Day 3 | 1月3日、水曜日
Was initially planning to read another Tadoku book today, but @soggyboy’s update on reading Harry Potter made me want to go back to my own e-copy of the book and give it a shot again (I’d started reading Philosopher’s Stone last year but was tripped up by the vocabulary and didn’t continue 
). Started reading the book on the ttsu reader, and while I could only read one page today, I’m finding the book much more readable than before - maybe the fact that I’m doing a Harry Potter movie marathon this week has to do something with it; nostalgia helps 
There’s still a lot of vocabulary that I have to look up with Yomichan, and I’m adding most of them to my anki for later study, but I’m hoping that if I push myself hard enough, I might be able to finish the book by the end of this challenge. がんばります!
New find!
I was confused about the meaning of 「いやしない」in the line 「…こんなにできのいい子はいやしない…」as the definitions on Yomichan were coming up like this:
I couldn’t find any explanation in English for the phrase, but a quick search in Japanese brought up many results out of which I found the second answer here the most helpful. I’m quoting a portion of it here:
居-や-し-ない」です。「居る」の連用形「居」＋係助詞「や」＋「する」の未然形「し」＋打ち消しの助動詞「ない」で、「居るだろうか。(いや、いるはずがない)」という意味を表しています。
The explanation here also fits the context of the original English text, since here the narrator was talking about the Dursley’s kid, Dudley and how “in their (the Dursleys’) opinion there was no finer boy anywhere.”
What made me happy about this whole process is that I realised that I’ve become much more confident in reading and understanding J-J definitions and explanations as someone who still relies on English definitions of Japanese vocab most of the time 
Also, thank you all for so many interesting History book recommendations! Loved reading about the recommendations and everyone’s insights so far
