s also 石の日! Stone day! Because い(1) and し(4) makes 石.
Yes, it’s return of the day-puns
Stones are supposed to have mystical powers so if you make a wish while holding a stone today it may come true!
(Or better, visit a shrine and touch a stone statue like a 狛犬 [こまいぬ] - legendary lion-dogs)
☆ Learnings ☆
New Words (there are a lot today)
なにわ 「難波」 ー An old name for the Osaka region
けち／ケチ ー Stingyness
小僧 「こぞう」 ー Youngster; boy. Brat.
ぞうり 「草履」 ー Traditional Japanese sandals. (I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this before, but I don’t feel I recognise it)
名案 「めいあん」 ー Good idea.
大番頭 「おおばんとう」 ー Head clerk
一人一人 「ひとりひとり」 ー One by one (for people); each (person).
うっかり ー Carelessly; Thoughtlessly
くの字 「くのじ」 ー The hiragana く, but here it’s used to be “to bend over (while sitting) in a く shape”, so, to be bent double.
おかず 「お菜」 ー A side dish (to accompany rice for example)
塩鮭 「しおざけ」 ー Salted salmon
ニッコリ ー Smiling broadly
力こぶ 「ちからこぶ」 ー Big biceps
チョロチョロ ー Trickling (of water)
巫女 = みこ Miko, shrine maiden. (I really like this word and its kanji.)
ひたすら = doing nothing but, earnest, determined (works as an adverb and adjective).
老若男女 = ろうにゃくなんにょ men and women of all ages (I also love this word).
唾液 = だえき saliva.
放置 = ほうち leave as is, leave alone (the word is a noun and する動詞).
Indeed . At the same time, so far it’s proven to be very nice to bind the memory with the Japanese descriptions of the scenes. Of course I know what is happening, but as long as I still put the effort into reading it all and looking up what I don’t understand, it’s good to be exposed to how it’s described in Japanese, regardless. I’m honestly enjoying it a lot .
This is literally me. I can’t help it; if there’s furigana, I’ll read it, no matter what. My eyes just drift there. Many people love furigana and find it really beneficial, but in my case I prefer to completely get rid of it because it didn’t feel super useful to me (other than your usual occasional furigana for specific words). Of course this might very well be because I already had a decent grasp on most kanji you encounter when reading, and knowing most of the readings makes the lookups much quicker and less tedious. But I also had concerns of not internalising kanji so I preferred the no-furigana route. I would say experiment! It depends on how frequently you look up things; if you do constant lookups, it can get extremely boring very quick, and in this case I’d rather have furigana than quit whatever I’m reading.
I’m also a fan of doing handwritten lookups when I encounter kanji I don’t recognise. Sometimes it’s kanji I’ve forgotten, and other times kanji I don’t know. It’s fun, and the Japanese IME on PC has a really accurate handwriting function.
Having said that it’s worth noting that I don’t know a ton of vocabulary, I just know a lot of the kanji readings so it’s often easy to look up things. But I still look up so many things, I have so much vocabulary to learn.
Thanks for the write-up, I definitely wouldn’t have gotten that from the title. I can see “Corona”, “Interview” and I recognize some of the kanji, but that’s it. I’m surprised by the varied levels in this thread as well. It’s very encouraging.
In the last three days, I’ve read Chapter 6 of 極主夫道, which means I can keep up with BC pace of 2 chapters per week, as long as I read 30-60 minutes everyday.
Yesterday and today I read this week’s assignment of 笑わない数学者 - it’s somehow really good to read another book of that series. Everything seems somehow familiar, even the vocab does not feel that unknown or hard. Plus, we are starting some interesting speculations in the reading thread, which is big fun!
I also started another project A Japanese friend of mine moved to Germany almost a year ago, and he is interested in European culture and churches and stuff. So I suggested that we could read one of my favorite books together - Ken Follet’s The Pillars of the Earth, which is the book from which I got most of my knowledge about churches and architecture. My idea was that we could read it together in Japanese, but he suggested he could read it in English instead. So now we are doing a Japanese-English study tandem I’m super curious how this goes, and I have no idea of his level of English.
Today I started to read the prologue (which is the part we agreed on for this week), and boi this is haaard! A ton of unknown variables that are waiting for me… and the English is not better, I just checked the page or so I read today. We will probably be slowly chugging away at this monster of a book for the next two years or so Although I hope that it will get a bit better once we move on from the prologue to the action part.
January 4th
Page 10 of the Naruto Manga has a lot of dialogue, so I just went through panel 1. I noticed “上” in the sentences. They were talking about the graduation test and one of the characters mentioned something about losing weight I believe.
Question about reading manga
I have a question, but let me know if I should make a separate thread for this instead. I’ve been noticing weird formatting in the speech bubbles in which there is a lot of blank space sometimes.
For example, there is a huge blank space between the が and 何 that this character says. Should I interpret this as a period, comma, or just a pause in their speech?
I’m going to be reading よつばと! later (of course), but I already have a success for the day to report! I just read my first full sentence by parsing out the grammar on my own! I had to look up the kanji/vocab still, but it felt so good to apply some super basic grammar stuff to a random sentence!
Natively.com - Shenmue
I have started よつばと！over the past few days, and it’s my first manga ever!. I’d also be super appreciative of any interested soul that wants to stop by and join the fun in my Journal / Study log. I always need guidance as I post what I’ve been attempting to read each day!
Today I read 80 pages and finished the first volume of Candy and Cigarettes 1 my first manga volume this year. It was full of words I didn’t know, thus not that easy to read.
Tomorrow I will probably read 本陣殺人事件 to not fall behind in the book club.
January 4
・かがみの孤城. I read the third week (it was shorter than the previous weeks), and a tiny bit of week four. I might have added too many new words to my srs today
Progress: (15% → 21%)
So, from looking at the last few days that I’ve been reading this book, I can say it’s not that hard in terms of vocab or grammar or too crazy sentences or anything like that. What seems to slow me down is… losing focus and going off to do something else (). Hopefully, I can improve that somehow.
Yay! More people reading the kagami book
I highly recommend using koohi to learn the words in the book, either by srsing them before you read or as you come across them. I do a mix of the two. The vocab list for the book can be found here.
If you’re not familiar with koohi, I would also recommend limiting the frequency to whatever suits you at your current level. In other words, if learning all the words is too much work, try learning the words that appear with high frequency first, for example at least 10 times in the book, and then 9 times, and so forth.
To add to @Natsuha 's answer - the って is pronounced a bit differently than just て. It’s also a grammar construct, see Maggie Sensei article here.
Also I don’t know this channel aside from bumping into it while browsing youtube, but it seems read-aloud manga is a thing. Any video starting with 漫画 will be one of those I believe. I can’t vouch for…literally anything about that channel so it may all be terrible stories, no idea. BUT! Listening to how native speakers would read it could be helpful internalizing patterns of speech. I do this with books sometimes by listening to audiobooks while reading the text.
I think the main reason the blank spaces are there, is because they want to divide the sentence in the most “natural” way, i.e. after a particle like those you mentioned. It’s not necessarily a pause or comma.
(Sometimes there’s not proper punctuation and a sentence can continue across bubbles, so it can get confusing at times too. It’s usually context dependent.)
January 4 update:
Read chapter 6 of よつばと! 1. This one was especially heavy on slang/kana-only phrases, to the point that a couple of them I failed to dissect into intelligible chunks (I don’t really mind, though – the general idea seemed to be clear enough). One chapter left to go! After that I think I’ll take a short break from よつば and read something else for a change – probably 時をかける少女.
@Redglare, thanks for mentioning Koohi! Looks like it has vocab lists for quite a few books, and the idea of SRSing the most frequent words from specific books to ease reading them sounds very attractive.
I haven’t done as much reading today (2 parts of Kona’s Big Adventure), but a little is still something, right? I got distracted by the sudden urge to start using Anki again for vocab I find when reading that’s not on WK. But of course then I was spending more time messing with Anki than actually reading! I’ll update this post if I end up reading any more
Edit: I ended up reading more 亜人, which I started back in December. It’s harder than anything else I’ve read but not so difficult I can’t get through it
I ended up not starting reading today until pretty late, so only 呪術廻戦 for me today (I say this because I should really sleep soon as I am back at work tomorrow…but knowing me I will probably read some 鏡の孤城 in bed and stay up too late as I have no self control). Anyway, I finished up volume 7 and read the first few chapters from volume 8 (I think 5 chapters in total). Two of the chapters were fairly dense with a fair bit of monologuing/exposition, but then the chapters following that have been mainly light hijinks and fun so it has all balanced out lol.
Woohoo! nice Hope you enjoy it, I’m very excited to keep reading! And @pocketcat - I downloaded the audiobook and it is indeed so good - almost more like an audiodrama or radio production with the sound effects etc. I’ve actually listened a little bit ahead of where I’ve read to so I need to catch up!(I read so much slower than the audiobook)
Nice! Good to know that it’s on koohi I very easily fall victim to ‘death by too many SRS’ so I probably won’t go for it right now but I might change my mind if vocab seems like an issue so good to know that it’s there as an option. Seems fairly okay so far though but I expect that may well change once the plot gets going. It’s actually the first novel I’ve read on my kindle since I managed to get a bunch of monolingual (J-J) dictionaries on it so I’ve been quite enjoying trying to use those as much as possible for lookups. My understanding of monolingual definitions is still certainly more fuzzy than just looking it up in english but so far having the option of a few different definitions to check + the context means it is fairly okay, and the novelty of having all the dictionaries there at a click is fun (I mean, if you are a person like me who apparently thinks such things are fun lol).
Wow! I can’t imagine reading The Pillars of the Earth in Japanese. I read it in English and I don’t see myself re-reading it. I dropped the series after the second book came out.
. At the same time, so far it’s proven to be very nice to bind the memory with the Japanese descriptions of the scenes. Of course I know what is happening, but as long as I still put the effort into reading it all and looking up what I don’t understand, it’s good to be exposed to how it’s described in Japanese, regardless. I’m honestly enjoying it a lot 
.
A Japanese friend of mine moved to Germany almost a year ago, and he is interested in European culture and churches and stuff. So I suggested that we could read one of my favorite books together - Ken Follet’s The Pillars of the Earth, which is the book from which I got most of my knowledge about churches and architecture. My idea was that we could read it together in Japanese, but he suggested he could read it in English instead. So now we are doing a Japanese-English study tandem 
I’m super curious how this goes, and I have no idea of his level of English.
). Hopefully, I can improve that somehow.
