📚📚 Read every day challenge - Summer 2022 🏖 ☀

With regards to the challenge, I’m going ok, but have kind of missed one day already. (I’m not sure if blankly staring at SpyxFamily in a sleep deprived state counts?)

Since I was having editing issues up to now, I’m just going to post my notes from the last 6 days!

1/7 prefectures 1 page, Yoru Cafe 3 pages
2/7 prefectures 1 page, Yoru Cafe 2 pages; skim read 14 pages Spy Family
3/7 minimal - half page Yoru cafe, read over 3 pages Spy Family
4/7 think I failed! Did glance at spy family
5/7 prefectures 1 page, Yoru Cafe 3 pages, Spy Family 12 pages properly read
6/7 prefectures 2 pages, Yoru Cafe 10 pages (finished), Spy Family 8 pages properly read

31 Likes

:tiger2: :books: The Tanuki Beach Resort: Date 20220706 :beach_umbrella: :raccoon:

No Longer Tanuki Progress: 77.63%

Chapter I of note 3 complete, onto chapter 2!

And the main character turns his creepiness up by about 200%.

Learnthings

交友「こうゆう」ー Companion; friend
義侠心「ぎきょうしん」ー Chivalrous spirit
内縁「ないえん」ー Common-law marriage
動作「どうさ」ー Movement of the body; motion; gesture; action
伝言「でんごん」ー Verbal message; someone’s word
「くちばし」ー Beak; bill
旧交「きゅうこう」ー Old Friendship

Places
築地「ついじ」ー A district in Tokyo, means “reclaimed land”
Can also mean a mud wall with a roof, though this can be specified as: 築地塀「ついじべい」


Replies

This is amazing! Congrats! :tada:

Personally I do it to have a hub of all my posts so I can easily go through them to look at new words I’ve noted down. It’s also interesting to look back on to see how much I’ve progressed.

Plus it feels like an additional bit of motivation to put in an emoji for each day.

26 Likes

Today: 16 more pages of よつばと! (now on p. 104).

I am really inspired by the reports people are making on the things they’re reading. Maybe people have recommendations for things to read once I move up a bit from the よつばと・しろくまカフェ level? I expect I’ll be at this stage for a bit, but what did you start reading once you were a bit past the absolute beginner stage?

26 Likes

Cool, thanks! Yeah, Untitled Goose Game lets you change the language in the in-game settings, so I looked through all of Yakuza’s settings like three times trying to find it, but thanks to you and @natarin I could now! Yakuza’s gonna be one where if I replay it it’s gonna be in JP, so now I know how to do that when that time comes

8 Likes

You probably can’t go wrong with most of what was read in the Absolute Beginner and Beginner Book Clubs.

Around absolute beginner stage, the difficulty of 三ツ星カラーズ compliments よつばと! well.

Working my way through レンタルおにいちゃん helped me build my grammar and readiness for things beyond absolute beginner.

Before that, I was reading some beginner-level manga, but was still struggling with it. This includes ふらいんぐうぃっち, 怪盗セイント・テール (which I read with the superpower of knowing it well from the English-subtitled anime and English manga releases), and 俺物語!! (which I was constantly referencing the English release for the first two volumes).

12 Likes

Jul 6, Wed of Week 2 of Summer :beach_umbrella: 2022

From yesterday, I finished

  • 進撃の巨人 1, where I felt a big cliffhanger (and some expectations + theories) – so I bought vol 2 (and skimmed :smirk:)
    • Also planned to go serious on translating big text pages, so I took note of Bookwalker page numbers.
    • Also took note of the years :calendar:
  • 夜カフェ 1 :shrimp:
    • I still feel I don’t understand enough, although I might understand better than the beginning…
    • I am thinking on whether to continue, if there is an offshoot; or to repeat vol 1?
      • Repeating at all seems to be a good option. – In my notetaking, this is simply creating a new folder.

Today, I read TUGUMI a little (about 12 pages on mobile), but it seems harder than I think… Should I still continue reading this series (with the club)?

Also read 妖怪の子預かります, which I don’t feel overwhelmingly hard or un-understandable, but I did look up vocabularies every once in a while.

  • Not really looked up Yokai / name references yet though, although eventually probably I should.
  • Read about half of chapter 2. Not necessarily so easy. There are probably some odd grammar and hard-to-interpret things as well.
  • I decide to read the whole volume; but I can’t yet promise to continue to next volumes (because I saw Fantasy Series Recs thread, and the world is wide…)

Also played a VN – ATRI -My Dear Moments-, for 50 minutes.

  • Seems like a book, with music, and limited text at a time. Audio is a big bonus, but 夏生 isn’t voiced.
  • Previously, I successfully set up Textractor (text hooker), but now I didn’t use it. Plain old dictionary app and finger-writing; also frequently I can guess readings.
    • It is very good that I didn’t rush, so that I can understand more.
  • I can also read and play audio from the log. (Sometimes sfx just for 萌)

Yesterday I mentioned updating Bookwalker. I read some comments on the books as well; but at my level, if comments are too long, I probably won’t read (or like)…


Replies

Art and creativity are always motivational :tada:

27 Likes

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

Day 6!

I’m tired after work, but I read 17 pages of ピーチガール. Seems like the love triangle plot is taking center stage now and I can’t say I’m excited about that. Oh well.

Congratulations!! That’s such a huge undertaking.

27 Likes

These are all great suggestions! I’ve been meaning to read ふらいんぐうぃっち in particular. I’m thinking I’d like to build myself a little library of physical manga to inspire me, so I guess it’s time to create an Amazon Japan account. Thanks for your input on this!

13 Likes

I mostly stuck to reading stuff I was already familiar with regardless of difficulty. My first manga was Haikyuu. A few months of reading that series, I joined the 氷菓 (Hyouka) book club. Then I decided to read the Sword Art Online light novels, even though I was told it is around the N2 level (or partly because of it even, 'cuz I wanted to git gud - lots of struggle and perseverance, but definitely worth it for me).

So my recommendation is “read something you’re interested in”. Joining a book club is also a good idea. If you’re going to read something you’re not familiar with, I’d at the very least advise against picking mysteries (like Hyouka) because the language barrier going on is quite puzzling already.

Random snippet of one of my bookshelves on bookmeter

18 Likes

This is good advice; I do find myself rejecting some recommendations just because I can’t imagine being interested past the first few pages. I really wish there were a bookstore with a good Japanese section in my city so I could browse (I need to become a member of my Japanese cultural centre, which looks like it has a good library!)

14 Likes

If you don’t mind browsing things you’d have to import (if you want them physical), digital manga store sites such as BookWalker have a button marked 「試し読み」 on the book pages where you can often view the first chapter of a manga or novel. Some series have a very short preview (10 pages) and some have a long preview (50 pages).

10 Likes

Really enjoying the time tracking feature on Natively so far :slight_smile:
As expected, my speed went up quite a bit after the first chapter of 告白, cruising altitude seems to be about 35 pages per hour.

28 Likes

June 6th!

Chapter 80 of Yotsuba today. It was Halloween, so obviously Yotsuba was ridiculously adorable :blush:
The next 2 chapters are a 2 chapter story arc so I’d really like to try to read them together but that would mean reading about 90 pages in one go :smiley: I definitely have enough reading stamina to do that now, but I might have to save it for the weekend to have enough time!

(Home Post)

@Daisoujou HUGE congrats on finishing Summer Pockets, what a great achievement! Would you recommend it as a first VN to read in Japanese? I’m hoping to start one in the near-ish future.

@MarnieDEB A few things that I would rate as a good step up from よつば from my experience are:

  • からかい上手の高木さん
  • レンタルおにいちゃん
  • 三ツ星カラーズ
  • ふしぎねこのきゅーちゃん
31 Likes

Great suggestions; thank you! I am making a list.

7 Likes

Home post :bookmark: July 6th :beach_umbrella:

・詩的私的ジャック - JACK THE POETICAL PRIVATE (49% → 54%)

I finished chapter 6. (What happened with the “let’s pace ourselves” strategy? Seems like it doesn’t work for me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

31 Likes

:sparkles: HOME POST :sparkles: || Mon 4th - Wed 6th July

Starting off with a variety this week!

Mon 4th - NHK Easy News

I read an article about the four day long interruption of au’s phone/internet services. The first paragraph took me a solid three reads to parse because I wasn’t sure what 宅配便 was (in hindsight, duh) and it knocked my confidence, but the rest of the article was surprisingly a breeze.

The comment from the 50 year old man waiting in front of the Tokyo store regarding how inconvenient the situation was and how he would be considering switching to another company if the outages lasted any longer got a laugh out of me. It’s somewhat comforting to see that the language of customer dissatisfaction is universal.

Tue 5th - 5分後に意外な結末 「バス停」

Yesterday I was stuck on trains between London and Leicester so I took along this book, a collection of short stories that are meant to have surprising endings, and a book that is indisputably above my current reading level. I read the first short story -「バス停」- which took me around 45 minutes. About two pages in I had the bright idea that this could be a good book to document my N3-N2 progress. So, on the last page I jotted some pencil notes down of my understanding of the narrative and I’m going to do that for each short story, then, after N3 I can read them all again and write a new summary, and the same after N2.

I did understand the characters - a new bus driver covering a route between a small mountain village and the main town, and an old lady who used the bus regularly for visiting town for shopping. She then seems to go missing and it’s mentioned that it seems like she could have died. Later the bus driver meets an elderly man who claims that after he hurt his leg the old lady was doing his shopping for him, hence her catching the bus. Then I’m not really clear on the stretch from this conversation to the end as it seems like a small period of time might pass - at the end there’s a description of the old man alighting from the bus and his body just disappearing into thin air (I think). So I’m not sure if the elderly woman and man were ghosts all along and that’s the surprise? The woman was described as having a demon like face at one point in a bumpy journey.

Anyway, I could be entirely off the mark in my comprehension and I can’t wait to re-read later in the year and laugh at myself. :sweat_smile:

Wed 6th - よつばと! Vol.2, Ch.8

Well look who’s finally starting Vol.2 of よつばと!after saying she was going to do it during the Winter challenge.

It was great to read this after yesterday’s headache. :sweat_smile: I loved Ena’s attempt at diffusing the mood after Miura told Yotsuba she was bad at drawing in this chapter, that whole scene was wonderfully comedic.

Think I’m going to stick to よつばと! for the next two days and maybe try another of the 5分後に意外な結末 short stories at the weekend. :thinking:

30 Likes

July 6th - Day 01 - Home

Starting to read 天気の図鑑. I already read a few stories at the start, but it has been a while, so I will restart.


Forewords & Characters Intro - Done
Chapter 1 - 雲のはなし - Progress 2 (+2) / 21

27 Likes

Since there were quite a few, thank you so much to everyone for the congratulations! Feeling good about what I’ve done and very happy to have you all here supporting :heart:

Summer Pockets as a first VN

Hmm, it’s got a lot of good points, but it’s hard to recommend for a few reasons.

One is simply the length, as you might have noticed, haha. I’d think most people would be best served starting with a short-ish VN, but I had a particular desire to read it. It’s a lot, but I suppose that’s already clear. The biggest downside is accessibility in getting it at all – if you buy it, it’s really expensive (something like 9000yen) and it’s also unusually hostile to players outside Japan. Like it checks your system time and everything. I found a means to bypass that but talking too specifically about getting around DRM might skirt a line on WK without taking it offsite? Fuck DRM though, heh.

That said! I think it’s a great read, it’s written at a level that I found good for my first (well other than Ace Attorney), and it plays great with the texthooker. Plus it’s nice that it’s a very modern one, above average in technical polish and the like. I’m running up against small irritations from Flowers in resolution and all that now, heh.

Home post

It’s Flowers time. Specifically, the spring (each of the four entries is based on a season). I continue to read things that are seasonal, and at the wrong time.

Content first impressions: I dig it. Lovely art, and I like the quiet, fragile, contemplative tone so far. It’s a solid contrast to Summer Pockets which had a totally energetic, outgoing vibe. Most of what I read was a girl stuck inside her head, beating herself up, and commenting on how pretty the girls around her are, haha. It was a nice prologue, but I didn’t move too much further, reading only a bit over 3000 characters, because…

Writing first impressions: Definitely feeling the challenge of starting something new. I’m also pretty sure this game’s writing is simply harder. They love kanji for words that don’t usually have it (筈 はず has a kanji, huh? and 為る as なる, all sorts of things I’ve never seen). The Catholic school slice of vocab teaching me words like 磔 (はりつけ, crucifixion) might not be immediately useful and certainly isn’t anything I’ve come across yet haha. But more than anything it’s just that sentences are a little denser than what I’ve been reading. Gotta brace myself for the のように, because we are making non-literal comparisons to everything all of the time.

You’re gonna put じっと in kanji like that?

I read slowly in part because I had to look up words in almost every sentence, but also just because I made myself slow down a little to make sure I was soaking it all up. The writing seems really nice and… flowery ( :wink: ), and often the difficulty is just making sure I can hold the whole sentence in my head, even when I definitely understand all of its parts. For example, lines like this are common:

美しい波となった歌声は春の陽を受けて輝くステンドグラスに反射し、緊張のためこわ張り着席している私たち新入生へと届いた。

You ask me, that’s a lot of information piled in there. To put a final pin in that point, a few lines in they hit me with another new N1 grammar point (たら最後, sort of an “if you do… negative result”). I expect to see a lot more of that stuff. Overall though, it’s a challenge, but I don’t feel too bad about it. I’m pretty confident I can comprehend and learn from this. My reading pace has taken a hard reset, but prior to Summer Pockets I have serious doubts about if I could’ve read this at all. I remain excited to continue.

31 Likes

I’ve noticed this is a thing where they’re trying to give an old-timey or extra-formal-for-kicks vibe. It kind of makes sense given I mostly come across those in very old texts.

emphatic nod

It took me a few passes to take all that in, oof. Very ‘flowery’ language as you said.

8 Likes

I have heard that Hatsumi (the author) does love to use a lot of unique kanji. She is kind of famous in some language learning communities for her use of very long noun-phrases/sentences overall as well but hopefully it gets easier as you read more. The start of something new always tends to be the hardest!

As for my own reading update, I finally finished the 生命のスペア VN after reading it every day for the past 6 weeks or so. It was the first jp VN I completed in full. It was a decent step up in difficulty compared to the manga/game scenarios I read prior but overall reading it wasn’t too bad. I think the story kind of dragged because I started to get really bored of it by the second half.
Hard to tell if the game itself was dragging on or if it is just because my jp reading speed is really slow. It was a game I was interested in initially though so I am glad I was able to read it! Since the VN club is starting soon, I’ll probably use this next week to read some manga while I wait. I had put all the manga I was reading on hold while I was doing the VN (I usually only focus on reading one thing at a time), so it’ll be good to catch up on that stuff.

23 Likes