This post absolutely got away from me, so there’s a TL;DR at the end. I don’t expect anyone to actually read the whole thing, but writing it helped me solidify some thoughts I’ve been having over the last month of the challenge.
Because of who I am as a person, I put all the books I read into a spreadsheet to compare rates. The total number of pages read was 1988, although that includes a lot of filler pages like chapter titles, tables of contents, etc.
| Volume | Pages | Start date | End date | Total days | Pages/day |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ゆびさきと恋々 1 | 176 | 2025-07-01 | 2025-08-23 | 54 | 3.26 |
| 遊☆戯☆王 1 | 40 | 2025-07-02 | 2025-07-05 | 4 | 10 |
| 遊☆戯☆王 2 | 309 | 2025-07-06 | 2025-07-23 | 18 | 17.17 |
| 遊☆戯☆王 3 | 333 | 2025-07-24 | 2025-08-10 | 18 | 18.5 |
| 遊☆戯☆王 4 | 413 | 2025-08-12 | 2025-08-30 | 19 | 21.74 |
| 遊☆戯☆王 5 | 301 | 2025-08-30 | 2025-09-15 | 17 | 17.71 |
| 遊☆戯☆王 6 | 325 | 2025-09-16 | 2025-09-27 | 12 | 27.08 |
| 遊☆戯☆王 7 | 91 | 2025-09-28 | 2025-09-30 | 3 | 30.33 |
The Good
- I was very successful at the actual discipline part of the challenge (even though I missed August 17th). I completely credit that to the social aspect and having all you wonderful folks to keep me honest.
- There was a gentle increase in pages per day. There are a few factors here:
- I just got faster at reading - at least, the part that amounts to sounding out words. In particular, strings of hiragana are much easier to parse than ever before, which I really didn’t expect given I’ve basically “known” hiragana for 15 years now (though with very intermittent use).
- I got better at pushing through uncertainty. In the beginning I would get very discouraged after just a couple of pages of looking up multiple words in every word bubble. Now I expect slow going and recognize that it’s part of the process.
- The manga got easier. If you know Yu-Gi-Oh, you know that it starts out with a new game every chapter, then progresses to a new game every couple chapters, then settles into just one game for hundreds of chapters at a time. This brings with it more repetitive vocab and long stretches of familiar phrases like “I draw! I play X in attack mode! X attacks Y! Y is destroyed!”
- 1988 is just a crazy number of pages. There’s no way to know for sure, but it really seems like I read more Japanese in the past 3 months than in the 15 years of intermittent study that preceded it.
The Bad
- I still struggle a lot with grammar. I constantly have sentences where I know all the nouns and verbs but have no idea how the ideas actually tie together. I’ll look up a grammar point but then forget it before I encounter it again, so I feel like I’m not actually making progress on the thing that’s most holding me back.
- Reading is still work. I (maybe naively) thought that at some point during the challenge, the switch would flip in my brain and I’d be reading for fun. I’m sure that day will still come, but 90 days of my current methods wasn’t enough to make it happen.
- I don’t think my current methods are enough to achieve my goals. I’m signed up for the N3 in December and in the past week I had a minor panic about how I’ll get there. I’ll talk about this in the next section.
The Future
- I’ve gone back and forth about whether I would participate in the Fall challenge. The answer I’ve settled on is “kind of”. I plan to make a home post and update it on occasion, but my daily progress tracking will be done through Natively, not through writing a new post every day.
- I’ve started the Bunpro trial so I can study grammar in a more focused way. Wanikani has been great for me as a way to just “strap in” and not have to direct my own learning, so Bunpro seems like the natural complement to that.
- I’m prepared to take a break from Wanikani lessons if I get overwhelmed. I think that Bunpro and daily immersion are the highest-value tools for me right now in the lead up to the N3. Wanikani lessons and reviews take about an hour and a half of every day which is well-spent toward my long-term goal of being conversationally fluent, but just not very helpful toward my short-term goal of getting a certificate so that I didn’t waste the $100 I spent on the exam. I already have high confidence that I’ll pass the vocab section of the N3 - it’s grammar and listening that I’m worried about.
TL;DR
- This challenge was so great, and absolutely everyone should take part in some capacity!
- It also highlighted some flaws in my learning process, which I’m now working to rectify.
- I’ll see you all in the Fall Challenge thread!