📚📚 Read every day challenge - Spring 2022 🌸 🌱

Well, I do use my phone dictionary when I am reading on my phone, and nothing when reading a physical book.
Although I should, because there are two words right now that I don’t know how to read (I understand them from context though), and it’s driving me nuts.
Alright fine; for my own sanity. 焙烙 ほうろく didn’t see that reading coming.
箙 えびら That one had furigana the first time, but it didn’t stick.

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April 15 :cherry_blossom: Home Post

The opposite of early today :joy: but oh boy VLR; I finished another main ending and couple other bits and pieces! With that I only have one more main route from the second branching point, and then it’s just finishing up all the locked bits I open. So like… the end is in sight :muscle: Unless all of that takes like thirty hours I’m going to finish this in less time than 999 took which is pretty wild!

VLR stuff!!

So I completed アリス’s ending; mostly more information about the terrorist organization and the bombs and ディオ’s connection to these things. And all of that is super relevant clearly, but like… they’re not putting on the nonary game, you know? ディオ’s completely trying to sabotage it, so that raises a lot of questions about why, what’s actually going on with it, etc.

But oh man, the bombs. Especially with what seems to be the main ending which is very much a work in progress; when you fail to stop the bombs and ファイ hugs シグマ and you actually see him in the present for the first time?? No idea what to make of that, especially with the whole K thing, there’s just a lot :joy:

Semi-related anime tangent

I did check out a few anime today (with Japanese subtitles so it’s reading-adjacent) and if you’re looking for something easy and cute to start out with, Shikimori-san is like… shockingly understandable. I feel like it’s even easier than other slice-of-lifey cute stuff that gets passed around a lot, though all of my judgments difficulty and content-wise are entirely based on the first episode so if it gets weird it’s not my fault :joy:

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I answered yes since most of my Japanese reading happens on kindle, but I also read physical books to a lesser degree. :thinking: I just checked since it was bothering me, heh. ⅖ of the books I’ve started reading this year are physical, that’s more than I thought.

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Home post

Day 14:

日本語: I read some of ミニスカ宇宙海賊, some of 冷たい密室と博士たち, and a bit of 鋼の錬金術師.
Read-aloud: We read a chapter of ダンジョン飯 and perhaps half a chapter of 蟲師.

中国語: I read an intermediate entry on Mandarin Bean and one page of 骑士幻想夜.

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Interesting there has yet to be a single person who uses yomichan while reading. 30% don’t even use an insta popup dictionary. Definitely unexpected

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:tulip: Day 15 :tulip: :house:
Read:マグメル深海水族館 [2]
Finished: Extra edition
Time: 4 minutes
Read the extra included at the beginning of the second volume of マグメル, I’ve never seen the extra in the front of a manga before.

New Vocab

間際 (まぎわ)the point just before; the point of doing; the verge of happening
清掃 (せいそう)cleaning; clean-up; garbage collection; scavenging
閉館 (へいかん)closing (for the day; of a library, museum, cinema, etc.)

Also made a bit of an impulse purchase...

I won’t have to worry about reading material for a while

The newest one came with a shiny Ceolacanth card


How am I gonna fit all these on the shelf… :joy:

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Ah well, I just imagined it to be easier? 夜カフェ and 銭天堂 went much smoother for me.

I do have problems with the writing style a little.
I think so too, that it will get easier later on. I will continue reading for sure.

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Reading novels on the computer is no fun. With a handheld device you can read anywhere, in an armchair, outdoors, in bed. I would love to read on a kindle because of e-ink being so much easier on the eyes, but I dont want to jump through hoops to register, so Bookwalker it is. Thankfully the build-in iOs dictionary is good enough, and there’s always extra dictionaries installed that are easy (but not one click easy) to access from within the device.

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I take it you don’t own a laptop

I do. I still use it on my desk only, it’s too large for comfortable reading in any other position other than sitting upright. And there’s no way to read on a laptop while waiting for the bus, for example.

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I do use Yomichan, but in cases where I can’t use it directly on the text, I typically just type the word/sentence I want to look up into some blank text field, then mouse over it with Yomichan in order to decipher it haha rather than using a different dictionary. I prefer my Yomichan setup to other dictionaries because it gives me several different dictionary definitions, including one monolingual one, and it also tells me if a word/kanji is in WK or not.

Plus it gives me the ability to instantly create an Anki flashcard from the word and import in the surrounding sentence, though I’m not at a point where I’m really bothering to mine words from print books. My Yomichan flash cards have all come from digital text. But in the future, I anticipate using it to mine words from print books as well.

My main concern is that I don’t want to become too tied down to relying on a reading format that’s compatible with Yomichan if I want to read. I want to be able to buy print books, for example, even though the format is perhaps less conducive to convenient learning. I own plenty of ebooks, but I also enjoy books as physical objects, and some books are only accessible in print form. When reading something, I want my focus to stay on enjoying content that I want to read and not trying to optimize it for learning. I don’t want to get to a point where I’m passing up things that I genuinely want to read because they’d be harder to use Yomichan with.

It’s not too different from how I read in Spanish, honestly, which I do mainly by reading print books and then looking up definitions on my phone or computer.

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@Belerith I hadn’t considered the possibility the kanji was only used for its reading. I remember wondering if it was せいふく, but when I was thinking that I wasn’t putting together most anything of the note, so I abandoned the idea. (Only after that did I figure out that the typography seemed to change when a new word began.) Thanks! :smiley:


So yesterday (April 15) I ended up only read like a paragraph of Japanese to be able to get the tick. Waited waaaay too late in the day to do. It is nice to be home and I’m falling back into bad habits at an alarming rate. :joy:

Anyway, today I started with Japanese instead (April 16) so now I finished the first story in the current booklet. I will see if I will read more later.

While I was traveling I spent less time in front of screens, so my eyes are so tired, especially my left eye is like “why you looking at screens so much, stop it”. Also, I’ve decided to try and get up one hour earlier (something I did while traveling) but I’ve been going to bed really late, so today I have shadows under my eyes. If I don’t start getting to bed at a good time for the new wake up time, I guess I’m going back to what I did before travels. Meh.

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That’s interesting. If you want to send a ransom note or something in English, it’s easy enough to find all the letters you need in a newspaper or magazine. Not necessarily so for all necessary kanji. I guess they could have used kana, but a kanji with the same reading might work as well in a pinch. Surprised to see that in a graded reader though.

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Am I really the first one who clicked yes? Was not expecting that haha

I use yomichan on my laptop as well as on my tablet. Sometimes I also read on my kindle, but definitely a lot less often overall. A kindle (or paperback) is definitely nicer in terms of eye strain but as long as I still have to look up as much as I do now yomichan’s A+ dictionary functionality is just worth it for me (+ I like using it for mining). The whole reading/look-up process is just a bit faster and more comfortable with yomichan compared to a kindle, IMO. I especially like being able to see a bunch of entries from different dictionaries at once without having to click buttons all the time :sweat_smile:
Maybe I’m just lazy (who am I kidding, I definitely am) but I really like the convenience :laughing:
I think I will probably read more on paper in the future, once vocab isn’t as much of a struggle anymore. So far I don’t really have any books in mind that don’t also have a digital version so I don’t have a reason to switch yet :woman_shrugging:

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Happy Birthday? 4x

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Hey, thank you! :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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I was showing my friend a site that estimates how many kanji you know earlier and left it up in chrome. Just came back and realized the one I stopped on was the one in 焙烙

Yeah I was pretty surprised too. But I guess the vibe I get from this thread is a lot of people are trying to just get some reading done rather than people who do their studying through books, so I guess it makes sense. People who study intensively with books as their main source of new knowledge probably would answer yes more often.

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:open_mouth: Happy birthday!! :partying_face:

Oh hey, I remember that one! :grin: Was one of the first things I read in Japanese I think. On some website though, not a book. Nostalgia.

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My only studying at the moment is reading. It may not be especially structured study, but it has helped me see unexpected progress in a relatively short time, much more than actual studying has ever done. I look up every unknown word and every unknown grammar, but I also get much enjoyment from the reading itself. Not sure if others would see it as studying as I don’t actually srs anything (yet?), but I know from experience this is the way I learn languages best.

Happy Birthday!!! :birthday: :partying_face:

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Why do you think so? Because one can add words from Yomichan to Anki with one click?
All my vocab comes from books, and I use Anki; still I add my cards manually (for one because my card layout is a bit special, and also because adding a word feels like the first review already).
For your other question, I do own a laptop and I use it a lot, but somehow I prefer reading on my phone. Sometimes I use my laptop to look up stuff while reading on my phone :crazy_face:

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