📚📚 Read Japanese Every Day Challenge - Summer 2024 🏖🍉🏏

Very busy and stressful day today, but at 4:00 I was finally able to sit down and do some reading. Close reading of p. 163-169 of よつばと!Vol. 3; almost at the end! New vocab:

代わりに: かわりに: instead of, as a substitute for
報告: ほうこく: report
離す: はなす: to divide, to separate
迷子: まいご: lost child
そばから: right after, as soon as
隠れる: かくれる: to hide
ひとごみ: crowd of people
大冒険: だいぼうけん: great adventure
平気 : へいき: cool, composed; all right, okay
うろうろする: to wander aimlessly

I will now give myself time to zone out with some Animal Crossing before I attempt to complete my listening challenge for today…

July 6th!

Chapter 10 of とんがり帽子のアトリ today.
The trailer for the anime premiered this week so I’m pretty excited for that now too!

(Home Post)

:bookmark: Home post // July 6 :beach_umbrella: :watermelon:

本好きの下剋上 17 (29.8% → 43.0%) | 25 742 ch. (84 027 / 195 530 ch.)

Today was a super nyoom :star_struck: :rocket: Spent 2 very concentrated hours around noon (was reading mostly out loud) and read some more in the evening. Things are starting to get more interesting, introducing new characters and stuff.

Btw, I keep thinking I’d read faster if I read silently, but then there’s the matter of keeping at it. On the other hand, reading out loud leaves me no room for getting distracted, which makes for a nice pace over a longer stretch of time.

Lookups (8+20)

The 20 lookups went lost during an edit :sob:

Word Meaning
はたから to be seen from the point of view of an onlooker
粛清しゅくせい (political) purge
分譲ぶんじょう 分けて譲ること。特に,土地を区分して売ること
八方塞はっぽうふさがり being boxed in on all sides
緻密ちみつ fine (grain, workmanship, etc.), intricate, elaborate
全力投球ぜんりょくとうきゅう using all of one’s strength (to), throwing a ball as hard as one can
衣紋掛えもんか rack or hanger for hanging kimono, coats, etc.
衣桁いこう clothe rack

Also went climbing at local climbing place for the first time, it was very fun! :woman_climbing: My hands are all sore now, haha :durtle_tomato:

What is the name of that series? And is it in English?

Lots of reading today… I’m tired now. It’s going to be a bit cooler tomorrow so I’ll probably spend more time outside (and maybe play some non‐VN video games… but I’m mostly killing time until 黎の軌跡II arrives in the post).

July 7th 6th (apparently I forgot how to count)

Title Type Progress
鹿の王 Book p14‐101 (2%-30%)
サマータイムレンダ Another Horizon VN 57‐64%
ひぐらしのなく頃に Ch.1 VN ~8600 characters

I played a bit of ひぐらしのなく頃に : I had started it before but but overwhelmed by the length of it and somewhat put off by its presentation. It being unvoiced made me feel like I may as well just read books instead. However, I found a mod that adds voice acting to the PC version among other changes and it makes it a lot more enjoyable for me!

Also, keeping track of characters read encouraged me that VN’s are definitely a fair bit faster for me to read than books. So I’m hoping it’ll take me no more than 200 hours total to read all 8 of the main chapters (which is still rather intimidating now that I’m writing it). I’m definitely going to pace myself and take breaks between each of the chapters and make notes, as from what I understand each chapter is somewhat stand-alone so that approach should be doable (at least compared to umineko which apparently requires a lot of attention to detail to understand, which makes me hesitant to play it even if I finish higurashi).

Today was a trickier than average day with a lot of (very gross, gory) descriptions and frequent context changes.

I can relate to this a lot. It was (one of) the first VNs I played in Japanese, and the descriptions really went places at times, which led to a lot of lookups for me. I remember the negative delusion triggers being especially graphic (from what I remember, Chaos;Child is not as intense on the horror elements).

1st Week:

  • Read an episode of 壁の穴 every day
  • Read a chapter of Intermediate Human Japanese every day

:kick_scooter: back to my home post

07月06日

:star: Club Title Type Progress
:fox_face: ABBC 玉藻の恋 manga 18% → 20%
:polar_bear: offshoot しろくまカフェ manga 20% → 29%
:candy: Natively ふしぎ駄菓子屋 prose 120 → 124/148pgs
:owl: ハリーポッタと賢者の石 prose 40% → 40%

Couple club reads and started the last chapter of Fushigi sweet shop vol. 1. So far this chapter is a lot easier vocabulary wise than the last chapter, felt like I was breezing through it.

Yep, it slows me down sometimes. Though the couple times it went hard on the sci-fi explanations were where I really started trudging. Today I was on the alternate ending you get for finding all the その目だれの目 instances, when you see all of the murders one after another from the victims’ perspectives. Not TOO hard, but just slower reading than if there had been more conversation or the protagonist’s usual obsessive thought patterns all circling the same general topics.

This is my first of the sci;adv VNs but I’ll have to move on and try the others later! I have heard Chaos;Head is more horror than the others as well, yeah. I enjoy horror so that’s a bit of a shame, but I’m very curious to see the others for myself because I’ve been liking Chaos;Head a ton.

Edit: Oh just read your other reply and saw you’re reading Higurashi! Yeah that mod is essential. I read it some years back in English; it’s truly fantastic. Hope you love it as much as I did. I’m kinda dipping my toes into Japanese Umineko right around now too, actually.

July 6

Type Done today Progress
ふしぎ駄菓子屋 1k characters 4.5/42k characters
とんがり帽子のアトリエ volume 2 Page 113-128 9/11 chapters

:mountain: :leaves: 7月6日 :leaves: :mountain: Study Log | Home Post

:books: Title Progress Length Type
:crossed_swords: ゼルダの伝説 ふしぎの木の実 大地の章 7:00 → 8:00 ゲーム
:cup_with_straw: コンビニ人間 (29) 80 → 85 137 小説
:musical_note: プロジェクトセカイ 4 chs ゲーム

Today I finally got around to installing the jp version of project sekai, a little bit thanks to @PotatoDancer’s prompting :laughing: Bit of work to get it set up but once I got going it’s been smooth sailing. I have no real way of tracking reading time or character counts in a game which is mostly playing a rhythm game, so if I happen read some story chapters during that day, I’ll just note them here. Chapters are fairly short VN sections, maybe 5-10 minutes each, but there are a lot of them. Hundreds, at least, counting all the groups and all the event stories. Even just reading all the stuff in 1 band main story took me quite a while when I first played in english. Decided to start with nightcord this time.


jp server impressions that aren't related to language learning

oh my GOD the UI is so much cleaner. Score screen having map difficulty is nice too, but just the whole UI experience is much cleaner in general. It gives you a lot more stuff to start out with, I had enough song cards to get 30 songs, compared to like maybe 2-3 on the en server? I’m not super invested in the gacha part of the game, but the current banner has some crazy good looking cards.

Also I’m pretty sure the jp server has a whole new note type??? They’re like the wacca or deemo yellow hold notes without a necessary start or end judgement. You just have to already be holding the note for the ticks, and I’m pretty sure I never played any songs on the en server that had these notes.

Once I got through the new phone hiccups of offset calibration, I think this phone is a lot nicer for playing rhythm games. Bigger screens I normally hate for normal use, but for games it’s kinda nice :laughing: Having trouble getting this phone to charge though, and it also has no headphone jack, which makes playing a bit of a pain.

Replies n Bookwalker Stuff

That too!!! I only use it to read in the web browser, and it’s so slow. Like you said, if I want to flip ahead to see how close I am to finishing a chapter, I only can skip maybe 2-3 pages ahead before it starts needing a few full seconds to load pages!! Another one I’ve run into is sometimes books that have images on pages with text are not treated as text, but that might be a publisher/formatting thing. The version of 化物語(上)on bookwalker just doesn’t have any highlightable text at all though. I think that is not a book that I will be trying to read without an easy way to look stuff up :sweat_smile:

Also no dark mode reader! I’ve noticed I can read much longer on aozora or ttsu because my eyes get tired less quickly :laughing:

It looks so gooood :sob: Can’t wait for this I’m so excited

yay climbing! :tada:

マリア様がみてる, Maria Watches Over Us. Doesn’t look like there’s an official translation of the light novels (that I can find, anyway, I don’t read lns in english so I don’t really know where to look for ), but there is an anime adaptation that got 4 seasons. My understanding is that if you want to point to where 2000s shoujo gets its big focus on"yuri subtext" from, you can point to this series for re-popularizing it and the whole Class S genre. Idk how much I completely buy that with stuff like Utena coming out solidly before it, but it’s in that mix of stuff for sure

Busy week so forgot to update

:open_book: :video_game: :sunny: :watermelon: July 2

Read a ハイキュー!! chapter and some 美しい彼 (86% → 94%)

:open_book: :video_game: :sunny: :watermelon: July 3

Too busy so read <1% of 美しい彼.

:open_book: :video_game: :sunny: :watermelon: July 4

Read 美しい彼 (94% → 98%). Soo close.

:open_book: :video_game: :sunny: :watermelon: July 5

Busy again so read <1% of 美しい彼.

:open_book: :video_game: :sunny: :watermelon: July 6

Finished 美しい彼!! The book wasn’t what I expected but still gave me an interesting perspective I guess.
Also played like 15 min of Amnesia.

:house: Home Post | :writing_hand: Study Log | 07月06日

Resource Pages Completion (%)
:cat: Chi’s Sweet Home Vol.3 107/152 → 152/152 100%

Home post

July 7

First week complete! :partying_face:

I read chapter 3 of よつばと! and 5 stories from the Tadoku series:

  1. あっ、まるい
  2. 野菜の花
  3. かまきり
  4. たまご
  5. どっち?

I almost didn’t read the from the Tadoku series, but I’m determined to finish the entire thing, no matter how easy I think they are. Even if grammatically there is nothing new for me, there is always the value of vocabulary and repetitive exposure.

Reading よつばと! has definitely been the more fun reading activity of the two since starting it. For chapter 3, I was surprised I could follow along with the global warming dialogue.

In general, it really is just the vocabulary at the end of the day that’s stopping me from reading more manga. Which is fine; I’ll get there eventually… Dragonball and Shirokuma Cafe seem less and less daunting after each よつばと! chapter that I get through…

I hope that even after starting a new job next week, I can continue to faithfully stick to the challenge.

July 7 | Home post

Vacation time! I brought my Switch, my Kindle and 2 bookclub books. No more Island until I get home to my computer.

Today I read VNs on my Switch, Loopers and Clannad. Read/listen to one sentence, switch to English for a sec to check my understanding, back to Japanese for the next sentence. Really enjoying reading without looking up everything. And Loopers looks great so far!

Today: finished よつばと! Vol. 3. It has been a long time! Very glad to add this to the “have read” section of my manga shelf.

I normally stop after 10 new vocab items but had some extra time today and really wanted to polish this volume off.

Vocab:

確保する: かくほする: to secure, to obtain
屋台: やたい: food carts, stalls
奢る: おごる: to treat someone to something
遠慮: えんりょ: reserve, restraint
太っ腹: ふとっぱら: generous, magnanimous; big-bellied
掬い: すくい: scooping
無用: むよう: useless, futile
ばっか: only
狙う: ねらう: to aim at
狙い目: ねらいめ: target, objective, chance
濡らす: ぬらす: to moisten
じゅぽ: slurping sound
ガバッと: suddenly, quickly
迫力: はくりょく: impressiveness
とんだ: unexpected, strange
さいた: most numerous

I free-read Vol. 4 for the 24-hr Readathon challenge back in June, so tomorrow I will reread the first chapter and prepare for close reading.

Whenever I feel discouraged about my language progress, I take a look at my “have read” books to motivate myself, and this challenge is really helping with that!

<< Prev

Q3 of 2024 | Week 1

7月4日 (木)

  • :cn: (Du) 你给力吗?
  • 蟲師 1 (44-100%)

Forcefully trying to finish 蟲師 1, and so 4 minutes after the time limit.

7月5日 (金)

  • :cn: (Du) “加班狗”是什么狗?, “狗带”是什么?
  • ヒラヒラヒヒル end Ch.
  • 夜は短し歩けよ乙女 (0-3%)

7月6日 (土)

  • :cn: (Du) Thirty-Six Stratagems 1 (1-2/5)
  • キングダム 1 (0-28%)
  • ゴールデンカムイ 1 (0-50%)

25 days left for キングダム 1-5 and ゴールデンカムイ 1-2. I might manage something.

7月7日 (日)

  • :cn: (Du) Thirty-Six Stratagems 1 (3/5)
  • ヒラヒラヒヒル
Words
  • 干天(かんてん)慈雨(じう) = (long awaited) rain of mercy after a spell of drought
  • (おに)金棒(かなぼう) = giving a metal rod to an ogre
  • 飯盒(はんごう) = outdoor cooking utensils. And a various of other ~(ごう) and a (はん)ごう.
  • 子飼(こが)い = rearing from infancy
  • 白壁(しらかべ) = white plaster wall. Plastered with 漆喰(しっくい). Looks expensive.
  • 汚部屋(おべや) = dirty room. Also read 汚部屋(おへや). The first Kanji is read like 汚染(おせん). Well, there is also 御部屋(おへや) = お部屋(へや).
  • 恬然(てんぜん) = calm; cool; indifferent. A different kind of 天然(てんねん) (but not).
  • 天衣無縫(てんいむほう) = flawless beauty. From 天女(てんにょ)(ころも) and also ()()がない.
  • 偕老同穴(かいろうどうけつ) = couple partnership until old and death. Live together until elderly, and let be buried in the same grave. First Kanji is (とも)に, but with leader and (みな).
  • 満腔(まんこう) = wholehearted; heartfelt (e.g. gratitude, sympathy). The second Kanji is cavity, like 口腔(こうこう) or 鼻腔(びこう); so probably all body spaces.
  • 燎原(りょうげん)() = (spreading like a) wildfire
  • 相撲取(すもうと)り = sumo wrestler. Compare 力士(りきし)
  • 狐狸(こり) = deceiver. (きつね) and (たぬき)
  • (かぜ)(うわさ) = hearsay
  • 屏風(びょうぶ) = Byōbu - Wikipedia, Japanese folding screen
  • 予知夢(よちむ) = prophetic dream

Meant to reply to this yesterday but I agree! Reading out loud is really nice to fully focus on reading sessions.

6th + 7th july

pixiv yesterday, jlpt n2 today (plus the 52 reviews i had waiting for me when i got back :((( ) tired now :sleeping:

Day 7!

About 12k more characters of Chaos;Head, just don’t have the time right now to keep going beyond that. I’ve been doing a decent job adding other things though, played some SMT5 last night. Some of the ways the demons talk in that are a pain though:

つはもの is a way of writing つわもの, but I’m still not quite sure what this 去れど is doing.

New word today: 方舟 (はこぶね, ark). Would’ve been a lot easier to figure out the reading had it used the other way of writing it: 箱舟