📚📚 Read every day challenge - Fall 2022 🍁🍂

November 20 :maple_leaf: Home Post

More chaos today; I ended up picking up Pokemon Legends Arceus to chill with my partner while they played the new one. It’s a lot of fun so far! I’ve been meaning to play it for a while, it always seemed like my kind of thing, and I had access to it so why not :man_shrugging: It’s at a good reading level where I can really just hang out and play it and only look up an occasional thing when the mood strikes, so that felt good!

I also read a bit more ブルーロック until sleepiness came for me :joy: good times as always, but now it is time to sleep lmao

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Home Post

Day 11 Progress:
お隣の天使様 二冊 - 73.44% → 80.64%
スローループ - Chapter 3

I’m not really enjoying 天使様. Actually, it’s driving me insane. Excuse me while I rant a little bit.

My primary reason for choosing it as a first read was that it’s a SOL/romance title and I enjoy those, plus I had heard great things about it being a fairly straightforward and pleasant series. On top of that, I figured it probably won’t have too many difficult or made-up fantasy words and insane kanji for me to deal with. In the early days I could only read a few lines or maybe 1% and was much more focused on the mechanics of reading than the story itself. Now, I can read a bit more comfortably than I used to so now I can properly get into the story… which would be great if I could actually get into it.

天使様 is just boring. Boring, and also pretty frustrating to read. The heroine, 真昼まひる, is a paragon of beauty and the apple every boy’s eye besides あまね, our apathetic protagonist who has no interest in her… or so the author claims, before inserting lengthy sentences about 真昼’s beauty and virtuosity in every chapter. In fact, I’m pretty sure 愛らしい and 可愛らしい are some of the most common words in the series, considering they’re pretty much used to describe every single action 真昼 does. It feels like the author is spending way more time idolizing her than actually creating an actual relationship between them, and 周 himself is constantly smitten by her beauty, resulting in unpleasant obsessions like this particularly egregious example I came across in today’s reading:

The passage (with my own half-assed translation)

手入れして撫でて、まではよかったのだ。
To hear that Mahiru holds the stuffed bear (he gave her) and pets it, that much makes him happy.

ただそこから続いたのは、耳を疑うような可愛らしい行為だった。
However, she continued to speak and described doing something so cute he doubted his own ears.

抱き締めて一緒に寝る。
She held the bear when sleeping.

あの真昼が、くまのぬいぐるみを抱えて寝る。
That Mahiru, held the bear in her arms and went to sleep.

真昼の寝顔を見た事があるが、まさに天使のような寝顔だった。
Amane has seen Mahiru’s sleeping face and it was truly an angelic expression.

あの寝顔で、ぬいぐるみを愛おしそうに抱き締めて寝ている。美少女が、くまのぬいぐるみと一緒に寝る。
With that expression, she held the bear tenderly and slept. She was a beautiful woman but she slept together with the bear.

想像すると、ものすごく可愛らしく眺めていたくなるような光景が脳裏のうりに広がって、顔が赤くなる。
When he imagined it, an adorable scene that he desperately wanted to see unfolded in his mind and his face turned red.

Imagine that sentiment being cycled over and over again, ad nauseam, over the last two volumes.

If I were fluent in Japanese, this probably wouldn’t annoy me as much as it does, but unfortunately it takes me probably four times longer than with English to get through a Japanese sentence even when I’m reading smoothly. And my irritation definitely builds up the longer it takes me to read.

Will I take my own advice, read only what I enjoy reading, and give up? Probably not, I’m a stubborn (and dumb) motherfucker who wants to see the first series they ever started in Japanese through to the end. Plus, the novels have actually been a great help for my learning, including (rather bizarrely, I feel) quite a few literary grammar points as well as showing more conversational Japanese writing when 周 and his friends talk like the high schoolers they are. So there’s been plenty of learning at the very least, even if I do take some considerable mental damage every time I see him talk about 真昼’s 可憐さ and her 美貌…

Word of the Day: 猫を被る - to feign friendliness; to play the hypocrite. Kind of a contrarian phrase to me considering how standoffish and honest to their own desires cats really are…

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Ah! You’re right, it’s よ, reading sure would be easier if I could read. I spent way to long trying to find なも as well because I kept reading it as なま.

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Main Post

Ok, my mental health was not at best recently, so, unfortunately, I didn’t do much reading. I did read a bit, but forgot to take a note of it, so I’m not sure which days it was.
So, for simplicity, it would be best to say that from November the 8th till November the 17th I haven’t read anything at all.
On November 18th – November 20th I caught up with NHK Easy News.

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Didn’t post yesterday - partly due to a particularly poor effort. But I was at work for a lot of the day.

Today was better. I didn’t have as much time to read as I’d like, but made progress.

20/11 1 page Spy Family
21/11 18 pages Spy Family ( to end mission), 7 pages God Bless the Mistaken

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Nov 21, Mon of Week 9 of Fall 2022 :maple_leaf:

  • Death Note Vol.5 Ch.39

Try reading without look up, while inferring from Kanji and Kana; but it felt too long. Also, I somewhat have lost interest in the case (just like L some chapters ago). Furigana is very helpful, because at least I won’t blank out. (I might remember Kanji meaning, but not the reading.)

And indeed, I can’t highlight manga on Bookwalker.

  • うたわれるもの (Steam) 1 hour

I killed MC in a fight, but I believe he will be revived for the next fight.

Interesting vocabularies
  • ワイロ written on top 献金 (けんきん). I don’t realize the Kanji form until I look up, but わい gives some naughty and bad feelings; it’s actually 賄賂.
    • First Kanji is seen often throughout the same material of the same chapter (always read わい). Verb / Kun form not seen within the chapter (賄う (まかなう)).
  • さする written in Hiragana. Kanji form of 摩る, 擦る has many readings.
  • 謙虚 void is modest
  • 不条理 perhaps like 不合理
  • 呻き声 confused with 呷る from yesterday. Of course no Furigana (うめきごえ).
  • 瓶 [かめ] apparent 花瓶 or such has a Kun reading, like 亀, but with different pitch. 大瓶 [おおがめ] in context.
  • 詮無い first Kanji is from 所詮
  • 丹念 rust-tanned colored mind is of hard work.
  • 手練れ mastery of training (訓練), and is sufficient (足りる). Has an alternate writing as 手足れ.
  • 軟膏 Kanji is from bandaid (絆創膏), meaning greasey fat
  • 由緒 therefore we are there together = lineage.
  • 金づる full Kanji form is 金蔓. Well, money vine (蔓).
  • うだうだ on and on
  • 手厚い the 厚い part has a second meaning of being warm
  • 寸法 measurable plan

Phrases

  • 余裕綽々 [よゆうしゃくしゃく] longer version of 余裕

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:tiger2: :books: The Tanuki Autumn Onsen :hotsprings: :raccoon:

20221121 - 吾輩は狸である progress: 79.38% :high_heel:

Master’s niece visits the house so that can only mean one thing: big conversation time.
(and this one looks like a huge conversation)

:fallen_leaf: Japanese found under the leaves :fallen_leaf:

Meowords

放任主義「ほうにんしゅぎ」ー Principle of laissez-faire
猪口才「ちょこざい」ー Impudent; impertinent
「かかと」ー Heel
蝙蝠傘「こうもりがさ」ー (Western Style) umbrella

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:maple_leaf: :turkey: November 21st :turkey: :maple_leaf: (Home Post Link)

Been doing some more linguistics literature review, and found this nice study: Unknown vocabulary density and reading comprehension (Hu & Nation, 2000) (should be open access) which I think is where the experimental evidence for the “98% vocabulary knowledge for comfortable unassisted reading with adequate comprehension” number comes from. It also has a nice overview section (it’s MA thesis work, so this is expected). If you’re interested in that relationship, this is a really nice standalone paper. Importantly, they were only looking at purely written text with absolutely no assistance. With the context of visual info (images, movies), or with the use of a dictionary, this number probably goes down to an extent.

Read/Played:

  • 耳をすませば pg 32 → 70 – it feels pretty good that a lot of the words i’m looking up are in the N3 or N2 word lists (at least as labelled on jisho), and it’s pretty rare that i’m running into words below that. So I’m mostly needing to look up words around the level I’m currently studying at, which definitely gives me some confidence.
Good Words

連れて行く「つれていく」ー to take someone (to a place)
奥「おく」ー inside part
不思議 「ふしぎ」ー wonderful, marvelous
敏感「びんかん」ー susceptible, sensitive
ヤナヤツ = いやなやつ ー something like “unpleasant guy.” this was DRIVING ME CRAZY. thank you @MissDagger for already having this question and an answer in the book club lmao

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November 26 :heavy_check_mark: :open_umbrella:

体育館の殺人, 26-37%

I read this week’s portion of the Mystery Club book along with the audiobook. I’m continuing to not be impressed, but the audio helps a lot. Not sure whether it’s because it’s for a younger audience (it’s not officially a light novel though), or that it’s supposed to be a honkaku mystery, which means it is based on cold, clinical logic more than human passion. Humans are very illogical beings in my opinion, especially when committing crimes - but not in books like this.

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November 21st
:maple_leaf:Home post:maple_leaf:

Card Captor Sakura volume 1 or Aria: the masterpiece volume 2 – progress report
Yesterday: finished volume 1 of Aria: the masterpiece
Today: started with volume 1 of Card Captor Sakura. Read up to page 17(?).

I have started reading the 1st volume of Card Captor Sakura today.

The beginning where Sakura used magic was fortunately manageable. I may indirectly credit this to me having played JRPG’s with Japanese voice options with magic using or summoner characters and having encountered such words beforehand – thanks video games! :wink:
The introductory scenes to Sakura’s daily life have also been comprehensible which is probably due to the vague memory of most parts of the series that I still have.
So far, so good! I may eat my words in the future chapters, though. :eyes:

It was also satisfying to come across a few words I (re-)learned through Wanikani,
such as 科目, 小学生, 追う and 風.

Lastly, the page numbers I write down for my daily progress may not always be correct for this series because I’ll probably miscount the page number I stopped at since the volumes use them sporadically.


Word or expression of the day:
遅刻 (ちこく) - lateness, late coming

Honourable mention:
命じる - (めいじる) - to order, to command

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:fallen_leaf: Day 52, 21st of November :maple_leaf:

:open_book: Back to my Home Post

More Kiki. I might manage to get through the first chapter at the end of this challenge! After that things will go much faster because I won’t transcribe everything. I mainly did this for the first chapter because it lets me take notes on any grammar points I find so I can refer back to them later.

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That’s definitely interesting, but I feel like the actual experiment doesn’t really provide enough data to strongly support a 98% figure. In particular, they never actually test anybody on a 98%-known-vocab text – they only tried 80, 90, 95 and 100% and are extrapolating between those. Ideally there’d be more data points between 95 and 100 since that seems to be the range of interest.

Empirically, I find when reading that unknown words fall into two categories – important to understanding of the text, and unimportant (very often adverbs), and you can generally tell which is which. So 95% known words plus a dictionary doesn’t mean you have to look up one word in 20 for comprehension.

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Definitely! Reading a lot of Paul Nation’s stuff, he’s mainly doing theoretical and computational work, so even this amount of experimental evidence is a huge (and for work done at a masters thesis level, this is pretty impressive). Google scholar marks this article as being cited by 1800 other papers, so it’s definitely not the end of this story. The data set was small, the method was clever but pretty convoluted, and the conditions for comprehension may have been way too strict for such a short piece of writing. Clearly more work needed to be done, and clearly more work has been done. But I’ve seen the 98% number pop up a lot in other papers, so It’s good to know more or less where that idea comes from in the literature.

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Home post :bookmark: Nov 21 :maple_leaf::fallen_leaf:

・本好きの下剋上 13 (37% → 42%)

Yay, finally did more than just a tiny read.

Found a yojijukugo: 切磋琢磨(せっさたくま)
・1) diligent application (to work or study); cultivating one’s caracter by studying hard
・2) mutual encouragement (to improve); working hard together; friendly rivalry


So true. Can’t have too much shounen manga factor! At some point, I must have forgotten what happened to マイン at the end of the second arc, leaving her in a position where she can’t stay with her family in the 下町(したまち) anymore. Interesting how both of those incidents were at the end of arcs :thinking: As for me forgetting, may be due to how smooth it went to pick up those four ingredients for the magic potion (except for the initial try, of course).

May I ask what book that is? :3

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お狐様の異類婚姻譚 1
I have decided to read something else for now, though :sweat_smile:

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November 21st!

Today I read Chapter 46 of Mitsuboshi Colors.
It was quite a quick read, so I considered reading something else too, but then decided that since I’m pretty tired, it was ok to let myself have an easier reading day today.

(Home Post)

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:lady_beetle: Home :lady_beetle:

November 21

人間椅子 -

ジョジョの奇妙な冒険51
111 - 134

I had a use it or lose it occurrence after work and decided to take the opportunity, although it took up a good chunk of time. After that and dinner, I was off focus and then it was 1am before I knew it :confused:

I got to start Pompeii at least. I’m really excited to be reading this in its original version.

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Home post

Day 51:

Priority: :houses: 青桐.

Free choice: :rocket: ミニスカ宇宙海賊 1.

Extra: :boom: 鋼の錬金術師 7; :scissors: 魔王城でおやすみ 11.

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My goal was to read 5 chapters of Shield Hero volume and ended up reading 6 yesterday. Today I plan to finish the book, but leaving the extra stories for tomorrow. I went ahead and ordered the next 4 volumes because thats all of season 1, and I have trip coming up. Can’t believe I read this much but its been so fun I can’t put it down. Luckily I have other obligations so I am eager to jump back when the chance arrives. Otherwise I would probably just burn myself out through the free time.

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November 21 :maple_leaf: Home Post

More ブルーロック today! I finished off volume 14 and then ended up reading all of volume 15, which was… quite the adventure lmao, if you know you know :joy: but yeah it was lots of fun as always, though I did encounter a lot of words I really didn’t expect to in ブルーロック :laughing:

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