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2024年1月14日
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Title | Read today | Currently at | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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あなたも殺人犯になれる! | Chapter 23 & 24 | — | 39 new words |
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奥日光 | 2 episodes | 35/62 | — |
Caught up with book clubs and working on Quartet Chapter 5, probably will have time for my usual reads tomorrow 
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Log
Jan 14. Read a few pages from あなたは誰かを殺した
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Home post // Jan 14 
・ 夏のレプリカ Replaceable Summer (98% → 100%)
Finished! Probably the fastest I’ve finished a book in the Saikawa & Moe series. The last chapter/end was a bit anticlimactic imo. smh
・ 名探偵コナン 6 (100%)
I haven’t made time for manga and it hasn’t been a goal of mine either. Today I thought “why not” since it’s temporarily for free on bookwalker. It’s only for a few more days tho, so I’ll have to continue the series another time when it’s for free again ;u; I hope @/ChristopherFritz isn’t judging me for not reading more 
・サイレント・ウイッチ V (0% → 3%)
Thank goodness, I can finally read more Silent Witch.
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1月14日 | Home post
- この美術部には問題がある！1 Chapter 5
- 作家になりたい! 1 (0.00% → 1.63%)
Started my first book (that is not a graded reader) today. It’s a children’s book, and jpdb ranks its difficulty at only 2/10 (which is precisely why I chose it), but it’s still a book. I also started experimenting with vocabulary mining using Anki, Yomitan, and ッツ Ebook Reader.
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Considering this was 30 volumes temporarily free for the 30th anniversary, maybe it’ll be 40 volumes free in a mere ten more years!
My current pace[1] for reading the series (one chapter per week) means two months per volume, and I’ve already fallen one chapter behind schedule. (Maybe I should read that today.) I’m certainly not going to judge someone for not getting through 15+ volumes during a two-week free period!
[1] Maybe I should move Conan from one chapter Wednesdays to one case (multiple chapters) Sundays, then I can actually complete the series in under 10 more years.
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I read four N5 level short articles on Watanoc. I also read ten stories from graded readers: seven level 1 stories and three level 2 stories.
The level 2 stories were actually easier than the level 1 stories because they’re from different sources. I sorted the level 1 and 2 stories so that there would be a more natural progression in difficulty level. My theory might not quite work out though, because I categorized any story with a lot of words on the page as difficult 
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Jan 15 | Home
- Another chapter of Dungeon Meshi. Trying some more ‘reading without lookups’ stuff (though a bit cheating, since this chapter was covered in this week’s anime episode, so it’s still fresh). It’s no good for words I don’t know or can’t associate at least the meaning with, if not the pronounciation, but the extra bit of friction is enough to jog the memory for words I have seen before but don’t remember… and then I just go back over it again afterwards with a comb to get the proper words/lookups anyway, so I guess it’s fine…? It’s certainly faster…
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01月14日 | Read: | Progress: |
|---|---|---|---|
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グースバンプス | 8 pgs | 29/189 pgs |
Tried out some extensive reading strategies with Goosebumps. I was able to follow the story broadly with no/very few lookups. (Broadly.) I have to decide now if I would like to go back over things intensively, or just keep forging ahead with very few lookups.
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Jan 14
Had a good reading day today!
- Read ARIA chapter 12
- Finished up the スキップ・ビート chapter I started yesterday (59), and then also read the next chapter (60), which finishes up volume 10!
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Jan 14
Finished chapter 10 of my grammar textbook. Also read one graded reader each at level 0 and level 1.
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１日１４月 (Home Post Link)
Read:
- とらドラ！219 → 227 - chugging away. I’m like, maybe one very motivated day away from finishing this now
Fun Words
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So I’m finally making my home post half a month into the challenge because I was too lazy to set it up…
I’ve been reading every day, most of it while travelling in Japan. Other than travel days I haven’t actually read a lot, but I have read every day.
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| 月 | 火 | 水 | 木 | 金 | 土 | 日 |
| 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 |
| 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
| 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 |
| 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 |
| 29 | 30 | 31 |
| Feb | ||||||
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| 月 | 火 | 水 | 木 | 金 | 土 | 日 |
| 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | |||
| 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 |
| Mar | ||||||
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| 月 | 火 | 水 | 木 | 金 | 土 | 日 |
| 01 | 02 | 03 | ||||
| 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |
| 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
| 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |
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1/1/24 3 pages Spy Family, 20 pages 舞妓さんちのまかないさん (read weeks 2 + 3)
2/1 6 pages Spy Family, skimmed back over volume 13 シャドーハウス
3/1 21 pages シャドーハウス
4/1 17 pages シャドーハウス
5/1 19 pages シャドーハウス
6/1 34 pages シャドーハウス, 7 pages Spy Family (finished mission 66)
7/1 28 pages シャドーハウス (finished week 4), 16 pages Spy Family (finished volume 10)
8/1 6 pages 本好きの下剋上 manga
9/1 14 pages 本好きの下剋上 manga
10/1 5 pages 本好きの下剋上 manga
11/1 17 pages 本好きの下剋上 manga
12/1 8 pages 本好きの下剋上 manga
13/1 20 pages 舞妓さんちのまかないさん (read weeks 4 + 5), 2 pages Spy Family
14/1 8 pages シャドーハウス
I’m not doing too badly but need to catch up with some of the book clubs so I can start reading a book or light novel. I’m doh g fine with シャドーハウス and 舞妓さんちのまかないさん, as always am lagging slightly on Spy Family, and I should catch up fine with ホリミヤ. We’ll see.
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Jan 15
Today I was reminded why I’ll never be a true Stoic. Because moving away from passion is not something I want to do. Passion for Japanese, passion for reading, passion for many activities I have. And freedom from passion… that doesn’t sound like a life I want.
Maybe the word passion meant something a bit different back then? If so, that means that the translation is bad though. So which is more likely? 
Because I hope they don’t assume I should know what Seneca et al. thought passion was.
Still, I am finding some worth in using this daily Stoic journal. Thinking about what I am lacking to have/find serenity is a reframing of the question I hadn’t thought of. It also asked me what I’ve done recently that was unfriendly/unsocial/uncaring, and it is something good to be reminded off. It is easy to complain and lambast other people for doing those things, but we often get defensive about the times we do them (or plain don’t notice, or notice and quickly forget/ignore it).
Also already peeked into Alice 19th and read a few pages. Will read more later. The story has now picked up, all the set up is done and now it’ll be a romp from here on out for the next 6 volumes (and what is left of volume 1). There might be at least one more slow-ish bit (mostly for me as a re-reader), but if I remember correctly, it has a lot of comic relief stuff to get through the explainy bits, so will be fine. 
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My main exposure to stoicism is Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, which has a lot of interesting and sensible stuff in it (as well as some parts founded on axioms that I don’t believe). I found the main place where I departed from him was that he and I think most Stoics saw the intellect as separate from the body, such that emotions, pain, etc, were bodily concerns and you could choose to not be affected by them. I think our brains are much more tightly connected to our bodies than that (and much of what we do is not really determined by the conscious reasoning part of the brain), so thinking you can become some pure reasoning intellect unaffected by the outside world and with no emotions and passions is just deluding yourself. So I agree with you that emotion and passions are a core part of being human.
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I totally agree with both of you! What I hear in “freedom from passion” is that you are not driven by your passion but instead have a choice: You can deliberately choose whether you want to be passionate about something in this particular moment, or you can choose to detach yourself from it in this moment. Which may or may not be what those philosophers had in mind, though it’s just what I find helpful (for me personally) in these thoughts.
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11 Jan - 14 Jan
| Title | Pages read | Progress | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 進撃の巨人 vol.4 | 140-192 | 192/192 | finished |
| 鋼の錬金術師 vol.9 | 51-176 | 176/176 | finished |
| ハリー・ポッターと賢者の石 | 42-52 | 52/256 | reading |
Yay, I’ve read 1/5 of ハリー・ポッターと賢者の石 and 1/3 of 鋼の錬金術師! Fullmetal Alchemist is the only thing that I read as a physical book, which means no yomichan, so it takes more time, but it is a pleasure to read an actual book. At least it has furigana
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１日１５月 (Home Post Link)
Read:
- とらドラ！ 227 → 254, end (27 pages) - DONE
taiga really bungled this confession to kitamura way more than she did in the anime. Went through all that trouble and then just absolutely wipes out at the finish line, and then they still haven’t figured it out yet. Absolute fools, just shut up and kiss already! asj;agowiejf;alsdkg - イジらないで、長瀞さん ch 143 - said i wasn’t gonna read more, but then the notification for this popped up on my desktop and I couldn’t stop myself
I went back to check and compare to my last day of reading 夜カフェ, where I really pushed myself to read 24 pages at the end of february last year. This was a full 10 natively levels higher, and an even longer read, making it my new best text reading day ever! I said I could finish it with a very motivated day, but I didn’t think I’d actually manage it
I had already relegated magic treehouse and 夜カフェ to the 童話 section of my spreadsheet, meaning that this is the first “adult” level book I’ve ever finished! (spreadsheet also makes a distinction for ラノベ vs 小説 too, but we’ll get there when we get there 
)
some reading stats for とらドラ！
Based on my bookmarks/highlights, it took me 44 reading sessions to finish 254 pages of text, averaging just over 5 pages per session, excluding today’s giant and uncharacteristic burst. Looking at my spreadsheet, it’s split pretty evenly between days that I felt really good and managed 6-7 pages, and days where I kinda phoned it in and only managed 2-3.
I started this book on 10/7, with an extended break in december, meaning it took about 3 full months of active work to read it, making it by far my longest single reading project. Even longer than my full series read of ホリミヤ!
fun words
stoicism stuff!
It’s actually even crazier than this! Not only did they think that intellect was separate from the body, they thought that the intellect/soul was a separate physical body that just detaches from your body body when you die! (vs the immaterial mind/physical body dualism that’s more popular post enlightenment)
The stoics like to differentiate between “impressions” and rational “assent”, and there’s a pretty famous thought experiment used to demonstrate this. If you have a cylinder and a cone at the top of the hill, and give each of them the same kind of push, the cylinder will roll down the hill normally, while the cone will spin around in circles. What matters to the outcome isn’t the input, but rather the physical characteristics of the object being pushed.
So for human terms, that means what matters to the stoics isn’t the circumstances that lead you to feeling the emotions, or even the emotions that you feel in response to something, but rather how you choose to act on them. You can still feel sad, feel happy, feel passionate, and those feelings (the impressions) are not something you are morally responsible for. But, what you are morally responsible for and can and should control are the actions coming out of those emotions (the things you assent to). You can’t control getting pushed, but you can control how you roll, basically
Stoicism has gone through a lot of pop culture filters over the past couple thousand years though, so it’s hard to say if the stoicism in your journal is the same one these old guys are arguing about Plus, like all ancient philosophy, it’s a little hokey sometimes. Their hearts were in the right place though, and reading ancient philosophy can still be helpful as a way to see how differently people can treat the same world, even if some of their ideas don’t really hold up to modern scrutiny.
Exactly! The passion is just a push, and you can choose to act on it or detach from it.
Stoicism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) 2.8 and 2.9 especially relevant to this discussion, but the whole page is nice. SEP is written and reviewed by pro philosophers working in academia, so it’s generally a great first resource with lots of recs for further reading! downside is that it does get very jargony very quickly on some stuff 
For a more modern treatment of how emotion interacts with our capacity for rational decision making (but definitely not a stoic one), really recommend Emotional Insight: The Epistemic Role of Emotional Experience by Michael S. Brady. Pretty short, and I don’t remember it being too overly technical
It’s still really early in the day for me, but I’m gonna post early because to be honest I don’t know if I can do any more japanese today. That was well past my limits and really took as much focus as I could muster, I was taking a break after almost every page at the end there
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15th jan
another ouran chapter (30) finishing off that story arc. wasn’t too bad! about average difficulty for the series. there was a bit of confusion where the dialogue said shuriken but the art featured kunai, and i’m still unclear on whether there’s overlap there (seems no?). also did another chapter of ドラゴン which was fine? leads into the next one so idk how it wraps up yet. the humour is starting to lean more meta and gamer-y which is not language i’m very familiar with in japanese
today’s nhk article was this one, another granblue bnha collab chapter (this has taken a turn), and the entries on になると and における in aDoIJG.
words that stood out
桜蘭：
タガが外れる - to lose all restraint, to let go, to become disorderly
むさぼり食う - to eat greedily, to devour
脳震盪 - concussion
ドラゴン：
へなちょこ - novice, greenhorn, squirt, newbie
リア充 - normie
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