Had to start work early today, and didn’t have the long flight with no patient I was anticipating.
Still read a reasonable amount for a work day.
19/11 3 pages おばちゃんたちのいるところ
Had to start work early today, and didn’t have the long flight with no patient I was anticipating.
Still read a reasonable amount for a work day.
19/11 3 pages おばちゃんたちのいるところ
Thankfully it’s fiction! They have this whole thing about how the police academy is a sieve and the bad or hopeless students get filtered out, but IMO so far it’s really ‘the students who do horrific things to their classmates get kicked out’. That story was revenge.
20221119 - 吾輩は狸である progress: 77.87%
10 chapters in and it feels like this is the first time that Wagahai-cat has taken the time to talk about the rest of Master’s family.
(they’ve appeared a lot before but it feels like this is the first time where there are actual sentences dedicated to describing them and not just mentioning them in passing)
Japanese found under the leaves
Forms
罎 = 瓶「びん」(Bottle; jar)
Nov 19, Sat of Week 8 of Fall 2022
Another 1+1 hour. Viewing backlog and audio replaying is a big pro. Even without audio, backlog is quite handy. Not everything are felt to be look up upfront, but might want to look up in retrospect.
Forgotten ones
Phrases
November 19th!
Today I read a chapter of Teasing Master Takagi-san, and also the first half of Chapter 2 of God Bless the Mistaken.
Takagi was a fun read as always, and God Bless the Mistaken was interesting, I think I’m going to enjoy it a lot once the story starts to develop further/
*randomly visits the thread*
Aaaaaah I missed you finishing volume 12…
About the first thing, it really crushed my soul at the time. I really hoped it didn’t mean she would remain tiny forever. Also, she basically lost a lot of her advantage from getting a crazy education so far.
About the second thing, I love that combo as well So many fun characters in this series.
I cried back when I read that part.
I literally thought the same thing at the time
Home Post
11.19.2022
Pokemon Violet
6:42→14:17
Got my first gym badge and 秘伝スパイス
I’ve been struggling a lot with the Team Star diologue. Some other areas are feeling decently smooth, though. I’m still needing to look up a couple words on every sentence. It’s definitely taking at least 10x longer to play than if I was playing in English.
神さま
40→48
Just a few pages but they read so easily after all the Pokemon, especially since most of the words I needed to look up were already written down on the vocab sheet. After all the screen time, I was so blown away by the beautiful art style and the clarity of the words and by how nice it is to flip through a physical volume hehehe. Maybe I should stick to books and manga more, at least while I live close to a Kinokuniya.
I’ve been dragging my feet the past few days, but I got some prim and proper reading done and finished the story I was reading here. Feels good!
Been tired these past few days. Yesterday I just read one chapter of 金持ち君と貧乏君 and like one page of おばちゃんたちのいるところ. Today I read another chapter of 金持ち君と貧乏君 and SPY×FAMILY mission 17. Dunno when I’ll be getting to the rest of the T&B movie, but I’ve been too tired to put on a cooking show or something for background noise, much less actually watch anything. And I’m pretty sure this tiredness isn’t all my ill-advised near- and actual all-nighter watching T&B S1 catching up to me. Bleh
November 19 Home Post
Today was a bit weird and chaotic, I ended up running around a lot, but amidst all that I chilled out with some Miitopia for funsies! It’s very silly and doesn’t require many lookups at all at this point, so it was a nice time. I spent a good portion of it on character creation though
November 19th (Home Post Link)
Read/Played:
ついに ー finally, at last
やり取り「やりとり」ー conversational exchange (here, over text)
お相子「おあいこ」ー even, quits, square (of a trade; that is entirely too many vowels in a row)
取引「とりひき」ー transactions, dealings
Day 49:
Priority: 青桐.
Free choice: … I was so focused on making sure to get my priority read in that I forgot the one I hadn’t missed yet.
Extra: 魔王城でおやすみ 11.
Day 10 Progress:
お隣の天使様 二冊 - 65.91% → 73.44%
スローループ - Chapter 2
The biggest frustration recently is that I was making very rapid progress on my reading speed for a while but I’ve plateaued considerably and I’m not really seeing any apparent improvement. For what must feel like weeks now I’ve been reading around the same pace, just 5% of the novel can easily take me between 2-3 hours depending on how stuck I get. I know I’m still lacking an incredible amount of knowledge and practice but seeing my pace not increasing at all still makes me feel a little agitated. Unless I plan on reading something for over a year straight, those long visual novels I want to read are still a pipe dream…
Word of the Day: 媚びる - to flatter or to flirt. This one is just funny to me, the visualization of a woman doing some crazy stuff with her eyebrows as a flirtatious gesture…
November 20th
Home post
Aria: the masterpiece volume 1 – progress report
Yesterday: read up to page 284
Today: finished volume 1
I’m done with the first volume!
While I’m usually not the type to celebrate anything I do or accomplish, I will allow myself an imaginary pat on the back this time around because this is the first actual piece of Japanese media I’ve ever read.
Admittedly, it feels weird and unpleasant but I need to work on improving my self-hatred and that’s one step towards being more kind to myself.
I didn’t understand more than 70-75% of the whole book because there were still plenty of grammar constructions I’m not familiar with. I am willing to overlook that for the time being because right now I’m priotitising simply being able to read consistently and understanding the basic gist of things as I don’t want to make my early reading attempts too complicated and off-putting.
Once I have revised a good chunk of beginner’s level grammar, I’ll start looking more into the grammar points I’ve encountered* and will encounter in future reading material.
*(I wrote some things down from Aria volume 1 to check out at a later point).
So much for that.
And that brings me to another point which is that I messed up: I miscalculated the time it would take for my book order and for me to read through volume 1, because the next batch won’t arrive until next week. Meaning, I don’t have the second and third volume yet, whoops.
My mistake won’t be a problem, though, because I wanted to adjust my reading schedule and material anyway. I noticed that I really can’t make proper progress on Aria during the week as it’s still demanding enough that I can’t comfortably read it in a very short timeframe per day,
This is why I’ll do the following:
If I can set aside at least 20 minutes for reading during the week, I will read Aria.
If I don’t have more than 20 minutes to read, I’ll read Card Captor Sakura instead.
The weekends, on the other hand, will still be dedicated to Aria because I have enough time to make satisfactory progress per reading session.
As to Card Captor Sakura: I wanted to revisit some manga from my younger years in Japanese instead of my primary language which is why I bought the latter some time ago. From the bit I’ve seen, it looks to be easier to read because there are less Kanji per sentence.
To save some time per post, I also won’t add my words of note anymore – from now on it will be ‘the word of the day’ and one ‘honourable mention’ instead.
Word or expression of the day:
体験 - (たいけん) - personal experience, physical experience, one’s own experience
Honourable mention:
平たく言えば - (ひらたくいえば) - in plain words, in plain terms, put simply
I’ve been making some more progress in reading Colorful this week, wanted to be further along but I’m quite pleased with the results so far. Haven’t read today’s share yet tho. Part of it is because the story is moving along and getting more familiar with the writing and characters. Another part is that the chapters are now a bit shorter, that makes the pull to continue reading easier. Looking a bit ahead I think it’s gonna take a bit longer than expected, but it should be feasible to finish it by the end of the month.
This is not the only thing I have been reading lately. Played a bit of Persona 4 Golden again and made some good progress with Dragon Quest X Offline. I’ve put those on pause for a bit as I started Pokemon Scarlet on friday. Still early on, but I like it. There seems a lot to do and see. While there is an intended/natural path in certain directions, you have the freedom of choice what you’re gonna do. So I’m on my way to the first gym and trying to catch pokemon on the way. It’s very easy to swap pokemon in and out of boxes again. There are a few petpeeves I have. For one, they lack options to turn off the mini map. Another is that yeah they have a single script in Japanese with furigana, there is no way to turn it off like in DQX. Then something that I just find a very weird and that’s that signs apparently now show their own textbox over the sign, instead of where it usually is. That said, I’m enjoying myself and these are things I’ll just have to get used to. It’s also nice that the reception seems pretty positive.
Nov 20, Sun of Week 8 of Fall 2022
Surprising is not the successful result, but the default one (i.e. why assume?). Be glad for the warning.
Found a guy (warrior).
Forgotten ones
Phrases
Been hanging onto this challenge by the skin of my teeth
Work was like "how would you like to be out of office for 4 weeks in a row? " and I’m tired.
Mostly been reading satori since it’s so convenient but not the 5 per day I’d planned on. But I’m on vacation this week so I plan to catch up a bit. I’d like to finish the first manga volume of 本好き this week, in addition to hitting level 45 where I’m stopping lessons until spring, which should free up quite a bit of time.
20221120 - 吾輩は狸である progress: 78.35%
Today Wagahai-cat watched the children eat and learnt the joys of having children and trying to feed them.
Japanese found under the leaves
分捕る「ぶんどる」ー To capture; to seize; to plunder
敏腕家「びんわんか」ー Capable person
Forms
洩らす = 漏らす「もらす」(To let out; to leak; to let slip)
掠奪 = 略奪「りゃくだつ」(Pillage; plunder; looting)