Since today’s the first day of the new year I thought I’d read about the year of the tiger.
And right off the bat, new kanji! 寅 (とら), the same as 虎 but only used for the Zodiac.
This was quite a bit more difficult than what I’m used to so it took me awhile.
☆ Learnings ☆
New Words
寅 「とら」ーTiger (Zodiac only) 干支 「えと」ー Sexagenary cycle; 60-term cycle of 12 zodiac animals combined with 5 elements in the traditional Chinese calendar. [Shamelessly copied from Jisho because that is a rather specific meaning] 壬寅 「みずのえとら」ー Water Tiger (Zodiac). [Was not expecting that reading at all] 古代中国 「こだいちゅうごく」 ー Ancient China 五行 「ごぎょう」 ー The Avatar five elements (in Chinese philosophy: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water) 十干 「じっかん」 ー The 10 calendar signs 十二支 「じゅうにし」 ー 12 signs of the Zodiac 言及 「げんきゅう」 ー Reference / Allusion 結び 「むすび」 ー Ending, Conclusion / Join, union, connecting. [I don’t think the むす reading for 結 is on WaniKani] イラスト ー Illustration, picture, sketch キャラクター ー Character, personality 丑寅 「うしとら」 ー Northeast [Archaic Word]. [Also new kanji: 丑 (うし) - sign of the ox, which looks like it is only used in Japanese for Zodiac related words]
New Readings
陰陽 「いんよう」ー Cosmic Dual Forces or Yin and Yang. [I only knew of the おんみょう reading]
Forgotten Meanings
もともと 「元々」 ー Originally / from the start 発生 「はっせい」 ー Outbreak / Occurrence / Incidence 本来 「ほんらい」 ー Originally / Primarily. [Woops I forgot what this meant, this is a lv. 5 word]
Bonus Zodiac Names!
Because I think the Zodiac is really cool here’s a list of them:
Happy New Year, everybody! And big thanks for organizing this challenge!
I’m done for today, took about an hour to finish Chapter 5 of 極主夫道 manga. I post translations on the book club threads, like this, and usually someone from the group takes their time to read thru and comment/correct. Right now I’m two chapters behind the club schedule, and will try to catch up.
I ended my autumn challenge early to go off on a vocabulary quest, and I’m happy to report that I have now reached over 900 of the 1000 words that I wanted to collect. Manga has been a particularly useful way to find and flashcardify new words, so I’m focusing mostly on that for the moment.
So for now I am reading 極主夫道 with the book club and よつばと! volume 5 on my own while I await the arrival of a box full of first volumes, one second volume, one Haruta magazine, and some very fancy Doraemon notebooks. I’ll try to post a picture when they get here!
The goal is to translate through Chapter 5 of よつばと! Vol 1.
Currently on page 70 or so, halfway through Chapter 2. Trying to set realistic expectations.
My method for translation is to scan pages, drop them into a Google Sheets slide deck and translate each page next to the page image.
First day complete for me! I read 2021年度 国内ミステリーベスト10選定会議 第1位は特殊設定ミステリーのびっくり作？ - it’s a two page article so if you want to skip all the discussion and just see their rankings it’s at the bottom of the second page.
As I suspected, I am comfortable with reading books, but severely lacking the vocabulary/grammatical finesse to talk about books so this was an informative article for me to read.
Some of the words I looked up
杜撰 - sloppy or faulty. Often regarding information in writing
断トツ - cream of the crop; the best; top of the top
力作 - a great piece of work; a masterpiece
注力 - to pour energy into
I added a couple of the books that sounded interesting to my 読みたい本 list in Bookmeter, though I’m trying not to buy any more until my 積読本 list is smaller
First day done! I wasn’t feeling great by the end of the year but I’m surprised that my mood has improved greatly these last few days and I’m pretty happy with my start. I would like to save time to actually sit and read, which is what I did today, and honestly I like it. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to do it everyday but I hope so, at least when it comes to reading novels. In previous challenges I normally just found a moment whenever (very frequently at night because I kept putting it off), but I’ve decided that I would like to actually make time for this. Firstly because I would like to put in effort and properly learn new words and grammar, and secondly because reading at night when you’re sleepy sucks.
Also, sigh, the pages are so frail I’m afraid I’ll end up making a mess of the book by the end D:
Day 1 started! (or maybe finished, we’ll see how my brain does)
All my mandarake books got here yesterday which is super great timing honestly. I actually ended up finishing the first volume of ラストゲーム a couple days ago, so I’m working on the second one. BUT in another impulsive move I also started reading 錆喰いビスコ which is… an adventure to say the least (side-eyes natively telling me it’s like N1, look at me making rational desicions for my skill level ). It has furigana on most of the unfamiliar kanji though, which makes it feel way more approachable while still getting me to actually read kanji sometimes.
So today so far I read one whole page of 錆喰いビスコ and now my brain hurts, but I am intrigued to see where it goes! I really need to read more actual prose so it’s a start. I’ll probably read some ラストゲーム later today once I’ve mentally recovered, but either way, progress!
Some fun words
Happened across both 経由 and 経路 which I’ve been battling in my reviews lately so hopefully that helps me out; always good to see WK stuff in the wild!
滲む - to run (like liquid), to blur or blot; it was talking about sweat getting in someone’s eyes and blurring their vision
馴染み - familiarity, intimacy
Got you! I added your name and a link to your calendar “home” post to the participants list - if you want, you can update the participants list post daily with the number of days you’ve read (you should be able to edit the participants list post with the “Edit” button at the bottom right corner of the post).
I just read a little bit from the ものべの visual novel today.
騙す だます to trick; to cheat; to deceive N2
手口 てぐち modus operandi; criminal technique; trick
油断も隙もない ゆだんもすきもない one must constantly be on one’s guard with …; one cannot be too careful of …
端ない はしたない improper; immodest; disgraceful
January 1
・Starting off the winter challenge by reading 笑わない数学者, which is the third book in the Saikawa & Moe series. I somehow read the whole bulk of week 2 of the schedule we’re following in the book club in just one day.
Progress: (13% → 22%)
But hey, that means I have the rest of the week I can spend on catching up on the かがみの孤城 book club. I’m on week 1 at around 5%.
note to self: edit days completed in the table in the second post of the thread
edit: haha, I’ve gotten so used to my tiny daily updates it looks so big now that it’s not written in tiny anymore
Thank you @windupbird for setting up the thread! I really like how the opening post turned out
Pro tip for those who link back to their daily updates in their summary posts:
By editing the part of the url that is the “title of the thread” into just an “x”, the url becomes much shorter and the summary post will be a bit easier to edit later.
Thanks @Redglare and @windupbird for sharing your experience! You convinced me to try doing daily updates (or at least as regular as I have time/energy for). I’ll try to keep them concise, at least until I figure out what format I enjoy the most. I just realized that I spent about 30 minutes writing this post
January 1 update:
Today was a bit hectic, so I only managed to read half of chapter 4 of よつばと！ I must say, Jumbo is using quite some dense vocab when he gets emotional. One of his speech bubbles was 9 straight kanji with no okurigana or whatever grammar points – I didn’t even realize such phrases are possible
BTW, @chamellow, I think it’s quite likely that I continue with よつばと！ after vol.1, so looking forward to reading along with you!
And thanks @vonnutje for your advice, it applies to me perfectly I’ve been SRSing a lot of words I was finding while reading, which made the process extra tedious as well as possibly inefficient (since I’m likely running into the same words repeatedly). So I’ve been leaning towards the approach you described, and now I decided that I’ll give it a try. I’ll read for maybe a week or so without SRSing any new words, but still saving the words I look up (that I would otherwise SRS), and then will see how many of them I still remember. If I end up with a reasonable amount, I guess I’ll continue like this. Thanks again for helping flesh out my vague intention!
First day done! Woo! For the last few days I’ve been reading 呪術廻戦 - trying to get through the first 8 volumes before the limited time free period runs out on 6 January. I finished the last chapter of volume 4 today and then read volume 5. I only set aside an hour and a half to read but ended up reading for a bit over 2 hours, oddly enough because volume 5 on the whole was kind of disappointing as it was mainly fight scenes between quite newly introduced characters that I’m not really invested in yet so I kept reading on wanting to get back to the characters/plot I care about more. But I can’t complain, that is pretty much textbook shonen manga and I think the next volume will return to being more interesting.
Hahaha, that’s Jumbo! Me and some friends do a biweekly よつばと reading club (we’re currently finishing up volume 4) and there’s a lot of moments where we are like ‘are we not understanding the Japanese here or is Jumbo just saying something really weird again?’ I love よつばと so much, it’s such an enjoyable manga.
Today I read chapter 8 of Way of the Househusband and chapter 32 of Yotuba!
That’s ~39 pages, which might be the most pages I’ve read in a day so far. It feels ultra satisfying to read in chapters, rather than “however many pages I can get in before losing my brain or bedtime whichever comes first”.
Homepost - Tigerdate: 20220101 
Got you! I added your name and a link to your calendar “home” post to the participants list - if you want, you can update the participants list post daily with the number of days you’ve read (you should be able to edit the participants list post with the “Edit” button at the bottom right corner of the post).
I really like how the opening post turned out 
I’ve been SRSing a lot of words I was finding while reading, which made the process extra tedious as well as possibly inefficient (since I’m likely running into the same words repeatedly). So I’ve been leaning towards the approach you described, and now I decided that I’ll give it a try. I’ll read for maybe a week or so without SRSing any new words, but still saving the words I look up (that I would otherwise SRS), and then will see how many of them I still remember. If I end up with a reasonable amount, I guess I’ll continue like this. Thanks again for helping flesh out my vague intention!
I love よつばと so much, it’s such an enjoyable manga.