Thanks! Heartwarming and calming sounds good, adding to my TBR (in English, that is 
)
8 Likes
Day 8, 8th of January
Today I read one page of Kiki. Compared to last year it went much more smoothly, so learning vocab in advance shows its usefulness. It was still quite difficult because the text has to be read vertically and not horizontally. And there are still places where I’m stumped on how to interpret the grammar, but overall I got the gist.
I stopped at the part where Kiki’s father is laughing because he heard the bell in the high tree(s?) ring, which means Kiki had a mishap with her broom again.
28 Likes
Jan 8, Sun of Week 2 of Winter Q1 2023 
- かぐや様は告らせたい Vol.26 Ch.256-257
I don’t feel strongly about this arc, but prior vocabulary learning making going through much easier.
- うたわれるもの
Interesting words
- ブレ = blurring. From 振れる. Probably like ボケ?
- ちっと = a little bit. Also, 些っと, and I have seen ちっとも…ない before.
- 優れる = to surpass. The vocabulary isn’t new, but without Furigana, and thinking about 優しい (as well as 嬉しい and 憂える) makes it even more confusing. Kanji Level 23 and vocabulary in Wanikani.
- 変わった = odd; weird. Like 変な as an adjective.
- 当てもなく = aimlessly. No 当て.
- 涙する = to shed tears
- 履き違える = to mistake one thing for another
- 不憫 = pitiable
- 稽古 = practice; training
- 猛威 = violence; menacing
- 言伝 = hearsay; rumor. 伝 = connections, and in Wanikani.
- 蚊帳 = mosquito net. Exceptional reading for 手帳, which has additional meaning of a veil (帳). 蚊 is just a mosquito.
- 利権 = personal interests, like of business and politicians
- 軟禁 = house arrest; confining in their own house
- 幼子 = little infant. Written in context with 幼児.
- 調達 = supplying; procurement. First Kanji uses the meaning of 調える.
- 選り好み = being fastidious; being particular. The first Kanji is for choosing (選ぶ).
- 道交法 = Road Traffic Act (law article) = short for 道路交通法
- 百面相 = making different comical faces (面相)
- 益荒男 = excellent warrior. Probably 益々 + 荒い + 男.
- 艱難辛苦 = hardships. First Kanji is about hardship.
- 色恋沙汰 = love affairs. Matters (沙汰) about love (色恋).
- 詰め所 = office; crew room. Also, 詰所.
- 詰めが甘い = not planning well towards the end of the game (詰め)
- 腑に落ちない = hard to swallow
- 浮き世離れ = otherworldliness. 浮世 = this fleeting world. The reading from 浮世絵.
SFX
- ほんわか = cozy; warm; fluffy
- もちもち = springy texture
- ぐさりと = deeply thrust; stab
Kanji
-
艱
- hardships
- カン
- 艱苦, 艱難, 艱難辛苦
-
憫
- pity; compassion => 愍
- ビン
- 不憫, 憐憫
- ミン
- 憐憫
-
帳 (Level 48)
- notebook / veil
- veil
- チョウ
- 几帳, 開帳, 紙帳
- 帳
- 蚊帳 (in Wanikani)
- チョウ
27 Likes
Read challenge first week done, too.
I think my 夜市 progress is at around 35% now. Not as much as I hoped for but since I’m reading this before sleep in bed I sometimes fall asleep while reading and then I have to reread a lot on the next day or just don’t end up reading much because I’m too tired. But seems like I’m on par with the intermediate book club pace, haha.
Also found some manga to read that’s gonna keep me occupied for a couple more days. I just wish I’d get myself to read more.
27 Likes
January 8th progress update
Home Post
Today was really successful in my opinion. 
Finished the first chapter of よつばと！- vol. 1. That means I went from page 20 to 53 in about 90 minutes or so. Today wasn’t nearly as tiring as yesterday, reading felt a lot more comfortable as I had to look up less grammar and vocab compared to yesterday. I’m using the old yotsuba&! book club thread along with the memrise course to speed up the learning process and help better understand even the tiny bits.
So far I’m having a blast with the manga which is a cute and funny story, a perfect beginner manga imo. Definitely going to read more in the future, got all the 僕だけがいない街 vols ready but I don’t feel like i’m even remotely close to that level yet.
Today I learned the following expression:
遣っ付ける - to beat; to attack (an enemy); to finish off
Does the manga have parts that weren’t included in the anime or you haven’t seen the anime itself?
28 Likes
The Tanuki Kotatsu Reading Den
January 8th
新書太閣記 progress: 00.86% // Volume I: 09.98% 
Chapter start: この一軒
I think I got a little carried away reading today, I began and finished the chapter at least, but at what cost?
My brain is mush 
Words found under the kotatsu
納屋「なや」ー Shed; barn; outhouse
焚物「たきもの」ー Firewood (also: 焚き物)
癒える「いえる」ー To recover; to be healed
陣笠「じんがさ」ー Ancient soldier’s hat; common soldier
顫く「おののく」ー To shake; to shudder; to tremble (more common to see as: 戦く)
足軽「あしがる」ー Common foot soldier; lowest rank samurai
工面「くめん」ー Contrivance; one’s financial condition
細腕「ほそうで」ー Slender arm; slender means
笊「ざる」ー Draining basket
産後「さんご」ー Postpartum; after childbirth
馴れた「なれた」ー Tame; domesticated
駄々「だだ」ー Tantrum; fretting
汲む「くむ」ー To draw water; to ladle; to pump; to pour
癇「かん」ー Temper; nerves
水甕「みずがめ」ー Water jug (also: 水瓶)
奇異「きい」ー Odd; peculiar
叱言「こごと」ー Scolding; telling off (also: 小言)
旗揚げ「はたあげ」ー Raising an army; raising a banner
刀鍛冶「かたなかじ」ー Swordsmith
系図「けいず」ー Family tree; genealogy
呟く「つぶやく」ー To mutter/murmur/grumble // also has a more modern meaning: to tweet on Twitter
燈心「とうしん」ー Wick (candle, lamp etc.) (this kanji is now outdated though, newer version is: 灯心)
膳越し「ぜんごし」ー Rudely reaching over your serving tray with your chopsticks to grab food behind it
密使「みっし」ー Secret messenger
魘される「うなされる」ー To cry out in your sleep
怯え「おびえ」ー Startled; trepidation; panic
疳の虫「かんのむし」ー Convulsions (in a child); nervousness; short-temperedness; bug thought t cause diseases in children
灸「やいと」ー Moxibustion (Traditional Chinese medicine)
Forms
呶鳴る ＝ 怒鳴る「どなる」(to shout/yell in anger)
Character Name List
for easy referencing later, because these will take some remembering
Also probably some spoilers, but this is a historic novel, so can spoilers really exist for things that have (for the most part) actually happened 
Main
Hideyoshi: 豊臣秀吉「とよとみ ひでよし」// 豊太閤「ほうたいこう」
Volume I Characters
日吉「ひよし」
(Hideyoshi as a child)
Friends
仁王「におう」- Big kid friend
於福「おふく」- Timid kid friend
Family
木下弥右衛門「きのした やえもん」- Father
筑阿弥「ちくあみ」ー Step-father
大政所「おおまんどころ」ー Mother
おつみ - Older sister
加藤清正「かとう きよまさ」- Ojisan (only distantly related)
Others
織田信秀「おだ のぶひで」- Daimyo (Foreshadowing drum noises)
– 織田与三郎「おだ よさぶろう」- Younger brother
今川義元「いまがわ よしもと」- Daimyo
五郎大夫 「ごろ だゆう」// 祥瑞「しょうずい」(Goro’s Chinese name)
– Servant of Goro: 捨次郎「すてじろう」
– Mother of Goro’s child: 梨琴「りきん」
– Rikin’s & Goro’s child: 楊景福「ようけいふく」
Historical People
-
阿倍仲麻呂「あべ の なかまろ」ー Japanese scholar & poet (around 700AD)
-
白楽天「はく きょい」ー Late 700s Chinese poet (Bai Juyi / Bo Juyi) also known as: 白楽天「はく らくてん」in Japan.
-
道元「どうげん」(or 道元禅師「どうげん ぜんじ」ー Japanese Buddhist Priest, writer & poet (Early to mid 1200s) (also known as 栄西禅師「えいさい ぜんじ」)
-
空海「くうかい」ー The one and only Kukai or Kobo Daishi - a Buddhist monk. Posthumously given the title of: 弘法大師「こうぼう だいし」born as: 佐伯 眞魚「さえき の まお」(late 700s to early 800s)
28 Likes
I’m curious, how do you all try to memorize new words that you come across while reading? Do you take notes on paper? Add them to anki cards? Do you try to use them in sentences so there’s also output?
12 Likes
Home Post
Week 1 - Jan 1st to 8th
I’ve been reading an episode of じゃむ屋さん on Satori Reader each day so far, and plan to continue doing that throughout the challenge. I’m also considering joining the BBC with 古見さんは、コミュ症です but while I enjoyed the first season of the anime I don’t want to commit to buying more than one volume to start with and I also don’t want to pay shipping for just a single manga, so: I’ve decided to buy a selection of first volumes from different series (or one-shots and short story collections) to try them out and see if I want to stick with any of them. I’d really like some recommendations if you’ve got any:)
I’m not limiting myself to manga with furigana since the worst case scenario in that regard is me having to wait and try again later. If the manga seems interesting then that is basically just additional motivation to study kanji 
Technical difficulties
I went through the trouble of saving each image as the title of the manga so that the information would be accessible on hovering your mouse over the image but for me this only works for one of the images:
in spite of there being no difference in how it is encoded in the post
it seems to work as intended in the preview vindow:
I also can’t click to open the gallery view of any of the other pictures either.
All of this annoys me, does anyone know what could be causing this behaviour?
27 Likes
You have at least one month before the next one starts.
One path you could take, for example, is to go through Cure Dolly’s subtitled “Japanese From Scratch” video series on YouTube.
Watch just one video (typically 10 to 15 minutes long) per day, which may overlap with grammar you’ve already learned as well as touch upon grammar you haven’t yet learned, and the book club will become more of review of grammar you’ve encountered rather than trying to learn a lot for the first time.
It’s enough to know the various grammar exists and get a basic idea of what they mean, as you can flesh out your understanding by revisiting the grammar when you encounter it while reading.
By the way, I found chapter two of Takagi fairly difficult as well back when I read it with the book club.
Although I’m currently on hiatus from using SRS, for me the process was to add the highest-frequency words in a manga volume I planned to read to Anki. I don’t bother trying to learn the low-frequency words because I probably won’t see them often. Since learning the 20% most-frequently-used words can cover 80% of the overall words, the system worked out fairly well for me.
Slight note: This one’s being read in the BBC, which may go at a faster pace and/or have more dense dialogue compared with ABBC books.
It only shows if the image was “too big” and resized smaller, in which case you can click/tap on the image to view the larger version.
18 Likes
１月８日 (Home Post Link)
Read:
- ホリミヤ ch 59, 60
Taking a break from magic treehouse today, still deciding if I want to do the 2nd book (just so I can mark it off on bookmeter ) or if I want to move on to 夜カフェ already.
I’d like to do more reading later, have a bunch of other work to do today though, so if not, 2 chapters is ok.
Good Words
泥「どろ」ー mud, slush
溶ける「とける」ー to melt, to thaw
あくまでも ー to the last
歪「いびつ」ー distorted, irregular
妄想「もうそう」ー delusion, wild idea
Replies
There’s two major philosophies for how to approach this, and I don’t think one is inherently better than the other:
The first is to approach reading as a thing to sentence mine: you look for new words in the text, and then make flashcards out of them (anki, usually) so you can better remember them in the future. This lets you be more likely to remember the word/grammar and have real context for where you first encountered the word, so that the next time you see it you are more likely to understand it without looking it up, but takes time away from reading (both for making your cards and reviewing them) Livakivi has a good video about this method which is the strategy I use when I want to do mining for things.
The second is to approach reading as reading. Your main goal is to understand and follow the story, and any vocabulary and grammar you pick up is passive. You only spend as much time looking up words, vocab, and grammar as you need in order to understand it enough to move on. If you end up looking the same word up multiple times? totally fine. You spend more time reading.
I tend to prefer the latter of the two, but you can always mix and match. If a word seems particularly useful but also seems like it might not come up much, you can make a card for it to help you remember. But, especially when you are first starting out, a lot of the words and grammar points that are at your learning level are gonna show up preeeeetty frequently. If you make a card for every new thing you see, reading takes forever, so it’s a balancing act.
End of the day, you can really do as much or as little sentence mining as you want and be successful. I personally haven’t felt the need to make flashcards since I started the fall reading challenge, though. Maybe it stays that way, or maybe not!
I really have been wanting to check out ヨコハマ, so if you get that let me know how it is!
I’ve been reading 映像研 in english and really enjoyed it (there’s some jokes and cultural stuff that might go way over your head without translator notes, though), also read chainsaw in english, and komi I caught up in english but read the new chapters in japanese. Definitely recommend all of those.
In a similar vein to some of these:
アオハライド - high school shoujo romance
ホリミヤ - slice of life + high school romance, but not as melodramatic (usually)
ルリドラゴン - high school slice of life + some fantasy elements, only 1 volume currently so not sure where it will go with this, but it’s cute
ヲタクに恋は難しい - workplace romance/slice of life. very cute.
おでかけ子ザメ - this might be the cutest thing that’s ever been printed on paper, i’ve been enamored with it since @windupbird shared it
のんのんびより - since you already have yuru camp on your list, pure 癒し系
27 Likes
replies
My bad, I corrected my post so as not to confuse anyone.
I see, that’s annoying. Changing the display % or pixel count in the post didn’t help either so no quick fixes:/
Thanks for all the recommendations 
10 Likes
January 8th!
Today I read the next chapter of Teasing Master Takagi-san!
Despite the fact that the outcome of every chapter is basically the same, I really love this manga. It’s so cute and fun.
Replies
Starting to read native material is hard, but reading with a club was super helpful to me when I first started reading, and still is now! It was great to have the vocab lists available, and people asking and answering questions in the threads really boosted my understanding of a lot of grammar points.
The ABBC (and all the other clubs too) are a really lovely supportive group of people so there is no need to worry about finding it tough because there will be lots of people who are willing to help 
頑張ってね
Congratulations! Finishing your first manga is such a big achievement. 
Yotsuba is such a fun manga, I hope you enjoyed it.
Congratulations
Finishing your first book is a huge milestone!
26 Likes
I never watched the anime. These days I don’t have that much time to watch anime unfortunately.
7 Likes
Replies
Oh yeah the pareto principle works for this too 
Thanks for the tip!
@javerend Thank you for the detailed explanation
Will check this one out!
Yeah that is exactly why I wanted to ask, i’ll try to mix several approaches and see which works the best for me. For now I’m just going about it in a comfy pace to develop a habit of reading. Aim is to still have fun while learning as much as I can. Thanks again for the intel!
14 Likes
Home post // Jan 8 
・ 本好きの下克上 16 (42% → 44%)
I like finding new verbs while reading.
据え置く = to leave as it is, to defer
娶る = to marry (a woman)
押しかける = to go uninvited
28 Likes
January 7th & 8th (Days 7 & 8) 
I didn’t have much time or energy to read yesterday, so opened up a random nhk article and skimmed through it just for the sake of reading something.
Today I decided to join the チュベローズで待ってる AGE22 bookclub to mix things up a bit (reading too much Murakami at once can get a little tiring ), and I am very happy I did so! It was really difficult to put the book down, so I ended up reading the first two chapters.
As for Russian, I started reading Морфий today. The difference in difficulty compared to the collection of stories is quite big, and I have a feeling I may have bitten off a little more than I can chew. I am just not sure I have the mental capacity to read both this and Japanese daily - I can already feel my brain frying Perhaps it’s time to reconsider my approach.
Replies
I usually don’t write new words down unless something really catches my eye. Flash cards and notes are also too much effort for something I know I won’t look at again. So I usually just rely on picking up knowledge passively. I’ll look up whatever I don’t know and if it sticks it sticks. If it doesn’t I’ll just hope it will stick the next time I come across it 
30 Likes
Oh sorry I totally forgot belated Happy Birthday to everyone who had their birthday. I hope you were all partying hard.
Day 6
I started reading vol. 3 of Your Lie in April manga and also read some stories in manga magazines.
733 pages read 19267 to go
It really depends sometimes I put words into a SRS system and sometimes not. If I see a word pretty often and I don’t know what it means I will SRS it. But often I’m too lazy to do it. Of course it also happens that I memorize a word without SRSing it just by seeing it over and over.
23 Likes
By SRS you mean Anki or are there other tools? I’m not really familiar with the ones where you input the words into the SRS.
I’m living in the stone age and literally writing down words onto paper; kanji, reading, meaning then reading it out loud several times. 笑笑
10 Likes
Week 1
Read at least a small amount every day. Im replaying Pokemon Scarlet but in Japanese this time. It takes me awhile to get through the txt but im progressing. I also read a couple of pages of Yatsubato vol 1.
26 Likes
1月9日
My last day off so who knows when I’ll have reading time again but I’m proud of myself on the progress I made on かがみの孤城. I made it to the first stopping point in chapter 1 (which is the equivalent of week 1’s reading assignment for the old book club).
I’m really enjoying it so far. The writing can be a little convoluted at times (not sure if it’s the best way to describe it), but the author switches from first person in the sort of intro to third person in the actual chapter reading. Then there’s the weaving in and out between present and past timelines so if you’re not paying attention, it can get confusing. The stylistic choices are interesting, and I’d probably appreciate it more (being a literature major and all) as a native reader or a more advanced reader.
Interesting enough, the themes and issues presented are somewhat similar to 夜カフェ. It’s just not written as straightforward and doesn’t have a sense of lightheartedness that the latter has. For example, even though bullying is a common issue presented in 夜カフェ, the author’s message is we should ultimately just find ways to get along. I don’t think かがみ is going in that direction though. Just based on the cover and title, the book seems to be going in the escapism route, which is the opposite direction of what Aunt Aiko would advise. 
Overall, if you’ve read 夜カフェ or are starting to get into native content, the first volume of the series is a good way to get comfortable with written Japanese. But before you get too stuck in your comfort zone, かがみの孤城 is a good level up option to explore other writing styles. I have to say also that reading the book on the Bookwalker app is super helpful for fast look ups. Without that, it would’ve been harder to follow if I took my time with a physical copy.
30 Likes