Forgot to update yesterday (oof) but I did read that day as well as today. It’s crazy how quickly this year seems to be passing - feels like I only started this challenge last week, but here we are. It’s definitely the most consistent I’ve been with reading since I began learning Japanese, so I plan to keep participating in these challenges for the foreseeable future.
Got through half the trial in Case 2, nearly done I think. Might be able to finish today if my current pace holds and they don’t introduce too much new vocab
Day 41:
Chapter 4 of からかい上手の高木さん４ (4 sure!). I read this one early enough in the day that I don’t remember quite all of it but I remember it had something about tarot cards and 好きな人 and 西方 was in full awkwardness mode. Somehow it doesn’t surprise me that there’s a second series where he and 高木さん have a child, and presumably are married (not 100% sure but seems likely) - and he probably thinks it was all his idea.
Miura, makes me so mad like why do you have to scare yotsuba like that and the last time she said yotsuba is a bad drawer. Her whole existence is just to make yotsuba cry and poor ena’s teddy bear
Oof, it has been a long time since I posted again. I’m thinking about dropping down my posts to weekly even, bc I keep on forgetting to do it before I go to bed (which is when I do a lot of my manga reading). Was kinda a slow week (I’ve been reading a lot more novels lately), although I did finally finish up 僕らの食卓 ( – not the contents, just that I’m done with it), and read about half of 放課後、恋した。 3 this afternoon on basically a whim. I also reminded myself that I’m only about halfway through the first chapter of ウェイバーズ, so I should really get back to that.
牧場物語 successfully arrived in the mail today (hooray!) and I’d set aside the whole evening to play it. My aunt ended up calling to catch up just as I’d started the game, and that lovely but unexpected conversation ended up being about 2 hours, so… yeah, not as long as I’d hoped. But it did give me time to create my character and scroll through Japanese name and kanji ideas!!! Also, special shout-out to the "どちらでもない” option for 性別… gotta be one of my favorite 性別!
I adapted the farm name モーモー草地 from the Mario Kart track name モーモーカントリー, but then the game added 牧場 to the end. Turns out the original Moo Moo Farm track was just named モーモーぼくじょう, so I could have just done that, but whatever. Not sure if my name ended up seeming natural, but none of my farm names ever are in this type of game…
Anyway the game is cute, the dialogue is voice acted (!!!), and most importantly the language so far has been really appropriate for my level. I’ve been able to read most of each sentence and understand the meaning while still having a few lookups to do for new words. Nice!!!
I also found an Android app called Dokuen Japanese Reader that does OCR on a photo capture (or a screen capture), adds furigana to the image, and then lets you click on text for dictionary popups. It seems new and not quite perfect yet, but it’s simple to use and made doing quick lookups from the couch much easier, especially for the menu items that don’t have furigana. And it defaults to local OCR, which makes me a little more comfortable using the screen capture feature.
I love reading tech blogs and realised I could start reading them in Japanese. Gizmodo has already been enjoyable and rewarding to read. I can get the gist of many articles and identify words and many kanji in each sentence that I know. Experimenting with “active” reading using iPhone’s built-in dictionary and it’s ok. No furigana so I have to just hand on heart believe that I am reading various words correctly. It’s a leap of faith in my kanji ability and it’s fun!
If you want practice reading names of rooms, this is the book for you. Also saw that there’s another book in the same series and two other similar novels by the same author who seem to follow the same “theme” but with different depictions (maps and illustrations). Will definitely check more of the author out, for now it’s in the perfect balance of entertaining while not being difficult to follow.
February 8
More, more 英雄伝説 碧の軌跡. We finally rescued エリぃ and the party is now complete. That was funny she jumped into ロイド arm and the other girls were all envious. Not only that but now we know how to disengage the barrier.
I doubt that I will ever be done with the game, it goes on and on.
February 9th 
Home post
: 16 manga vols, 1 LN
Case 2/5
6%
and poor ena’s teddy bear 
牧場物語Let’s!風のグランドバザール
42
February 11th 
Rest for now.