📚📚 Read every day challenge - Spring 2022 🌸 🌱

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I read Seed 13 of GREEN.

I read 3 pages of 2.43, finishing 1-3! Next up is 1-4. RIVAL’S SHADOW. Hopefully starting Monday I can read more again, 'cause I am just too tired from work. It wasn’t as bad as yesterday, but I still just wanted to lie down and sleep for most of the day.

Being tired ain't gonna stop me from rambling about my hyperfixation though lmao

Apparently Subaru comes off as naïve to others. I never saw him as such, but I can see how people might if they don’t actually know him, especially with his rather carefree nature and his idealism. Plus, this is Ochi thinking this (how he used to think he was just a 天真爛漫な人気者), and he’s rather jaded.

Oh my god they have a height difference of 21 cm. Like, some part of me knew this since I know Subaru’s 189 cm and Ochi’s 168, but it never really registered. They went from probably around the same height in middle school, to a little over 10 cm’s difference in 高一, to 21 cm in 高三. That’s… well maybe not nearly a full head taller since that’s more like 30 cm (the height difference between Oda and Aoki!), but that’s still a lot.

(I’m a sucker for height differences.)

Another word used in relation to Subaru using the kanji of his name! 伝統, “tradition, convention.” This time not directly describing him though: 県内で全国大会最多出場を誇る伝統ある強豪校の主将として。

Also, I was reminded of this seeing the title of a track on the OST when I paused it, but smol Chika tells smol Yuni just before he leaves for Tōkyō with his father,「忘れんでの、ユニ。絶対に忘れんでの」and I still don’t get how that’s a negative. “I won’t forget you.” Unless that ん is the contraction of ない that’ll also show up in Kansaiben (like in 知らん or わからん). There are definitely a lot of places where ん trips me up, especially as there are multiple things it could be. Then if that’s the case, I still don’t know what the で is, and I guess the の would be explanatory or whatever? It’s definitely not a question particle here.

I also read the final two chapters of Colloquial Kansai Japanese.

Some vocab of note:

天真爛漫 (てんしんらんまん) [四字熟語, な-adjective] naïvety; simplicity; innocence. That’s a lot of characters ending in ん in a row lol
分かれ道 (わかれみち) [noun] branch; forked road; crossroads; parting of ways; turning point. Also written 別れ道.
核 (かく) [noun] core (of an organization, team, etc.); nucleus; heart. At its heart (hah), the kanji means “core; nucleus” and is used to refer to the core of many things, like the pit of a peach or even the nucleus of an atom. Mostly I just picked this one because I like the look of the kanji lol

顰める [一, transitive] is usually written in kana, and it has two different readings depending on how it’s used. In 顔を顰める, it’s read しかめる; this reading means “to pull a wry face; to screw one’s face up; to scowl; to grimace; to frown.” In 眉を顰める, it’s read ひそめる; this reading means “to knit (one’s eyebrows).” I’ve only seen this with the latter reading, in kana, and I was like “all right so I get from context that he’s frowning, but how does ‘to hide one’s eyebrows’ mean ‘to frown’” because I’d thought it was 潜める. Glad that’s cleared up now lol

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I Think Ill try to find some japanese short storys or at least a poem each day.

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April 16 :cherry_blossom: Home Post

More VLR today!! All still going well; シグマ has white blood?? Absolutely wild, it’s late so that’s all for today, but tomorrow :eyes:

@NicoleIsEnough happy birthday!!! :tada::tada::tada:

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I’ve had to import them through amazon jp, and they’re not very cheap. Costs like a new CD release (music), so for a longer series that amounts to a bit of money for sure. If you’ve been buying them once a year, once new releases got available it’s less noticeable. Sadly, physical CDs is the main format of audio dramas, though there are some that get digital releases.

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Home post

Day 15:

日本語: I read a bit of ミニスカ宇宙海賊, a bit of 冷たい密室と博士たち, and a fair amount of 鋼の錬金術師 (finished v4 :star:).

中国語: I read an intermediate entry on Mandarin Bean.

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:tulip: Day 16 :tulip: :house:
Read: 夜カフェ
Finished: 2 pages
Time: 4 minutes

New Vocab

もぐもぐ mumbling; chewing one’s words​
ねぼけまなこ sleepy eyes; drowsy look

and Happy Birthday to @NicoleIsEnough! :birthday: :confetti_ball:

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Thank you sooo much everybody for your birthday wishes! Y’all made my day big time :smiling_face_with_three_hearts: :man_bowing:

And now let’s pass on the staff to the next team member: Happy Birthday @sycamore! :birthday: :sparkles: :rainbow: :cherry_blossom:


For my reading, I finished the section of 大聖堂 I agreed on with my friend, and now I’m waiting for him to catch up. I think this will take some time as he was struggling a bit with the English text, and also he is quite busy with irl stuff, so this might take a while. Therefore I returned to 雲をつかむ話, the book whose first chapter I read for the German-Italian reading circle. I really like it! So far there is an underlying plot (which has not yet developed very far) and around this plot the author draws on a lot of autobiographic memories. E.g. she, a Japanese person who moved to Germany a long time ago, describes how she helped teach Japanese in an adult education center, and the mistakes people made, in a very lighthearted and easygoing manner, e.g. 「赤い家の外に出ます」、「火曜日に、町から外に出ました」、「カエルが川から出ました」など、正しさがぎりぎり怪しい例文を作って文法を稽古する. Later on she describes how the students learn to conjugate verbs from -ます form into -たい form and comments on it: 鱒を取り除いて鯛を入れれば欲望が現れる。which I thought is an interesting observation in itself (that these are fish names as well). Of course the book is primarily directed at Japanese readers and so this might all be well-known to them, but I at least enjoyed it :upside_down_face:

Whoa! Now we get talking :grin: Let’s hope I can resist this until after JLPT :sweat_smile:

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すみません Norwegian sea, I didn’t mean to mistake you for some measly lake :pray:

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Home Post

Day 16
Apr 16
I finished Ch. 3-4 of 佐賀のがばいばあちゃん! Did 1 chapter in the morning, and 1 chapter on my way to friends’ home. I shared the “wisdom” from the grandmother with my boyfriend, and we all laughed about it :rofl: I get a hold of some of the 佐賀 dialect, which I shared in the weekly discussion thread. But I think the story is a little bit thin from Chapter 2-4. A lot is about the art of living stingy. I hope the story will be developed more in later chapters.

Words of the day:
下駄ばき: 下駄+履き
いかだ:筏。a raft
泥んこ:muddy
筋金入り:hard-core、頑固
天日:てんぴ sun
信心:しんじん。faith. In Chinese, this word means “confidence” instead

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Happy birthday, @sycamore! :tada:


It is done! Ask Graded Reader, Level 4, Volume 2! Finished!

Yay, first finished in quite a long time. One more volume and I will have finished all the graded readers I own (except for those aimed at natives). Feels good.

Both the stories in this booklet had kinda non-endings in my opinion. Basically there is no indication on how life will be in the future for the characters. Doesn’t make them bad, but also not the kind of stories I really enjoy. Like I’m not likely to pick up another story by the same author.

Won’t have anymore time to read Japanese today. Hopefully will sneak in some regular reading right before bed.

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Late happy birthday @NicoleIsEnough :confetti_ball: and happy birthday to @sycamore today ! :confetti_ball: :star:

It’s Sunday again and weekly update time! I’ve read every day this week :star: I’m up to date on ハピネス, reading my easy news articles every day, and also did some Ace Attorney earlier. I’m agonizing over what game to try my hand at next (definitely interested in Zero Escape :eyes:) but I’ve been forbidden from buying anything before my birthday.

Next week will require me to plan my reading time. I start work on Tuesday and then I’m heading on a weekend trip to Stockholm. I haven’t been on a proper trip in years (thanks, pandemic), so I’m feeling a little nervous about keeping up my studies. I’ll have to find the time to do my reviews every day, because I refuse to lose my 472-day streak! Thankfully my traveling partner is the one who paid for my sub last year, so I know she’ll be cool with it.

I wonder if there are any stores with resources for learning Japanese in Stockholm… It’s a much bigger city than the one I’m from.

Anyway, I hope everyone has a marvelous week with lots of time to read :books: :potted_plant:

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Day 16 (:heavy_check_mark:) :cat2:

三毛猫ホームズの推理 ~60% to 61%

I was out and about almost all day yesterday, so I only managed a measly 1% (3-4 pages maybe?) before I passed out. I guess it still counts as reading, but nothing to be proud of. I’ll try and make up for it today (already reached 66% since morning).

Happy birthday!!! :partying_face: :birthday: :star2:

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I think I’ve lost track of the birthdays :sweat: So if I miss you I’m sorry! But happy birthday @sycamore and @NicoleIsEnough ! :confetti_ball:

I decided to read another 青空文庫 story last night, and grabbed something (悪魔の宝) by an author (豊島与志雄) who I had liked the work of before. Unfortunately this was a very basic children’s story and I was pretty bored. It’s about a hunter who makes a deal with the devil, and that goes about as well as you’d expect. I left difficulty notes on Natively, but this was a hard one to judge as it was

  1. 100% a children’s folktale written in simple language which IMO probably would be mostly friendly to someone with a solid grasp of N4
  2. That simple language was quite outdated (written 1929) and was filled with weird gotchas

I had no trouble following along, but a good deal of the gotchas for the type of language are not going to be covered by the JLPT and unlikely to encounter again until they reach the point of complicated old adult reading material. So I stuffed it into the N3 range, wrote a clarifying review, and am hoping for the best. It doesn’t really “work” anywhere nicely.

Also the library let me poke through books they were gonna sell off and I grabbed more 赤川 and a random book with 殺人事件 on the cover (あらすじ:清滝トンネル内で幼稚園児の送迎車が消失!). I got some 横山秀夫 books from them the other week as well. I wish I could read faster, I couldn’t justify taking any more home. Doubtless I’d find even more to read, though.

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I read digitally on a tablet, and look up vocabularies on another device (smartphone). Sometimes I read on smartphone, but the process is still the same (switching the apps). Writing Kanji with my finger, if I have to.

On my laptop, I do have and use Yomichan.

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:tiger2: :books: Tanuki Den (aka Homepost): Date 20220417 :cherry_blossom: :raccoon:

Tanuki Scroll XVII: こわいみやげ :scream:

Read today’s folktale about scary souvenirs.


:seedling: Japanese found in the tall grass :seedling:

Lonely New Word

真っ青「まっさお」ー Deep blue
though thinking about it, I think I have seen this before.

Forgotten Readings

近寄るちかよる」ー To approach
(Went super blank on the second kanji like I had never been aware of its existence before :sweat_smile: )


Happy birthday!! :birthday:

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Main Post

Finished reading through Yoru Cafe vol 1 last night and today I read the sidechapter of Yuru Camp vol 3 finishing that. Yoru Cafe was a comfy read for the most part. Difficulties were sometimes in not knowing who was talking at the moment or me not paying attention and drifting of for a bit. Either way it was a good experience. More thoughts down below, they’ll have general spoilers.

Yoru Cafe vol 1

I think it’s a neat little book that shows some character growth during an important period of development as a kid. Going from one school to the other, situation with your parents growing worse, avoiding life because fear of bullying. At one point it is too much and you break. Luckily Hanabi (the protag) and the other kids are able to come to terms with their life after stepping away from it all. It is kinda like day treatment. Of course good cooking helps with it. In this way they’re able to make friends, socialize and grow as a person. Maybe see things in a different light, experience new feelings, or whatever goes along with maturing.

I liked how it has a certain bittersweet flavor to it. There’s drama, bit of romance, comedy and cooking. Hanabi becomes a more positive person and is able to make friends, but then also has to say goodbye to one… poor girl.

I don’t have volume 2 on me, so that will have to wait a while. Yuru Camp is about more of the same, also comfy and good. I’m starting fresh tomorrow again, as I’ll be reading a new manga and book alongside each other. For manga I’m still undecided and I’ll have to pick something from my kindle library again I think. As for the book, I’ll be reading ふしぎ駄菓子屋銭天堂 vol 1 next. I’ll have to see if I can still manage to read a chapter every time I read. These chapters are a bit longer and I noticed it’s a bit more dense.

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[/quote]

I finished Book 8, and read 5 pages. The kids and Dad celebrate Mom’s birthday with a surprise party. Dad gives Mom a sweater which is waaaay too big. Mom doesn’t look too happy!

New Vocabulary:

たんじょうび
誕生日 birthday

プレゼント gift

New book starts tomorrow.

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april 17 :cherry_blossom: home post

I finished 極主夫道3 today! I don’t know what it is about this series, but something about it makes me want to read all day. I feel like I’ve had to push myself to read anything else recently

Speaking of which...

I really want to continue 夜カフェ, but every time I sit down to read it, it feels like a chore. idk why though, I really want to enjoy it, and so far I’ve liked what I have read. but I still haven’t even finished chapter 1 :frowning:

I want to finish this chapter by the end of tonight and be caught up with the club by the time they start chapter 5 at the end of april. That should be a good goal I think, it’s about 3 pages per day give or take

sorry this got a bit rambly, I wanted to have this all written down in this post so I can hold myself more accountable :sweat_smile:

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replies c:

Yay! :D Then rereading was definitely worth it :muscle:

ohhh, so it was from the French word xD Funny how it actually worked too, just take away some of the letters and then it just :clap: bam :clap: → English

Note to self: no more posting past midnight :writing_hand: #somnwritebulism


I really like those snowy mountains :eyes: :sparkles: so pretty and majestic in the sunny weather :mountain::sun_behind_small_cloud:

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Today I started デスノート ・ Death Note 📓 Vol. 2 (read ~20 pages). It was pretty good to be reading Death Note again! I’m still not sure if I like the story of the manga as a whole, but for some reason I really like the writing style. Maybe it’s just exactly the right level of difficulty for me at the moment (just hard enough to feel that I’m constantly learning).

Hang in there! 頑張ってください! :smiley:

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