another ouran chapter down and that’s it for the main content?? there’s a solid 50 or so pages of side content, so uh i’ll work out how to approach that tomorrow ig. also did another two chapters (ish) of 着たい服がある which was fine, it’s still a relatively easy read (i think i looked up two things total) but i’m struggling to get invested. also some more entries in the bakumatsu book (i’m finally coming up on chapter two!), there’s a fair amount of repetition which makes it a bit easier
today’s nhk article was this one, another granblue chapter (long boss fight was long x2), and read the entries on のもとで and の上では in aDoIJG
words that stood out
桜蘭：
ひったくる - to snatch from, to steal from
玩具 - toy. usually read as おもちゃ but can kyouya be bothered with usual? can he hell
Next story! This one seems to be a collection of short stories about the main character’s memories of times staying in a little house deep within the mountains. The first one is about a huge cherry blossom tree and Mr. Ultimate Fancy-Pants with his magical serum to make the blossom smell like plum blossom.
Words Found in the Mountains
甥「おい」ー Nephew
埃「ほこり」ー Dust
日傘「ひがさ」ー Parasol
シルクハット ー Top hat
鼻眼鏡「はなめがね」ー Pince-nez glasses; nose glasses
ブリキ「錻力」ー Tin plate
鋸「のこぎり」ー A saw
Today, I didn’t only read (and translate) one NHK Easy article, as I had originally planned, but I also read (and translated) two more chapters from Aryn’s rescue! It appears like I was pretty productive today (considering how slow I am currently lol)
Finished 奥日光! My thoughts on it (ping @hotdogsuplex):
奥日光 thoughts - mild spoilers
I really enjoyed the setting of the story, a child staying with his grand parents at an 温泉 in 奥日光 and wouldn’t have minded more descriptions of their daily lives over there.
Then I got pretty captivated by the grandma’s disappearing and really curious about what had happened to her.
Then from when we learn what happened to the end of the story, I found it a bit less interesting story wise, too fictitious for me, but still enjoyed it language wise. I also thought the epilogue was a nice touch.
Read a few pages of Alice 19th. I kinda got caught in starting to watch the latest season of OoT Randomizer standard tournament. Only watching the qualifiers yet, which were in November/December, so I’m very far behind. Lol.
I’m excited to try the cooking books. All from the same author, but the samples showed easy recipes with easy Japanese too (well, at least I’ve acquired some of the cooking domain vocabulary from reading a few different things) and a focus on quick and easy food. Already flipped through some and man, it all looked delicious! Not sure when I’ll try my first recipe though.
I think I’m officially in effort burnout, but thankfully scanning doesn’t seem to use the same muscles, so I will probably just do my 15 min revision of the book club books and then keep going with dungeon meshi scanning.
Taking a beating in the SRS stats lol but whatever, it’s still evening out and my meaning → JPN word comprehension has always been poor since I don’t practice expression very much.
If work doesn’t kill me today I think I need to reorganise my bookshelf, so will try and post my shelf to the thread…
Yesterday I finished the 不思議駄菓子屋1 week reading and overshot slightly. Today I went over it again more closely with lookups and understood most everything, which I am happy about.
Scanned another vol of Dungeon Meshi last night, will go over the english again today. Last of the English volumes I have at the moment.
Might scan another vol of Dungeon Meshi tonight, we’ll see.
So I read a bunch of 放浪息子３ today. I feel terrible for everyone in this story at this point. Well, maybe not Maho yet.. And uhh… (spoilers and CW) Yuki feels like a giant walking pile of red flags, even before she attempted to grope Takatsukl. I dunno, I know manga/anime likes to play that kind of thing down, but this has been a mostly down to earth manga and it just feels very… ick.
I may read a bit later, but I took a day off from Harry Potter 1 and read almost half of “新しい上司はど天然”. Maybe it’s because I have watched the anime previously, but I am finding it quite easy to get through.
I finished the last unit of my grammar textbook, yippee! It feels nice to finish something Now I have another one to work through.
I read 3 N5 articles on Watanoc. One of them was about 牛丼 and now I really wanna try it… It looked so good…
I probably won’t get to my pokemon today since I had an accidental nap and still have to do my Anki, but hopefully tomorrow I’ll manage it. (Not optimistic though, since that’ll be day 3 of digging through fudgy mud.)
ときめきメモリアル - about 2 hours. I went out and paid $10 for a 1 megabyte ps1 memory card today (god we are so spoiled now ). getting through the initial parts was a lot faster already knowing how it goes, and then really started to get into the meat of the game. I have no idea what i’m doing, but it’s kinda like if the social/dating parts of the persona series were made for a baseball spreadsheet nerd (or, i guess, really persona just is this but dumbed down so you can actually succeed). This game is intense. I’ve already failed a qwop minigame and lost us the sports festival, been kicked out of 3 school clubs, and almost failed out of school (?). Unclear on the last one, but wowee this is brutal. Learning some good words, though. I’m trying to play my first run without looking anything up, and it’s definitely a game you are supposed to try playing through more than once, but I have a strong “bad ending” feeling coming It also generally auto advances text, and even with text speed on the slowest setting I wouldn’t recommend it for people who aren’t already pretty confident readers.
侵略！イカ娘 - one of my “volumes with a bookmark that I forgot about” from yesterday, just read until I got tired.
Reverting back to daily updates, since I’m reading quite a lot and it’s getting harder to keep track on a weekly basis.
I read Sakura and Suzuki Episodes 8-9 and finally started playing animal crossing in Japanese! A lot of things are going over my head, but I can get the context of the conversation with the words I can pick up. It was my first time on my island after a year or so and my neighbors kept saying things like they’re happy to see me back, it’s been a long time, etc. I forget the exact words used but I’ll be noting them down next time! There were a lot of cockroaches in my house though so I had to go running around the rooms a number of times to step. Ugh… Thank god that wasn’t real life… I’m horrified by cockroaches. I looked up the word for cockroach later which is ゴキブリ.
Had an easy manga reading day. Finished rental oniichan volume 2 and read last week’s shikimori. Shikimori is a nice popcorn read for every once in a while. I like the art style. Was pleased at my comprehension of rental oniichan, felt like I knew a lot of the words and comprehension on longer sentences was easy. Loving the confidence boost of coming back to easy manga every once in a while to see how much my reading skill has improved.
cw: abuse I was worried during this volume that the storyline was going to be ‘just be nice to abusers and they’ll stop being abusive’ but thankfully it didn’t seem to be going in that direction. not sure what the end of the story in the later volumes will be like though
The final chapter of BLEACH is mostly mysterious panels with less text than its average, so I was genuinely surprised when I reached the bottom of the chapter and it was the end of the volume It also ends on a rather dissatisfying cliffhanger imo But that means that the bingo category for “won an award” is now complete!
Scanned another volume of Dungeon Meshi. I really do feel like this is a weirdly useful exercise, even if I can’t say I understand everything completely and so can’t really count it as ‘reading’… but boy, do I enjoy it
January 30 
2024年1月30日 
Previous
放浪息子３
Manga
Chapter 20-23
97 pages
45m
Now I have another one to work through.
１日３０月 
). getting through the initial parts was a lot faster already knowing how it goes, and then really started to get into the meat of the game. I have no idea what i’m doing, but it’s kinda like if the social/dating parts of the persona series were made for a baseball spreadsheet nerd (or, i guess, really persona just is this but dumbed down so you can actually succeed). This game is intense. I’ve already failed a qwop minigame and lost us the sports festival, been kicked out of 3 school clubs, and almost failed out of school (?). Unclear on the last one, but wowee this is brutal. Learning some good words, though. I’m trying to play my first run without looking anything up, and it’s definitely a game you are supposed to try playing through more than once, but I have a strong “bad ending” feeling coming 
It also generally auto advances text, and even with text speed on the slowest setting I wouldn’t recommend it for people who aren’t already pretty confident readers.
１月 ３０日 
Finished!
It also ends on a rather dissatisfying cliffhanger imo 
But that means that the bingo category for “
