I read four pages of Dragon Ball. There were a couple of fun words.
ケチ------stinginess; miserliness; penny-pinching
うふふ ------tee-hee-Female term or language, Onomatopoeic or mimetic word[
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February 17 
Home Post
More Zero Escape! 
I was able to play for a good amount of time today, so that was nice. It’s still generally feeling really manageable, though I’m looking up plenty of stuff. I’m definitely able to follow what’s happening (and even get some puns and such!) so it’s been a lot of fun!
999 adventures
サンタ was not happy about being in the freezer 
We finished up our whole states of matter tangent and
Amazing 
But yeah we got out using a bomb made from a water bottle and dry ice we smashed with a frozen chicken?? wild and now we’re bringing base 16 into the mix and really it’s just a wild ride all around.
(There was one point where I was like “…is this innuendo” (spoiler: yes it was) where
we were talking about how frozen the chicken was and just:
紫: wow it’s super hard!
淳平: …say that again
紫 …it’s super hard?
淳平: one more time please
紫: …it’s super hard
淳平: thank you
サンタ: dude your face is so red
Like 淳平 we have bigger problems
Some words!
後回し - putting off, postponing
物色 - looking for a particular person or thing, rummaging
ずっしり - heavily, profoundly
コント - tale, skit
喚き散らす - to rant and rave, to raise hell (it said サンタ was doing this as always lmao)
待ちくたびれる - to get tired of waiting
未必の故意 - willful negligence
うろたえる - to be flustered, to lose one’s presence of mind
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Day 48: Today I read 2 pages of よつば＆！Didn’t have the braincells for more lol
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Day 47:
日本語: I read some of ミステリークロック and some of 機動強襲型令嬢アリシア物語１.
Read-aloud: We read two chapters of 7SEEDS.
中国語
中国語: I read an intermediate entry on Mandarin Bean and one page of 擅长捉弄的高木同学.
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Oooh, all of these word facts are interesting but this one especially so! Actually wondering if there might actually be a pun at work here or even if it is meant to be refering to gender dysphoria because the gimmick that the main character has in this game is that (marking as spoiler but it’s revealed very early)she can travel back in time, but she ends up in some random other person’s body. So at the time of this scene she is in the body of this other guy, trying to convince someone else that she is a reporter that he met earlier that day (although you have none of this context when you first see the scene haha)
Nice! Yeah I just recently watched the anime without subs (prefer to have Japanese subs but crunchyroll doesn’t have them 
) and it was in general pretty okay but I certainly missed some stuff so should be nice to read it and fill in some gaps! I also have a quite alarming to be read pile on bookwalker but I’m justifying it by being like ‘I want to look at screens less, need the pretty paper books’
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Yeees! I felt the same just recently! I was so glad to go back to a novel. It’s aimed at kids, which means yeah the language isn’t too hard. It has a fair amount of casual speech though, but there is so much more redundancy that I feel like I can handle it much better.
It’s a bit funny to me how so many people prefer to start out with manga but I got all stressed out by them 
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Lately I’ve been getting up at 6am to read before breakfast which is working quite well for me. I have medication that I need to take 30 minutes before I eat so it’s good way of passing the time. It’s very cosy, reading by a lamp when it’s dark and quiet outside, especially if I can convince the cat to sit on my lap for a bit and not yell for her breakfast. The book I’m reading at the moment is a ghost story but I’m only in the first few chapters so there’s just a general sense of unease pervading at the moment and nothing actually spooky has happened yet. Might be glad of the lighter mornings when it does get spooky though.
In the last thread we had a tanuki indulgence day for when things happened outside of your control, and I would say this definitely counts! We’ve got a big storm here in the UK today so I’ve been busy charging everything just in case.
Yes same - novels aimed at 7-8 year olds seem to be the sweet spot for me at the moment in terms of comprehensible input. I’m still having to look up a LOT of words but everything is very spelt out in terms of the plot so I can follow it even if I am a bit fuzzy on the direct speech. Glad to find someone else who feels the same way!
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Ohhhh, Out of interest, how do you find novels by target audience age?
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For books targeted at late elementary schoolers, I’ve been looking at books by the publisher “Aotori Bunko”. They come with furigana and so far have worked pretty well for me. “kadokawa tsubasa bunko” seems to be similar as well. There are also some grades readers that target elementary students by school grade (e.g. the １０分で読める series). I also found the 10歳までに読みたい世界名作 series (Stories from around the world you want to read before you are ten) (that publisher also seem to have some other books aimed at elementary to middle schoolers as well). There’s probably a plethora more (I guess I mostly only cover modern stuff) but at that point I thought I have that age group covered and stopped searching
I don’t yet know to what I will graduate from here. I kinda want to at least partially drop some furigana, but “normal” books are still a little much I recon. I’ll probably google for something like 中学生向けの本 and then browse through some rankings and then see what I’ll find from there? 
(edit: coming from the elementary school stuff: My tip would be: after you found one that seems to be around the right difficulty and/or age group, look if the publisher has more books for a similar target audience)
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Whew, finally it’s the weekend! I read pages 155-160 of 銭天堂 today, which isn’t quite ten pages, but isn’t a bad amount either! I’m hoping to finish off Chapter 3 either tomorrow, or before Monday.
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Today’s article was 本の厚さ
which brought me the word 目安 which means criterion/reference. I would never have guessed that. 
Ahhh I wish it was that interesting (I love puns!) but it’s actually just the pitfall of parsing multiple kanji compounds incorrectly. I’m very used to leaning heavily on kanji knowledge to pull me along and I had no idea 解離性 was a word on it’s own! It doesn’t actually have an entry in my JP dict, but I found it online. Anyways, I double checked and the Japanese definition for 解離性同一性障害 has nothing to do with gender and actually lists 多重人格 as a synonym.
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If you google 小学生に読んでほしい ( or 中学生に読んでほしい etc) you can find lists of recommended books organised by age range/school year. I kind of stumbled into all this by accident after buying some books on ebay thinking they were going to be manga and then panicking when they arrived and they had very few pictures!
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Sorry all, I haven’t really had time/energy to keep up with everyone’s posts recently… I hope your various readings have been going well!
I just wanted to drop in and say that 霧のむこうのふしぎな町 is going well, sometimes I can just fly through ten pages in one day. (It feels like flying, but in reality I’m pretty sure it takes hours.) Today though I got totally stumped on the first sentence, halfway stumped on the second sentence, and the third sentence had four names of flowers and trees that I had to look up and two words for fall leaves (which I also had to look up). So that’s all I’ve read today, three sentences.
(I did appreciate the third sentence, as the only words I add to my flashcards these days are names of plants, animals, and foods, and I always enjoy collecting new ones!)
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Homepost - Tigerdate: 20220218 
Tanuki Scroll XLIX: 嫁になった雪女
Read today’s Hyakyumonogatari, from Yamagata Prefecture. It’s another story involving Yuki-Onna.
☆ Learnings ☆
New Word
置き手紙「おきてがみ」ー Farewell letter; A letter left by someone who has departed
お世話「おせわ」ー Help; Aid; Assistance
Forgotten Meanings
遠慮「えんりょ」ー Restraint; Reserve; Constraint
きっと「屹度 (rarely used)」ー Surely; Almost certainly; Most likely
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Day 49!
I finished the first volume of 三ツ星カラーズ today. I haven’t decided if I’m going to carry on reading this series yet. I probably will if there is an offshoot club for it, but because of the slightly random behaviour of the characters, I think it may be tougher to read alone. I spend a fair bit of time double checking whether I read things correctly because what I understood something to mean seems a bit weird 
Also read the next chapter of からかい上手の高木さん. As always, it was a cute fun read 
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I forgot to say earlier but I have read and have access to that volume so am happy (to the best of my limited abilities lol) to help out with whatever questions at any point
Aww, well, still a cool word haha. That was me just assuming that the ‘japanese people love their puns’ rule might be applying haha
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That’s excellent! I see you there staying with Santa at all possible opportunities, haha.
Still going well! Today had a real overload of unfamiliar words and sentences with grammar that took some time to parse, so that slowed me down and I thought I’d have to stop pretty short, but I did my best to really push it and made it to ~3100 characters and 250 lines. I think from here, when circumstances allow, I’m going to do my best to set my sights on about 3000 characters, as it’s clearly doable under decent circumstances but does represent at least a slight increase in amount read from where I was not long ago.
Speaking of those nastier sentences, I’ll highlight one (for context, the protagonist’s relative staying with him has been cooking him チャーハン every morning, but wasn’t around today): 朝からチャーハンっていうのもどうかと思ったけど、ないとそれはそれで淋しい。There’s a lot going on for a simple learner like myself. Like knowing how どうかと思う is a bit of an expression and parsing that out of the kana string, knowing how それはそれで works, knowing (err, using Yomichan on) さみしい with a less frequent kanji representation, etc.
On the flipside, I came across ねばならない, and that’s a nice reminder that higher JLPT level doesn’t necessarily mean harder to understand, heh. One of those points that I looked at and understood immediately. I mean it appears to be the same as some early grammar everyone learns, just expressed a bit differently.
In the absence of anything more exciting for screenshots or content, today is the day I’m finally going to internalize that たって is basically just that one usage of ても/でも , because this one catches me off guard a little too often. Doubly so when paired with どう in this way, took a little thinking.
I’m also a little way’s past the 1/3 mark on Zoo 2, and about 60 pages in, so I’m having a good time! Have absolutely seen improvement over the course of this challenge
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February 18 update:
Read the third story of きまぐれロボット today. This one had a bit more words for me to look up. It was also less predictable, I would say, – more of a situation puzzle kind of story, even if a bit simplistic to be actually used that way. Overall I like how this has been going so far.
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Yesterday
Just some lines in Monobeno.
Today
I think I read half a chapter in Monobeno and added lots of new words to SRS.
Yamada kun and the Seven Witches Vol.3 continued reading it (70 pages). It’s much better than volume 2 which was rather boring.
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