I’ve been struggling to keep a consistent habit when it comes to reading every day so this challenge is just what I need. (Its been very all in or nothing at all which is… )
the plan
No real rules as long as I finish at least a page.
Read / catch up to the current schedule for はたらく細胞 before the eighth (abbc)
Join the beginner book club reading 月刊少女野崎くん and see if its my level.
go though some of the books I have on my shelf and / or play some easy games.
Happy New Year everyone!!!
Wishing everyone all the best for the new year!!!
Vasi’s home post
January
月
火
水
木
金
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日
Week 52
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
February
月
火
水
木
金
土
日
Week 5
Week 6
Week 7
Week 8
Week 9
March
月
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水
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金
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日
Week 9
Week 10
Week 11
Week 12
Week 13
= read today = missed day
My approach and goal for this challenge
:dart: For quite a while now I have been wanting to join back in the tanuki squad fun, but everyday life was just being too much..(some of you might remember me saying that at the beginning of December in the Autumn thread lol, well Finals happened,oops ). This past year had been a wonderful one, but not as much when it came to keeping consistent with habits and studying, and I really wish to change that this year :muscle:
Having participated in these challenges in the past, I can't even begin to tell you how much of an immense boost and help they were for forming and making new habits, so that's one of my major goals joining again this year:
*to become again as consistent as possible with daily reading!* :dart:
Quantity or level of what I read won't matter to me as much as actually getting reading done.
I also wish to start reading Chinese :cn: a little bit more. since I'm at a beginner level, I'll probably only dare to take up graded readers as a challenge, but hopefully that will be a good first step! If anyone has anything to recommend, let me know! I'm preparing for HSK3
Reading material
I still haven’t sorted out what reading material I will be going through, but probably it’s going to be just a backlog of books/readers/manga, since I’m also trying to have a NoBuyingMoreBooksTemporarily policy in effect lol;
Alright, so this is what I’ve got for now:
暁のヨナ、第18巻、第19巻 with our ongoing bookclub!
教養366、Still have not gone full circle with this (started spring 2022), but I do have a lot of backlog…
I am re-starting 会長はメイド様！１. It’s been about a year since I gave it up for being too densely worded. Now I just breezed past the first 11 pages and actually understood most of the dialogue without relying on my memory of the plot. I even recognised words from my WaniKani lessons like the one I highlighted below:
Doing this and the Listening challenge. Today for reading it was trying to muddle through some Tadoku and starting Genki I. Here is to getting through Genki 1 by the end of this challenge!
UPDATE 1/16
After a bout of sickness i def fell off the wagon. But i’m back on it and studying Genki again! I don’t think I’ll get through the book by the end of February but thats okay.
First day of the challenge in the books! My spouse and mother-in-law are playing cribbage behind me, so my concentration wasn’t the best.
I read one story from the collection, titled 「冬の気配」. I started reading this book for the advent calendar event in December, but I ended up falling behind on the whole thing… Going forward, I’ll aim to read two stories per reading session.
This one was predictable but sweet. The premise is that, after an accident leaves a young woman with brain damage that costs her the ability to see, her boyfriend tries to prove to her that he still wants to be with her despite her newfound disabilities. She decides to give him one chance by requesting he bring her something wintery that is readily apparent to her. He ends up doing something that reminds her of the day they first started dating, and she realizes that she doesn’t want their relationship to end, either.
I think one of the challenges for a story collection like this is writing something that’s fully satisfying to read despite the short length. I don’t think this story hit that sweet spot for me.
After lurking for a while in the previous threads, I’m really excited to be joining the challenge this year! As of now, I have never read a single manga or book in Japanese so I hope this challenge will put an end to that! Yes, I’m Level 59 and haven’t read anything. I have formally studied grammar, though, so hopefully it won’t be too rough.
As well as reading some manga, I want to start regularly using the Aomi Japanese app I bought the past year. It’s an app that’s supposed to help you practice pitch accent in Japanese–you listen to a recording of a single word or phrase then record yourself repeating it in the app, and it shows you visually how your pitch accent compares. While it doesn’t correct you on actual pronunciation of vowels and consonants, I hope that just by repeating what I hear I’ll improve my pronunciation regardless. It also teaches onomatopoeia, slang, loan words, and idioms, all of which I’m lacking in. It works with a spaced repetition system, and has a gamified approach like Wanikani so it might be appealing to some of you, as well~
While the ideal goal, of course, is to do both everyday, as long as it more days than not, I think I’ll be satisfied!
Key Aomi Japanese (Speaking Practice) にわにはににん (Manga) 魔女と猫の話 (Manga) n o t h i n g
January 1st
What did I read?: にわにはににん
How much did I read?: 37 pages
(Completed Prologue: 庭師の仕事, Started 1st Story: 水槽屋敷)
How long did it take me?: 1 h 32 min
The book I will be starting with is にわにはににん by 中野シズカ! (That title’s so fun! XD)
It’s a collection of manga short stories which all are on the theme of gardens. I thought that starting with a short story collection would be good since when I’ve finished what would ordinarily be just a chapter’s worth, I could say, “I’ve finished a whole story!” Gotta motivate myself somehow! XD Will probably also be good since I’ll be reading pretty slowly, and having fewer characters and events to remember as I go through will be helpful.
While I technically did read 37 pages, the entirety of the prologue had no words except for sound effects, and quite a few of the pages in the first story were pretty sparse in words. So it wasn’t that much reading. But I still learned a few new words! There is also no furigana, so that’s, uh, fun. Though I actually don’t mind that much, since Wanikani has helped me out a lot in that respect, and I don’t actually want to lean on the help of furigana too much.
The Prologue was about a gardener maintaining a Zen garden while evading the attacks of sentient pine needles??? Random, but I thought it was neat how he could turn the strokes in the sand that represent water into actual water that he could drown the needles in. I’m only part way through the first story, so nothing to say about it yet except that the background art is really nice~
After breezing through reading yesterday I managed only 4 pages of 半落ち before my brain gave up. I maybe shouldn’t have waited so late in the evening to read a rather difficult book. I need to catch up on the ユージニア reading so probably should have done that instead but oh well! Tomorrow!
This is my first time commenting in the wanikani community forum so hopefully I am doing this right Anyways, I figured this is a great opportunity to try to be more consistent I with my reading practice. I seem to be able to read more succinctly in my head verses when I read out loud (I end up getting all tongue tied) so I am hoping that’s something I can work on slowly improve upon with this challenge.
The plan is to read as much as I can daily before life gets in the way or my brain turns to mush (whichever comes first). Hopefully, I’ll be able to consume more books than last year.
I initially started logging the pages I read daily. However, once work resumed after the winter break, I couldn’t keep up. Now, I’m just checking the boxes and logging the books I’ve read.
As I dove into my first day of reading for the year, a surprisingly common situation came up.
First, from volume 1 of 「夢みる太陽」, I encountered:
It took a bit of searching to discover this is 一目惚れ.
Good to know. Probably will never see it again.
Time to jump into volume 13 of 「名探偵コナン」.
What are the chances that I’d start a new series that uses a not-so-common word that appears in volume 13 of another series, and oh yeah I read both pages with that word within maybe ten minutes of one another?
Apparently, the only other time I’ve encountered this word written this way in manga was in 2019, in volume 1 of 「怪盗セイント・テール」. Since I read that mostly without look-ups (due to knowing the material already) to build up my reading and comprehension speed, I would have glazed over this word back then.
If you find you struggle even while knowing the words and grammar, keep going! It may take time to build up the pattern recognition that will allow you to understand sentences without carefully processing them.
Day 1! I actually managed a pretty significant reading day today; I finished chapter 2 of BU$TAFELLOWS it continues to be a wonderful/emotional time. Really I’m setting myself up to suffer, I’m gonna miss all the characters over the next like two weeks restraint!
Then I just… really felt like playing Breath of the Wild? So I started a new game in Japanese and that’s been fun, I forgot how nice it is to just explore and such. It’s also fun to see how it’s all presented in Japanese, and it’s mostly at a chill reading level for me thus far so it was a nice time. Another project to throw in whenever I just wanna relax with a game I suppose
Hi, Greya! I also bought the Aomi app last year but found it too difficult to use!
How do you go through the exercises? I’d love to give it another try!
Nothing like feeling a little more confident after doing a few months of reading now and immediately getting 左 and 右 wrong. Talk about a confidence crusher.
Word of the Day: 四六時中 -around the clock; day and night. Four and six because multiplied together they make twenty-four hours. What a silly phrase lol.
The writing style of this book is my favourite out of the Japanese novels I’ve read so far. It’s more difficult than I expected, considering the Natively reviews I’ve read about it all say the language is easy and it’s graded similar in level to かがみの孤城. But perhaps I just need to get used to it!
I saw the movie a couple of years ago, which is why I’m progressing faster than usual. The writing so far has been easy to digest. However, it’s not gripping enough for me to sit still and read for a prolonged period of time. How do you guys build your reading stamina?
This book came highly recommended by a Japanese native as an “easy read.” The writing to me is much harder than コーヒーが冷めないうちに, even with furigana, and it’s just thick and daunting. I’ll give it a few more pages but it may be one of those books that I abandon early and add to my list for when my Japanese gets better.
Read some more ハイキュー！！ today. It was an easier time than yesterday, thankfully. The font size is still abysmally tiny, but at least the words make a little more sense… I’m considering adding the words from my spreadsheet to Anki but 1) I’m so burned out on SRS, and 2) figuring out Anki seems like something I want Future Me to deal with. For now I’ll just gaze longingly at my spreadsheet…
Some life stuff
While I was not reading during the fall, I was job hunting. After two months of unemployment, I finally managed to get a new job It’s a full-time, permanent position and I start tomorrow. I know it’s going to be hard to combine work with studying but I refuse to turn into a person who can’t have hobbies outside of work. I hope to do my readings while cooking/eating dinner, before I inevitably pass out on the couch. From experience, it’s a terrible idea to do it before bed.
Frankie’s home post 
)
Vasi’s home post 
暁のヨナ、第18巻、第19巻 with our ongoing bookclub!
10分で読める伝記6年生, a graded reader. [ 
わたしの幸せ結婚、
Du Chinese app & Mandarin bean
なぜどうして,もっと科学のお話ー4年生 
Catbus’s Home Thread 
ラストで君は「まさか！」と言う 冬の物語 (23% → 27%)
Going forward, I’ll aim to read two stories per reading session.
Aomi Japanese (Speaking Practice)
にわにはににん (Manga)
魔女と猫の話 (Manga)
n o t h i n g
Stray Sheep Home Post
Shishamo’s Home Post 
月
火
水
木
金
土
からかい上手の高木さん Volume 10 (0% ➨ 13%)
夢みる太陽 Volume 1 (0% ➨ 53%)
6月のラブレター Volume 3 (0% ➨ 80%)
からかい上手の(元)高木さん Volume 10 (0% ➨ 10%)
くノ一ツバキの胸の内 Volume 7 (0% ➨ 13%)
it continues to be a wonderful/emotional time. Really I’m setting myself up to suffer, I’m gonna miss all the characters over the next like two weeks 
restraint!
