Welcome to the “Read Japanese Every Day” Challenge, Fall 2025 Edition!
It’s perfect timing for a fall thread over here in Japan as the weather is finally cooling down a smidge. I hope our friends in the Southern Hemisphere are able to enjoy their spring and the lessening of the cold. Let’s all get together and read!
This Season's Emoji Explanation
This fall’s emoji are a moon and moon-viewing/mochi. Fall is the season for moon-viewing (月見) in Japan. You’ll find a lot of stores celebrate by offering food with an egg on it since the yellow-white color and dimpled texture mimic the moon’s appearance. The other emoji shows a traditional moon-viewing. It’s custom to eat tsukimi dango for a few reasons- it looks like a full moon of course, but also because in Japanese traditional folklore, rabbits make mochi on the moon. While dango aren’t mochi, they are also rice based wagashi.
This year in particular I thought would be more appropriate to have moon-viewing emoji because Japan got the first lunar eclipse in about 3 years earlier this month. It was during a full or nearly full moon and was eye wateringly bright until the shadow passed over the moon. Happy reading and moon-viewing everyone!
Where does this challenge come from?
Back in the summer of 2021, @Redglare had the great idea of a “Read Every Day” challenge, in which participants challenged themselves to read something in Japanese every day for 2 whole months. Since then and until winter 2024, @Redglare and @windupbird have hosted this challenge every season. Thanks to them, many of us have improved our Japanese and lifestyles! You might notice that I am neither a bird nor glare. I offered to take over the challenge since they’re quite busy (お疲れ様！), but of course they’re welcome to take it back at any time if they want to. I’ll do my best to keep up the encouragement!
Please help us keep this a positive, encouraging, and fun space! Please feel free to bribe encourage fellow participants with cute pet and animal photos or recipes even.
Archive of Past Challenge Threads
Read every day challenge - Summer 2021 
Read every day challenge - Fall 2021 
Read every day challenge - Winter 2022 
Read every day challenge - Spring 2022 
Read every day challenge - Summer 2022 
Read every day challenge - Fall 2022
Read every day challenge - Winter 2023
Read every day challenge - Spring 2023 
Read every day challenge - Summer 2023 
Read every day challenge - Fall 2023 
Read every day challenge - Winter 2024 
Read every day challenge - Spring 2024 
Read Japanese Every Day Challenge - Summer 2024 
Read Japanese Every Day Challenge - Fall 2024 
While the name of the challenge is “Read Every Day,” you may have noticed that it also has a season attached. That’s because each challenge only lasts 2 months. Forever would be a long commitment. By having clear start and end dates, it becomes a much more manageable goal. At the end of the challenge, please consider what worked or didn’t work for you. Did you have fun? Then you can take a break or decide to keep going.
Also, please don’t worry about starting late or not completing the challenge! Life happens. This is an open opportunity for everyone who wants to set some reading goals. Everyone is welcome. Some participants have even started tracking their reading in other languages.
As @Redglare has said:
This is a thread for people who:
want to spend time reading a bunch
want to improve their reading speed and comprehension
want to hold themselves accountable and have a place to document their progress
simply want to join in on the challenge of reading every day for two or so months
To add onto that, this is also a thread for people who want to track or talk about their reading too. If you’d like a computer to do most of your tracking, please check out Natively.
Time frame: October 1 - November 30
Again, late starts are totally welcome! Usually people will continue posting through December and some may give some updates even later. It’s all good! You can start and finish your personal challenge at any point during that time, and shorten or lengthen the challenge to the time period that works best for you. Personally, I usually extend my reading into the 3rd month since I find these challenges have been great at helping me reach my annual reading goals.
As @windupbird has said
Your reading materials can be whatever you want, be it manga, light novels, books, visual novels, magazines, graded readers, satori reader, Japanese webpages/blogs, or Japanese games - you name it, anything goes as long as it is something in Japanese
“Reading” can be interpreted creatively, if that helps keep you motivated - for example, some people have counted reading Japanese subtitles as reading some days. In general, we are a pretty flexible and forgiving bunch
Need help finding something to read? Check these threads out!
The News Reading Challenge - folks typically read the easy NHK article of the day or other similar articles from various apps
The "news reading" challenge 🗞
The Immersion portion of this thread has a lot of great resources
The Ultimate Additional Japanese Resources List!
Reading the same book with others can be pretty motivating. It’s also easier to ask about grammar or vocab, so how about joining a book club? If you don’t want to join, you could always take it as a recommended book instead. A list of book clubs can be found here:
- Yes
- Yes, but I might start late
- Not sure
- I’d like to but I can’t
- No
Happy reading!
Dec
I just started コンビニ人間 by Sayaka Murata with the English translation as a companion. I also have Murakami’s ノルウェイの森 – it’ll be one of the two! But if I can work through a page a day that’d be awesome.
