📚📚 Read every day challenge - Summer 2022 🏖 ☀

This is a great victory! Small accomplishments add up to a lot. (I remind myself, as I look at the list of tiny things I have crossed off today’s to-do list and reassure myself that it’s ok to stop now…)

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Home Post

Today I finished 海辺のカフカ(上). I only started recording my reading time from page 155 onwards, sadly. Here is the reading time for everything I read everything whose reading time I recorded (I’m missing maybe 2-3 hours of manga reading in here) in that timespan:

For カフカ, this equals an average reading speed of 9.6 pages per hour. I suspect this is rather thanks to Nakata than to Oshima, though :sweat_smile: Anyways, if we assume that I read the first 150 pages at the same speed, then it means that it took me about 50 hours (across 38 reading days) to read the whole book.

Next plans are Flesh&Blood vol. 3, and Kafka part 2 from Saturday.

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Read p. 16-30 of よつば& Vol 2 today. A milestone: my first time looking up a kanji on Jisho.org using the radical search! One day I will be able to read something without furigana…

New words:

見つける (みつける): to discover
影 (かげ): shadow (this was the one I looked up)
ひょっとして: by any chance
そっくり: exactly like; spitting image of
ビクッと: with a start, with a jump
配達 (はいたつ): delivery
見間違える (みまちがえる): to misperceive, to misjudge
やっぱし: casual やっぱり

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:sunny: :beach_umbrella: Memoria’s Summer Readin’ :beach: :sunny:

August 16th:

Feeling kinda feverish, so I just read the subtitles of a youtube video today. I’m totally exhausted after work, but I hope a good night’s sleep will help.

I’m really looking forward to your FFXIV updates! I love XIV too, and it’s a dream to be able to play it in Japanese. I’m going to live vicariously through you from now on :heart_eyes: Good luck!

I hope you feel better soon. I think reading when you feel blergh definitely counts as a victory.

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August 16th!

All of my book club reading for this week is finished so I’m back to Yotsuba today :slight_smile:
Todays chapter involved looking for stones at the beach, and was a very lovely chapter with some beautiful artwork.

(Home Post)

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Home post :bookmark: Aug 16th :beach_umbrella:

・ 本好きの下剋上 10 (27% → 30%)

I like me some long archaic prayers. 「…浩浩たる…」


Nafu~

I look forward to the day when I can read your post! Hopefully not too fashionably late xD

Yes! 一志! Miyo has come so far, I love it. Author did us good regarding 新 xD I didn’t expect that he’d actually do something Evil, but look at him go betraying us like that.

I’ll write this in a separate spoiler in case you haven’t finished the book yet: And then boom, done 甘水 arc. That arc really went from 0 to 100 real quick, and then basically back to 0 again. Almost getting whiplashed here. And then marriage! Not quite yet, unfortunately, but looks like it’s on the horizon :eyes: I can’t wait! x3

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Sorry I was too lazy to post in this thread. Today I played Monobeno and finished half a chapter in it. I need to get back to playing visual novels I still have around 30 to finish.

Read 8 more pages in the Shin Kanzen Master Reading N2 book I’m nearly done. The texts in it are not that hard but answering the questions is still a challenge. Four days ago I started doing the Nihongo So Matome Reading JLPT N1 6 week course. It’s pretty hard and there is lots of stuff to memorize. But the cats are so cute.

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:star2: :video_game: August 16 :video_game: :star2:
(home post)

Super Mario Odyssey :star2:

My reading focus for the last few days have been low. Ended my day (just now) with playing a little SMO to get some Japanese practice in. The kingdom tourist leaflets are as incomprehensible as they usually are. Wouldn’t be a problem if I looked up stuff, but SMO is my most casual reading that I still feel comfortable calling reading. :joy: (And mostly because I do try to read those stupid leaflets.)

Having a “which one to pick/do” problem not only in reading but also a bit in life in general. Got stuck in a kinda “which one should I do” rut, so I’ve ended up not doing any of the things I’ve needed. Hopefully I’m breaking that tomorrow.

For reading specifically, I think a bit of my problem is that I think: of the club reading picks, I should read Orange first, so I can fill in the vocab sheet and, you know, to feel like I proper shepherd/leader of the Orange book club. But I think that, maybe, this week, I wanted to either read Loopers first or catch up with Night Café. So instead so far I’ve only read those 13 pages of Orange I did yesterday.

What is best and what I want to do, so seldom agrees on the same thing. :sweat_smile: :joy:

PS. My grammar sucks when I’m this tired (basically off to bed as soon as I finished this), and while I think I fixed the worst unclear sentences, I might have missed a couple. Peace, and good night! :sleeping:

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Yes, I finished it!

Right, the author even said

次はお待ちかねの、ハッピーな巻になります(予定)!

So, I’m guessing marriage + trip to Kyoto (meeting a bunch of new people BUT ALSO her family again). Since it’s too much money to give up on, I assume the editors will milk it into 2+ volumes with some plot. Calling it now!

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Summary Post

August 16th
What did I read?: 今日のさんぽんた Vol 1
How much did I read?: 8 pages
How long did it take me?: 9 min

The definition of low effort today :upside_down_face: The chapter I read today was kind of funny though, Rieko went to buy a bottle of water for Ponta from the vending machine but the vending machine gave her coffee instead. She doesn’t like coffee, but proceeds to try and drink it anyway for some reason xD Then gives up and decides to take it home to her dad, but spills a bunch of it on her shirt as she starts running home. :stuck_out_tongue:

I feel like I will be in bare minimum mode for…most of the rest of the month, I’m guessing. Things are happening and work is a lot right now, I just can’t prioritize Japanese. Gotta prioritize my own sanity and ability to function :joy:

Thanks for the encouragement you guys :heart: I am at least in a better mood today - still stressed but less overwhelmed and irritated about it :joy:

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:star2: Home :star2:

ジョジョの奇妙な冒険25

118 - 140

The baseball slog continues! I’m hoping I might be done with this volume tonight, but we’ll see. This one’s only 187 pages after all.

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Home post

REDC
Week 8

8月16日
Final Fantasy XIV


Was busy and tired today so only managed a couple quests, nothing too fancy.

Oooh that’s nice to read!! Hopefully I can make it worthwhile and entertaining :slight_smile: . It’s going to take forever, though, with the amount of content in the game and my turtle speed. Hopefully it gets better at some point with more vocabulary. So far I’ve already been able to make like 10 cards so it’s a start (though many, many more lookups). With that and all, it is still hard for me so I’ll make sure to post my frustrations too :joy: .

Improvement :muscle: . I hope you’re able to recover soon, no shame in reducing workload for a bit :wink: . I know I do! (in fact today is one of those “ticking a box” day for me, especially listening :eyes: )

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In a weird headspace today so probably going to be mostly offline. Drowning myself in reading sounds good today. In that vein, I finished 遅刻して来た幽霊 | L27 just now. It was fun, I liked it a lot. There were two stories in the collection which I thought were particularly enjoyable, but the rest were ok. The nice thing about short stories is that even if they kind of suck, there’re still short.

I hope I graded it ok - I started reading this back in March. So my memory of vocab and grammar spread is a bit weak. However, I finished the last two stories off recently and 赤川次郎 is generally pretty predictable to level.

also @Mrs_Diss I saw you started reading ウテナ! I hope you’re enjoying it :rose:

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August 16 :blossom: Home Post

It’s wild times out here guys, it happened: I finished 海辺のカフカ! Part one anyway, which means I’ve officially finished my first novel in Japanese! :tada: Feels pretty weird all around really, for one thing it’s just the first half so it doesn’t totally feel like a finished book that way but it’s a physical volume finished so there’s that. But finally after all my stops and starts with different novels, and playing like five whole VNs in the interim lmao, I finished one yay! Check off that language learning box :heavy_check_mark: Oh also belated thank you on the バディミッションBOND congratulations!! It’s been a wild couple of days haha.

Congrats again to everyone finishing up books and things, progress has been wild! Powerful stuff :muscle:

Oof I’m sorry things are rough, I’m glad you’re taking care of yourself though! Japanese will be there for you whenever, your well-being always comes first :blush: I wish you the best!

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Home

While browsing the complete manga sets on the Book-Off website, I discovered a volleyball one, アタック!! so I read the preview for vol 1 on Bookwalker, and then, since that didn’t give me much of an idea of it, vol 2. Which meant I was totally confused of course lol but it seems good! So I’m definitely thinking of getting it. I also read the preview for リベロ革命(レボリューション)!! It was written 2 years after the libero became a thing officially in Japanese volleyball in 1998 and is about the 159-cm-tall Mikimoto Kaname who is a good spiker despite his height in MS but has all the makings of a good libero, and is scouted to a good HS as one (and, of course, as he loves spiking, is adamantly against it at first). Definitely want this one! (Also, TIL “libero” is another term for “sweeper” in soccer.)

I also read the preview for ギャルボーイ, which grew less interesting the further I got into the first chapter (a masc woman, who tbh seems perfectly happy being and acting masc even though she kinda wishes everyone didn’t always immediately peg her as a man and weren’t always so surprised to find out she’s not one, gets made into a model with the intent of making her super fem and making her femininely pretty rather than leaning into masculine prettiness or even going an androgynous route), and then afterward the one for おうちでごはん, which seems like a nice slice-of-life/cooking manga, plus the chapters are super short, though there’s zero furigana! Even for names! Anyway, this one’s going on my to-read list, though I’m steering way clear of the first. tbh I’d hoped it would be something similar to Otomen where it’s kinda queer-adjacent in that it goes against gender roles (and shows you don’t gotta be gay or genderqueer to throw them aside), but nope, it starts leaning hard into them. “You’re a woman, so you’ve gotta be feminine!” Oh, sod off.

I read ch 27 of ハイキュー!! and for the first time ever left off in the middle of a manga chapter (actually a little more than halfway through ch 28). I was reading during dinner and then got distracted doing other things (watching science tiktoks, mostly) for three hours and now suddenly it’s after midnight. I will be finishing it right after this lol

Some vocab of note:

仇討ち (あだうち) [noun] vengeance; revenge; retaliation
一夜漬け (いちやづけ) [noun, する verb] last-minute cramming; overnight cramming. Its original meaning referred to vegetables just salted overnight.
縁もゆかりもない (えんもゆかりもない) [expression, い-adj.] having no relationship with whatsoever; having nothing to do with
たまげる [自一] to be astonished; to be flabbergasted; to be startled; to be amazed
見世物 (みせもの) [noun] show; exhibition; spectacle
従来 (じゅうらい) [の-adj.] traditional; conventional; usual; existing
短大 (たんだい) [noun] junior college; vocationally oriented two- or three-year post-secondary education institution. An abbreviation of 短期大学.
汚名返上 (おめいへんじょう) [四字熟語, noun, する verb] clear one’s name; redeem oneself; clear/vindicate one’s honor/reputation. Like some 四字熟語, the first and last two pairs of kanji are words in their own right, but I don’t think this one is a combination of the two of them, as 返上 itself means “give up; relinquish; serve up; let loose,” and that’s not quite the right connotation. It’s more 汚名 + 返 + 上. “Return your sullied name to its former better (higher) state.” I dunno, just thought that was interesting, since the other 四字熟語 like that I’d come across before all seemed to be a combination of the two two-character words.
食えない (くえない) [expression, い-adj.] shrewd; smart; cunning; crafty

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Daily reading continues smoothly for me. Nearing the end of all of Azumanga Daioh! It definitely worked its hooks into me; this last volume is the best but I’m not sure if the quality is that significantly higher? I think I just have a really strong connection to these goofy girls at this point. Moments of it are rather emotionally resonant even though it gave off that frivolous impression. Glad I took the time.

Starting soon will be the generic starter novel, just a few too late, コンビニ人間. Looking forward to it!

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:spiral_calendar: Day 47: August 16th :dolphin: :desert_island:

spacer:ribbon: ふだつきのキョーコちゃん Volume 7 (58% ➨ 76%)

spacer:mag: 名探偵コナン Volume 11 (52% ➨ 61%)

spacer:girl: からかい上手の(元)高木さん Volume 5 (63% ➨ 70%)


This one’s on my “to read eventually” list. I remember liking the anime well enough back when I saw it, and I wondered if the manga would be better. At the time, I was waiting for the series to finish before I considered reading it, but rather than that, the official English release never finished.

Based on what you’ve read so far, do you get the impression that the series has held up well (characters, story, pacing)? Or does it feel more like “it’s good only if you have nostalgia for the anime”? (Or can’t really tell?)

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:books: :video_game: :thong_sandal: :sunny: August 16

I think I’m getting faster at reading ビブリア, at least until I reach a new chapter, which should happen on the next session (42% → 48%).

I also read 3 chapters of 青のフラッグ and finished Volume 4. Halfway through the series!

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Feeling pretty burnt out today. Read things here and there but could only do one social link in P3P. I was really motivated for personal reasons but now the reason has come and gone. Might hop around the next couple of days until I land on something to get my motivation up.

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Finally started reading 青ブタ3 and got a little dopamine hit from it. But I’m not gonna rush into things because I like I said earlier I’m a little burnt out.

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