Today had some false starts finding an article to read. I didn’t sleep well so am feeling groggy and book reviews were a bit much to get through. So, good ol’ Meaning Book to the rescue: 「貧乏飯」とは？意味や貧乏飯ブログとはどんなブログ？ | Meaning-Book
The tl;dr is that 貧乏飯 is cheap but filling food, often shown on cooking blogs.
Homepost - Tigerdate: 20220209 
Tanuki Scroll XL: 生き肝の目薬 
Read today’s folktale from Chiba prefecture!
About a おばあさん who loses her sight, the story takes a pretty dark turn but at least it has a happy ending.
☆ Learnings ☆
納屋「なや」ー Shed; Barn; Outhouse
途端「とたん」ー Just now; in the act of; as soon as
何て事「なんてこと」ー My Goodness! Holy fudge! (I think I’ve heard this before [Yakuza I’m looking at you], just never seen it)
冥福「めいふく」ー Happiness in the next world; the spirit finding peace after death. Can be used (as in the story) like: 冥福を祈る [めいふくをいのる」ー to mean “to pray for the departed / to pray for someone’s soul to reach happiness/nirvana”
札所「ふだしょ」ー Temple which gives out amulets
西国三十三所「さいごくさんじゅうさんしょ」ー Saigoku Kannon Pilgrimage: a pilgrimage of 33 Buddhist temples in the Kansai region, all dedicated to the goddess Kannon.
@Natsuha, happy birthday!! 
!!
Loving all the aquatic life info you’ve been sharing 
And the penguins! 
Day 32: February 9
Yesterday I read too much when I was already tired, so today I felt even worse 
Still got a little bit of reading done, but I’m going to rest for a bit now and hope I feel a bit better tomorrow
February 9
星の王子さま, p. 40-45.
I swear this book is work for me. I find the language much more poetic rather than purely descriptive and I’m definitely not used to it. It might have been the reason I didn’t look forward to reading it the last previous days, and I kept postponing it today too. I don’t like that I’m starting to put it off unconsciously…
Otherwise the book is pretty nice, the vocabulary seems beautiful. Perhaps it’s also the sentence structure that I have trouble with, but it’s definitely because of the amount of hiragana words I don’t even know in kanji, and it’s so uncomfortable encountering them first in hiragana, all together with particles and so on. It’s like I sometimes don’t know where the unknown word starts and where it ends, or if it’s two unknown words together, or a word + a grammar point. So in the end I lose a lot of time just trying to know what’s going on like… structurally, before even trying to comprehend it semantically. So many constant lookups.
I hope this is not too pessimist a take for anyone deciding whether to read it or not. The book is nice, and it’s only my second book in Japanese, so it was natural and expected I was going to encounter a lot of struggle. I guess I’m just venting my feeling of shock after discovering that this book isn’t as easy as I thought it would be, just because it has pictures and it seems like a children’s book. It’s not super hard either, which makes it worse because sometimes it makes me think why am I even struggling in the first place, it’s a bit of an invalidating feeling.
I hope the work I’m putting into this pays off in the end.
Damn you, hiragana words.
Thank you.
Prison School Vol.1
Today I read 70 pages lol this manga is super weird and the guy with the glasses is bat shit crazy.
I spend lots of time singing karaoke today. It’s really incredible but you need to be super fast at reading to sing along. Yeah I don’t cheat and use romaji. Karaoke seems to be awesome to improve your japanese.
this is the reason that somehow even though it’s meant to be the easiest of the things I am reading I find Kikis (魔女の宅急便) the hardest 
. Kanji really does help out so much, especially with unknown vocab! But we will get there in the end, think it really is just an issue of slowly accumulating vocab 
It does help so much indeed 
. What I’m doing is even though I’m encountering the words in hiragana, I’m adding them to the SRS in kanji, because most of them are normally in kanji, so might as well learn them that way.
You’re right. I hope that once we know the vocabulary, it doesn’t really matter how you encounter it anymore. But wow does getting there feel so bad 
.
I can’t believe you didn’t know about the ふにゃりんぱ, that’s totally unforgiveable 
Oh I know all of those feelings super well, trying to balance what I say on my less good days without sounding too much like a downer. All that’s totally valid – after playing (some of) a few games aimed at semi-young audiences on the side like Paper Mario, I’ve learned it’s actually pretty crazy just how much reading competence is expect of kids at times. I’m sure it’ll eventually pay off but I’ve been sure been there and it feels awful sometimes.
Yeah, happy birthday!!! Hope it’s great. Sounds like you’ve been having some fun. I’ve been meaning to try out karaoke sometime myself, mind if I ask how you’re doing it?
Today felt really good! Nothing was really too hard. In roughly an hour I came out to ~2200 characters and ~200 lines read so that seems to be a decent basis for estimating my speed at reading Summer Pockets. Hopefully in a month or two I can look back and see gains there 
The newest addition to the cast showed me the symbol of the… what I want to be the bearded cat gang, but I guess it can mean whiskers and stuff too. Either way, it’s awesome. I’m spoiled for choice with these characters.
As I keep working through Zoo 1, I just want to share a sentence from last night. It’s… probably one of the longest I’ve come across, so I was super happy to be able to read a Japanese sentence that just goes on and on like this.
古くぼろぼろになった写真を撫でながら婆さんは俺の聞きなれない方言まじりの言葉で、この写真は外に立っているうちにぼろぼろになったが息子を写したものはもう他にないからどうしたらいいかなあという意味のことを困ったようにつぶやいた。
Pretty sure there are no typos there haha. I had to look a little bit up but, like, wow, I can read that. 
Oh yeah, cool new expression: 骨を掴む (こつをつかむ) - “to get the hang of / learn the secret of.” I had no idea こつ could mean skill, knack, secret, etc. I much prefer my immediate reaction of “This is… to catch bones??”
I’m so sorry that I tricked you into this 
I must say that it also became a bit more difficult for me over time. And yes, it is pretty poetic, which of course doesn’t make it easier, I know…
Also, as you suspected, the struggle with reading hiragana strings will become less the more vocab you know, and also the more you have read. Because the latter will get you more used to “normal” sentence patterns, and based on this you can make more and more educated guesses along the lines of “this must be a particle” / “this should be a noun” / “this verb starts here” and those things.
And by the way, depending on the author, they will use more or less strings of kana (if only occasionally) even in adults’ books, so there is no way out, I’m afraid… (And we’ve speculated a lot on how the authors choose whether to pick a kanji or kana, and sometimes they write the same word in kanji on one page, and in kana on another page 
My secret assumption is that they don’t want the page to be too fraught with kanji because at some point the text will start to look more difficult with too many kanji, but I have no idea whether this is actually relevant or not.)
Oh, that was a funny one So how did you figure it out? I had no idea what it was all about when I played it in English, so I googled it (with results being much to my surprise). I guess if I were playing it in Japanese, my first instinct would probably be to look it up in a variety of dictionaries, to no avail, and then I’d either leave it alone in frustration (I think they explain it in the end if you pick it?) or, indeed, google it. I’m wondering what Japanese people do when they come across it…
February 9 update:
Read chapter 16 of よつばと！ today. It focused on Asagi again, giving some insight into her weird relationship with her mother. Not sure where this is all going, but I feel like the Asagi arc might be over for now.
This chapter was about 花火. Until today I understood 花火 as fireworks in the typical sense of the word, i.e. the stuff that shoots up into the sky and blows up, often in fancy patterns (and this is what comes up when googling it), but apparently this word covers a much wider variety of things, such as sparklers and some weird devices that I couldn’t recognize. Which makes sense, since all of them have to do with fire
Recently I watched a documentary about the traditional Japanese fireworks, and wow that’s crazy stuff! Here is a short Youtube video to demonstrate it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CO_8eu70VK0
The people who are into this prepare them themselves and everything - I cannot even begin to imagine how dangerous this must be 
Same same.
Man totally had the same phrase today in my Slam Dunk reading. What a concidence (was also new to me). Didn’t make the same connection though since Slam Dunk uses way more kana and it was all in kana
I could at least read it alright without noticing any ^^.
If you want to specify it to only that stuff I think the special word for it is 打ち上げ花火 which is also a film. But I think noone really uses that word…
Hey, not at all, don’t be! 
I already had the book from many years ago. I saw it in my local Japanese store and I bought it cause I thought it was nice and also cheap. I only own two physical books in Japanese, and after reading 君の名は it was only natural that I would read the other one once I was done hehe. I also mentioned it in my conclusion of the autumn thread:
I’m thinking that perhaps alternating this with an easier resource might be best to keep my interest going strong right now. I’m not exactly sure what I’d like to start, perhaps a video game.
This is so funny to me for some reason. Even Japanese people feel dread when they encounter the WallOfKanji™? We’re not alone!
February 9
本好きの下剋上 8
Progress: (76% → 80%)
Getting close to the end of the book 
Just a few more chapters.
I read one page of よつばと！ again. Today I could have done more but I wound up playing chess with my flat mates for three hours instead and I’ve been prioritizing Japanese over socializing a bit too often maybe 
I also listened to a podcast for a bit over an hour while doing chores and noticed some progress in terms of comprehension so it’s been a relaxing but productive day all in all 
Day 40!
I had a lesson with a tutor today during my lunch break. She had prepared a passage for me to read, so we read that together.
This evening I read Chapter 6 of よつばと！which was about catching bugs.
It was another cute chapter.
Day 39:
日本語: I read a lot of 機動強襲型令嬢アリシア物語１.
中国語: I read an intermediate entry on Mandarin Bean, one page of 擅长捉弄的高木同学, and a bit of 孩子最爱读的中国民间故事.
