Hope everyone had a lovely new years, and if you or anyone you know is affected by the earthquake I wish you safety and speedy recovery
I have been extremely busy the last few days with holiday stuff, and only found the tiniest bits of time to read. Today I stayed up to go take pictures of the 初日の出, but ended up getting chased by geese in the fog instead
like 70 pages of assorted webcomics + new years celebration stuff, wasn’t feeling like sitting down with anything specific and still kinda in a daze from the holiday festivities
日本文化を英語で説明する辞典 - starting on my non-fiction book for bingo. It’s a parallel text, so I’m just covering up the left page with the translation, but if I do one or two entries per day, it should take me about half a year to pretty painlessly knock out the nf square. Today’s entries were about 相合傘 and 海女.
Finished ふらいんぐうぃっち Volume 1. I recently learned the ず negative, and since it also made an appearance in chapter 5 I added it to my Bunpro reviews. Read the entry for きり, which showed up in chapter 6, and added it to my reviews. I also read dialogues 12-22/26 from JapanesePod101.com Lower Intermediate Season 2 (which I had previously listened to).
5 more pages of ブルーロック this morning which brings me to halfway through chapter 1. A couple of pages were quite tricky today as there was a lot of slang and insults, but I think it might ease up a bit as I move into the slightly less text-heavy football-ery action bits.
Also, would anyone be able to help explain the meaning of せーぜー in this panel?
I’m thinking it probably means something like destroy or crush, with the full sentence being roughly:
“I’m going to crush the dream of this spoilt rich kid who knows nothing about how the world works.”
But I cannot for the life of me find せーぜー anywhere on Jisho or from a google search.
Some of today's new words
接待 せったい wined and dined, entertaining guests
道楽 どうらく pleasures, indulgement in drink etc
箱入り はこいり precious, sheltered
脳筋 のうきん musclehead, someone who says something without thinking
温室育ち おんしつそだち sheltered upbringing
1月1日と1月2日
I read one article on Tadoku Dojo / Yomujp today and yesterday. It took me a while because my concentration does not fully lass across a whole article in one sitting. But it was fun to read about Japanese traditions in January.
This has a very high probability of being incorrect, because I just tried to replace the dashes with long vowels. Could it be 精々? In that case, the sentence would be something like “As much as possible, this naive rich kid’s dream…” but I don’t know if this makes any sense in the context.
Turns out I forgot I had bought a few books on nordic/Swedish mythological creatures (we have far more than trolls and a version of elf/house elf) in Swedish. So I guess I will be reading Swedish a few times during this challenge.
Today I read about half the chapter on small humanoid creatures living underground. If you have read Ronja Rövardotter (Ronia, the Robber’s Daughter) by Astrid Lindgren (or seen a movie adaption), then it does contain the kind of mythological creatures I read about or similar ones anyway. I’m not sure all the creatures in that story is based on historical mythological creatures in Swedish/nordic mythology, but they might be.
One of the ones I was reading about was vittror (Wikipedia link). From a quick scan, Wikipedia says the same as the book I am reading, but less in depth.
Edit: Also, I feel fairly confident in saying, it is probably coldest where I live today unless we have some people living in arctic regions in this challenge. -36 C here today.
Whenever I have to interpret some particularly arcane slang, I always think about this quote.
‘Detectoring is like gambling,’ said Vimes, putting down the clove. "The secret is to know the winner in advance’.
Sometimes translation really feels like you need to basically already have a premonition of what people are going to say before they say it, to at least reduce the possibility space a little. lol.
/edit my favourite is middle schooler slang. spend 4 years learning jpn about how everyone is proper and respectful and crap about keigo etc only to be met with せんせー あず-あず
(how do you guys make the header bigger and centered here?..Upd: got it, thanks for the help, みんな!)
Yay, happy to join another RED challenge!
I still mostly plan to read videogames cause I have hard time sticking with books ^^’
Currently playing Star Ocean The second story R, (reading all the texts intensively, speaking to all the npc) and it might take the whole period of the challenge. Upd: nope, played only for a couple of days and dropped, for some reason got tired too quickly, switched to eng.
And on the days I don’t have enough time to dive into the game I’ll read some Satori reader chapters (likely 幸せの木) - Upd: read existing 20 chapters and then canceled the subscription
And once a week I meet with a friend and we read ナツノカナタ or Piano at 5am VN, that’s been going pretty consistently
Plus, started Another code and P3R
Make it bigger by writing # or ## at the beginning of the line. I don’t know how to make it centered, glad you asked, hope someone will reveal their secret
@jul You can try to use <div align = middle (end with >) and then write what you want before the writing the same but with / at the start <div align = middle (end with >)
You can just reply to the post in question, then in the editor click on the speech bubble in the upper left corner, which will copy the raw contents of that post into the editor. You can then pick whatever you want and cancel the edit.
feeling much better today so actually managed to finish vol 5 of ouran! considering how difficult the first chapter of that vol was the rest of it actually wasn’t too bad, the last three are (almost) normal! lookups have definitely decreased except for whenever tamaki opens his mouth. also read two chapters of ドラゴン、家を買う which is okay? first chapter was a bit rough, second was an improvement, had more gaming slang (and words for house) than i expected. i’ve got two volumes so i might as well read them both
today’s nhk article was this one (rough start to the year overall, hope everyone recovers quickly😔), did a chapter of granblue (plus the new years thingy when you log in), and the entries on なり～なり and なりに in aDoIJG.
words that stood out:
桜蘭：
ロメジュリ - romeo and juliet (there’s an abbreviation for everything!)
if there’s something you really struggled with/want to know in a particular article, the folks over in this news reading thread are very helpful with that kind of thing!
Currently I’m about to finish 月の裏側 and will continue with 天気の子 (which I can hopefully finish later this month). I also have half of the 大江健三郎 story left over - maybe I can finish that as well this month?
At least that’s the plan for this month.
greetings! i am fashionably late to setting up my home post but rather late than never. my intent is to build up stamina with reading japanese over challenging myself, so I'm aiming for things that are below my level. I hope to graduate to more difficult material as I make this a habit.
Read chapter 6 of あなたも殺人犯になれる！ This is probably a good book to get back into the reading habit since it’s been relatively easy to understand so far and has short chapters that help with motivation now that my reading stamina has fallen somewhat.
They’re not native to Japan but were introduced from China and their name 相思鳥 comes from that the male and female will call for each other when separated.
These sound interesting! I’m always curious about discovering more mythological creatures, do you have any links/book names? (it’s okay if they’re all in Swedish)
１日１月 
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January 1
January 2 