１月十一日
Didn’t feel up to hardcore studying of my grammar textbook, so I just read a couple NHK News Easy articles. Learning vocabulary and kanji is definitely paying off because I can understand more than at the beginning of the month. That said, I can’t really be happy about it when the vocabulary I learned today and recognized in the articles was all about death and bodies and people not having running water or electricy.
| 01月12日 | Read: | Progress: | |
|---|---|---|---|
 |
小さな森の狼ちゃん Vol 1 | 8 pages | 083/175 |
 |
ブルーロック Episode 凪１ | 2 pages | 046/199 |
After a week of relatively easy reads with magical wolf-girls and mice in holes in the wall, there’s nothing like 2 pages of Bluelock on a Friday morning to brutally remind me that I am very much still a beginner 
中盤 ちゅうばん midfield of a football pitch
頭脳 ずのう intellect
看破 かんぱ seeing through someone’s lies/ reading their thoughts
January last update - 12th I started school and work this week so I don’t have time to update daily. However I did manage to read a bit everyday.
Also reading the examples sentences in Bunpro and examples sentences in Nutshell Grammar which explains things really good!
１月 １１日 
I know I’ve already yelled excessively about how great the art is in this manga, but every now and then there are panels in Atelier that remind me of reading the Ray Bradbury graphic novel anthology as a kid… it’s such a thrill 
also i am so weak for white-haired anime men who end up being the dad figure of an unorthodox found-family group 
you’d think that such a genre of guy would be rare but it turns out that both of the manga i read today have that exact same trope smh
And then it was nice to pick naruto back up. I’ve been putting it off because of the need to fill out the book club vocab sheet skjdgdfkd but I love these kids
See you tomorrow (¯▿¯)
Jan 11
夜のピクニック 50% - 55%
Jan 12
夜のピクニック 55% - 60%
Broke my streak on the tenth 
12th jan
another chapter of ouran which was, again, difficult, but vague familiarity with this plotline helped get through it, plus i think i’m getting used to pushing through the harder bits. also finally went back to ドラゴン and this chapter was okay! not amazing, like, but i had more fun with it than i have previous ones.
today’s nhk article was this one (depressing read), there’s a bnha collab in granblue now so i’ll be doing that for a bit, and read the entries on にも関わらず and に基づいて in aDoIJG
桜蘭：
切り結ぶ - to cross swords with
大まか - rough (estimate etc.), broad, general
ドラゴン：
里親 - foster parent(s), pet caretaker
elsewhere:
やばめ - seems to be ‘on the verge of being やばい’
Jan 12, Fri of Week 2 of Q1 2024
狼と香辛料 Vol.1 Ch.5-6 (77-85%)
STEINS;GATE (VN) Ch.6
Did in fact read a bit more of Alice 19th before bed last night (11/1—how to confuse people, use a date format that depends on where you live in how you read it, and then only have numbers that can’t disambiguate, only you all know I’m talking January and not November; for me that is correct, 11th Jan).
I’m enjoying reading Alice 19th slower this time around and actually looking up things I don’t know. I’m thinking of quickly reading through the English translation once I am done with each volume (I own that too, mainly because I discovered this manga many, many, many years before today, and at least a few years before I would even consider learning Japanese).
I might, not 100% sure I will yet. Although it might be more useful to just read the pages where I know I’m not understanding so well to see if I can get a better understanding.
I also have a few things I need to look up that I took pictures of. Let’s see how many I can figure out myself and how many I will need help with:
したげる (which I saw twice) is して + あげる. I need to remember that sometimes things get smushed together, like verb-ておく becomes verb-とく. Maybe one day I won’t need to look up when I see a new version of this.
弓道部のぞきに来ない was not 弓道部 の ぞき, I have no idea what ぞき could be, neither did my dictionaries. I wondered if maybe it was a printed misspeaking/dialect something that made とき into that, but it didn’t really make sense. No, the answer when I looked today was much more clearly: 弓道部 のぞき に 来ない. So not coming to peek at the archery club. Why could I see that today, but not yesterday?
彼女ぼ集中 I figured out by starting to write it into jisho and that one suggestion 彼女募集中. Why did the kanji in the middle need to be kana? With the full kanji I understand! It isn’t girlfriend SOMETHING concentration/focus. But girl friend - recruiting/looking for - in the middle of/during/doing. (Later in the sentence it also helped to notice that it was けっこー not けっこ. Missing that lengthening of the vowel made me even more confused on what the whole sentence was about.)
Cool that I figured them all out myself. Wish I could have gotten unstuck with all of them last night though. 
As for so far today, I read in my Swedish mythological creatures book. Reading about Dödsväsen—death related creatures. Like our mythological version of ghosts called gast, and possibly another version of a ghost but maybe a bit more physical (it didn’t talk about the physicality, aka the solidity of these at all) called gengångare. And then also kyrkogrim (don’t look this one up if you hate animals being hurt) and glosom (never heard of this last one at all).
From here on out, the chapters seems smaller or more focused on just one creature. Seem like we’ve hit the bigger categories that include multiple different creatures of the same type.
@Jintor Congratulations on finishing your first book! Always a nice achievement/milestone. 
１日１１月 (Home Post Link)
Did a lot more enjoying the new VCR today: watched my copy of the lion king (including some troubleshooting and a bit of reading to figure out how a 二が国語版 vhs works), and also コクリコ坂から both with no subs. I was hoping to read more today but, I’m not gonna complain if the thing that’s distracting me is getting practice in a jp skill that I have significantly less practice in than reading 
Read:
Making good progress with 天気の子, only 80 pages left. I’m hoping to finish that over the weekend, and then I will catch up with the IBC’s あなたも殺人犯 
1月12日 | Home post
I’m tempted to drop Wanikani so I can use that time for reading…so many items still in circulation are leeches…
| Date | Name | Type | Amount | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024-01-12 |  この美術部には問題がある！１ |
 Manga |
 Chapter 5 23 pages |
20m |
Another day of book club catch up today, this time for the Beginner Book Club with この美術部には問題がある！. Honestly one of the better chapters so far.
Day 12
小さな森のオオカミちゃん chapter 10, 奥日光 episode 5, and this N2 article about autumn leaves. Look at the maple leaf manju:
New words:
とともに - together with; as X, then Y
紅葉狩り - autumn leaf viewing
あちこち - here and there
代表的 - representative
カエデ - maple tree. This name came about because maple leaves look like frog hands: カエル手 → カエデ
ギンナン - ginkgo nut
Also I remembered イチョウ from like a week ago
home post
2024年1月12日
 |
Title | Read today | Currently at | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
奥日光 | 2 episodes | 31/62 | — |
Home post // Jan 12 
・ 夏のレプリカ Replaceable Summer (79% → 87%)
Almost done! Will definitely finish this book during the weekend. やってみせますからね！After that I can finally continue reading Silent Witch (book V).
I haven’t been posting, but I have been reading. My goal for 2024 is to read 100 manga volumes, and I haven’t slacked off yet.
As we’re almost 20% of the way into the two-month Winter 2024 reading challenge, I’m almost 33% of the way through my goal for the time period.
My reading has been split between:
The hardest part hasn’t been the Japanese, but rather keeping track of two of my “read on the bus” series that have gone like:
| Series 1 | Series 2 |
|---|---|
| Kind but somewhat dimwitted female lead. | Kind but somewhat dimwitted female lead. |
| Girl likes classmate boy, but boy is “just friends”. | Classmate boy likes girl, but girl is “just friends”. |
| Girl meets dark-haired boy she’s compatible with. | Girl meets dark-haired boy she’s compatible with. |
| Dark-haired boy is unavailable. | Dark-haired boy is unavailable. |
| School has field day event. | School has field day event. |
| Girl wears a mascot costume. | Girl wears a mascot costume. |
| Blond-haired boy teases girl. | Blond-haired boy teases girl. |
| Blond-haired boy falls for girl. | Blond-haired boy falls for girl. |
| Blond-haired boy asks girl out. | Blond-haired boy asks girl out. |
| Girl says yes. | Girl says no. |
| Dark-haired boy becomes available. | Dark-hair boy becomes available. |
| Dark-haired boy realizes he likes girl. | Dark-haired boy realizes he likes girl. |
I keep having to think back like, “Was this the one who turned down a boy or was turned down at the beginning? Which one was the girl who almost fell down the stairs while wearing a mascot costume?” and so on.
Overall so far, I’ve completed three volumes and am partway into 11 more. (Well, 12 if I count being two or three pages into the next volume of Detective Conan.)
I had one of these come up earlier this week. Had no idea what it was and couldn’t look it up until I got home.
Jan 13
Finished a new release of 今日から幼馴染. I had forgotten it has no furigana, but it makes up for that by being pretty light and easy. It was funny to compare it to 僕の心のヤバイやつ since they’re both set in middle school.
Next up:
Fun fact: i must have bought this new because it still has the feedback postcard to send to the publisher (at least I presume that’s what this is)
１月十二日
I read two NHK News Easy articles and two level 0 Tadoku graded readers.
 |
01月12日 | Read: | Progress: |
|---|---|---|---|
 |
グースバンプス | 1 pg | 19/189 pgs |
Extensively reading 1 page at a time, then going back and reading the same page with lookups. This session I finished 1 page and then read ahead one page, but I’m not counting it until the intensive stage. Meant to read a bit more this session, but got so sleepy 
It’s interesting to see what comprehension is like extensively. Some pages I understand what feels like quite a lot, and others less.
Jan 12
Had a good amount of time to read today!
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