📚📚 Read every day challenge - Winter 2022 ☃❄

I’m reading two pages a day right now, which takes me around 20 minutes I think? It’s my first novel so I’m taking it slow and steady :ok_hand:t3: Maybe I’ll read a bit more later on but for now I also want to focus on reading manga that are available until the 6th of January xD

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Day 2 complete! Today’s article was 「モラハラ夫」の恐怖体験。モラハラにありがちな10の言動も紹介〈弁護士アドバイスあり〉 which I read to understand what モラハラ was because I’d seen/heard it a few times and still wasn’t sure.
tl;dr the article is about psychologically abusive romantic relationships.

General details here

So モラハラ seems to just be verbal abuse that takes place within a family (or just generally non-hierarchical) structure? I actually remember hearing this first in a TV show when a coworker was bad mouthing his colleague. Something along the lines of “Ah! That was パワハラ! Oh, that was モラハラ!” and so on. I don’t remember the exact relationship between those two characters, but I guess they must have been on relatively equal footing?
Generally seemed like a decent article for someone to identify if behavior they were experiencing from their romantic partner was normal or abusive. Had a section with advice from a lawyer about how to collect evidence to support a divorce case.

Some of the words I looked up

恩着せがましい - acting like you’re doing someone a favor; being patronizing/condescending
常態化 - normalization of a problematic situation
萎縮 - withering; shrinking
日常茶飯事 - everyday occurrence (this is a handy phrase to have!)
泣き寝入り - literally means to cry oneself to sleep but seems to more broadly mean to accept something unhappily

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I’d like to join. I’ve been reading the graded readers, both yesterday and today. After that I may attempt a manga. Also does reading in textbooks count? I’m using Minna no Nihongo.

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Why not? Whatever you classify as “reading”, that’s what counts :blush:

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Day 2 complete!

Today I read Chapter 4 of Volume 4 of からかい上手の高木さん.
I’m having such a lot of fun with this series, its really sweet.
I’m also enjoying being able to see how much easier I find it to read than I did when I started the first volume.

I need to think about what to read for the rest of this week, because thats all of my bookclub reading done!

(Home Post)

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January 2 :snowflake: Home Post

Day 2! I read another chapter of ラストゲーム today; it’s wild being able to actually read any kind of complete story in one sitting (as time-consuming as it definitely still is haha). It felt like a whole lot happened this chapter :joy: whole character introductions and arcs and everything; it’s still lots of fun!

(maybe some 錆喰いビスコ later? we’ll see :eyes:)

Some fun words

高嶺(たかね)(はな) - unattainable goal, out of one’s league
物好(ものず)き - idle curiosity, whimsy
下心(したごころ) - ulterior motive :eyes:

Also ran into お(たが)い (mutual, reciprocal) and didn’t know what it meant but for some reason instinctively knew the reading? I must’ve seen it before somewhere but I truly have no idea :joy: cool feeling though

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金田一耕助ファイル2
First I read two pages from this novel for the Advance Book Club. People reading this don’t get the wrong idea here the book club is only called that I am actually only lower intermediate at best. Yeah the book is pretty hard but I will finish it somehow.

Candy & Cigarettes volume 1 manga
Over forty pages read. This is about a grandpa, who to pay the health bills for his very sick grandson, joins a company which promises him lots of money. His job is to protect a girl around his grandson’s age, who works as a killer.

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I forgot how short the chapters are in おじさまと猫。I reread the first three yestersay to get to where I last stopped and put it down, and today I read chapters 4 and 5(only about 8 pages) in ~10 minutes, including look up time. I’ve mostly been able to read the kanji with only a few new ones (爪) and some new vocab (待ちきれない)。

The cat speech isn’t that bad after learning to translate all the にゃ to な。

Since I don’t want it to take all month I think I’ll up this one to 3 or 4 chapters a day. There’s 22 chapters and 126 pages total, so that’ll have me finishing by EOWish.

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Summary post :bookmark:

January 2
・かがみの孤城. I finished the first week. It was kind of tough, narration went all over the place. But I guess it’ll smooth out later. My experience is that the beginning of any given book is usually tougher than the other parts.

Progress: (5% → 8%)

General feel of the theme/plot: Seems like this book isn’t a particularly happy one, at least not in the beginning. Social anxiety, staying home from school, guilt, solitude… it’s heartbreaking ;-;


My post is like plant, it grow :seedling: :eyes:

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Summary post

January 2 update:
Read the other half of chapter 4 of よつばと! 1. Jumbo’s jokes were a bit hard to parse, but otherwise it was still pretty easy, so I might try reading a whole chapter or two tomorrow.

On another note, I noticed that BBC is starting reading Death Note on January 22. This sounds fun, I think I’ll try joining! I ordered the first couple volumes – hope they arrive in time. I was a bit surprised to see it in the “beginner” club, but after checking the sample pages I think I see how it ended up there :slightly_smiling_face:

On a completely unrelated note, I finally watched 君の名は。today (not sure why I postponed it for so long), and I’m totally planning to give the novel a try soon! :durtle_love: (Even though it seems to be way beyond my current comfortable reading level…)

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Home post

Day 1:

日本語: I read a fair amount of 伯爵と妖精 29.
Read-aloud: We read two chapters of 7SEEDS.

中国語

中国語: I read a beginner entry on Mandarin Bean, plus one page of 擅长捉弄的高木同学, plus a bit of 孩子最爱读的中国民间故事.

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Home Post
Day 2 Done
Read the next stories in the Hikoichi book. Going to be rereading them all tomorrow.

Jan
Week 00
Week 01
Week 02
Week 03
Week 04
Week 05
Feb
Week 05
Week 06
Week 07
Week 08
Week 09
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Summary post
…and day 2 down!

today I read a chapter of よつばと4 with the little book club I’m in. It was, as usual, very cute and funny :smiling_face_with_three_hearts: Only a few vocab lookups needed, and most of those were ones that I realised that I knew as soon as I saw the kanji, so a nice chill read. Only one more chapter until we are done with this volume!

I also read volume 6 of 呪術廻戦, and then the first chapter of volume 7. In contrast to よつばと, still a lot of vocab lookups needed here, but I think I’m at least starting to break through the ‘reading a new manga series/writer’ wall. Volume 6 was way more exciting than vol 5 as expected. Despite my complaints last time, I am really enjoying this manga, mainly because of the wealth of really likeable characters (including more than one that I thought ‘ugh, I hate them’ on their first appearance and within the span of a few chapters was like " :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:omg I love them :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:") and the series general sense of humour. I have tomorrow and tuesday to finish off vols 7 & 8 before the free period runs out - they might be a bit slower going than these last two which contained a lot of fight scenes which were lighter on text…but should be just about doable! It will be tempting to just continue straight on with the series once I’m through the free ones…but I keep promising myself that I will try another novel so I should probably do that!

Very much same! I want to read the rest of the NO.6 series but I don’t think I’m good enough for it yet - I definitely limped my way through the first one looking up like half the words in each sentence which got in the way of my enjoyment I think. Will be interested to hear how you find orange as it’s also one that I’ve considered!

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Yesterday and today I read 海の見える理髪店 and actually managed to finish it :tada:
I chewed on this book for so long! If you’re interested you can read my review in The Naoki Prize Reading Challenge - #9 by NicoleRauch

Next up is the second chapter of 笑わない数学者, this week’s book club assignment.

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I have customs blues … my little box of comic books was denied entry to the US. I guess DHL is gonna try again … but not sure how long that will take … Anyone else had this happen with books coming from Japan?

Anyway, I slightly moped my way through another chapter of Way of the Househusband. Chapter 9, probably the cutest chapter in the whole book! And now there are only a couple bonus stories left. I’m starting to wonder if I want to get volume 2 :thinking: :thinking: :thinking:

Yes, thank you! :slight_smile:

Edited to add: since I’m home alone tonight I read Yotuba (chapter 33 plus a few pages of 34) while eating dinner, and brought my pages total for the day up to 40! :tada:

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Jan 2 update :snowflake: summary post

Ended up reading more of Kona’s Big Adventure yesterday (9 episodes!) and continued to episode 15 today. I stopped there because (slight spoilers) that’s the end of the backstory part of the story. Tomorrow I’ll get started on the actual adventure!

As a side note, I’ve been wanting to adopt a cat for a while now and this story is making me want to even more…

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I think I will continue soon gotta find out more about Nezumi - I still enjoyed it a lot and don’t mind the look ups much, especially because I thought the book worked pretty well as a vocab mining source. I also felt the “authors often use the same words again” effect kick in a little bit (though not as much as I expected considering I’ve already learned over 700 words from it :laughing:)
Hoping it will get easier and easier with time!
Something more straightforward in between for a change of pace will be nice though, I think.

I am now kinda wondering who you hated in the beginning? :eyes:

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Day 2 down! I actually got through TWO more pages of よつばと!because of a helpful grammar guide someone linked me today as well as someone pointing out that I was not reading the bubbles as complete sentences :laughing: Very proud of myself tonight!

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Summary post

Day 2: January 2nd

365日にっぽんのいろ図鑑
Time spent: 33 min
Today’s color: 薄紅梅 (うすこうばい) - basically it’s a soft pink, like the color of plum blossom flowers

Reminded me of this picture I took in Japan the first time I went, so here's a gratuitous pic

This went a little better today, but still had to look up a lot of words :sweat_smile: I do like descriptive words though, like I enjoy the exposure to more complex descriptors/language than the ones you typically get in textbooks and such. It adds a richness and dimension to “the world in Japanese,” if that makes any sense at all.

Some more interesting words
  • 紅花 (べにばな) - safflower (Carthamus tinctorius); dyer’s safflower
  • 紅梅 (こうばい) - red-blossomed plum tree; red Japanese apricot
  • 濃 (のう or こ) - prefix meaning “dark” (as in a dark color)
  • 聴色 (ゆるしいろ) - permitted color (a color that the “common people” can wear)

まいにち暦生活 日本の暮らしを楽しむ365のコツ
Time spent: 21 min

Today I learned about 初夢 (はつゆめ) - the first dream of the year. Apparently, there are some auspicious omens you can see in your 初夢, as expressed in the following phrase: 一富士二鷹三茄子 (いちふじにたかさんなすび). It means “best is Fuji, second is a hawk, third is an eggplant” :mount_fuji::eagle::eggplant: One explanation for the :eggplant: is that ナス (eggplant) = pronunciation of 成す, meaning to accomplish; to achieve; to succeed in, which is my favorite explanation because wordplay xD

What else did I read?
囀る鳥は羽ばたかない Vol 1
Amount read: 11 pages
Time spent: 45 min

Went better than yesterday, but I can’t shake the feeling that things are just constantly flying over my head with this manga. Now I’m only 2 chapters behind :muscle: They are pretty big chapters though


I wrote this post before scrolling down lol, guess we all get to learn about this twice today xD
I also did not dream of anything last night :pensive: I’ll join you and @rikaiwisdom in the void

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Fun fact! This word can also mean ‘deep’ (like a deep flavor - 濃い味) or …heavy? not sure the English word. If someone has rather ‘intense’ features, I guess. Article on 濃い顔 - you can skim the headers and it’s basically all you need to know. :sweat_smile:

It’s one of the words in Japanese I find super interesting because it doesn’t translate cleanly into English but the concept it’s conveying makes perfect sense.

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