Caught up with 夜カフェ today! I read ch 2-7, which is about 72 pages of text. Ch 6 and 7 were both emotionally difficult for me to read, 6 on behalf of Ryouma (eating the somewhat burned piece of yakitori so none of the kids would have to be stuck with it, but that still being the wrong thing to do and the girls getting mad at him; not handling Risa-chan in the park correctly and the girls getting mad at him even though it’s not like they did that much better themselves…) (the neurodivergent relatability is coming out) and 7 on behalf of Hanabi because of the weirdness going on with Tina and Hanabi starting to feel out of place and unwelcome. When I saw that ch 8 was called ケンカ, I wasn’t expecting anything to happen until then, but I guess that’s just when things come to a head and we finally get an actual confrontation.
I’ve noticed with this book that for the most part, I know the majority of the words (some of them I don’t know or have only a vague idea of but can pretty much figure them out from the context and don’t bother looking them up; some of them I do know but it takes me a bit to make the connection due to the lack of kanji) and only have to make the occasional lookup, but then there’ll be random pages where I’ll have to look up every other word it feels like, and they’re not even necessarily the cooking or crafting pages…
I also read the 4-pg prologue of Stage of the Ground, because of course I did lol. Before the story, we get several pages of full-color illustrations by Hinota to sort of introduce the main characters and the story, and they’re so pretty. And the cover page of each chapter aside from the prologue and epilogue has a profile for a different main character, which is nice. Anyways, I’m back to feeling like I’ve gotta look up like every other word lol probably doesn’t help that this is my first baseball series.
I read one chapter of HQ vol 30 as well.
あの2番の子 大人しそうなのに…
lol, nope, Suga’s just as feral as the rest of them (if not more), he’s great
Some vocab of note:
波風を立てる (なみかぜをたてる) [expression, 一] to make trouble; to make waves; to cause discord
裏返る (うらがえる) [自ラ五] to break into falsetto; to crack; to squeak; to croak; to quaver. I can definitely see how we get here from another of its meanings, “to betray; to double-cross.”
またぞろ [adverb] yet again
なあなあ [noun, の-adj.] compromise; collusion; give and take; not making a fuss; closing one’s eyes (to). Often as なあなあで.
立ち居振る舞い (たちいふるまい) [noun] movements; behavior; bearing; manner; demeanor
どん詰まり (どんづまり) [noun] dead end; end of the line
Oh, this is super relatable. Even with all that I’ve been reading, my 積読 count has increased to 150… (Wasn’t I just getting close to 100??) At least the amount I can comprehend without having to go back over it and/or look stuff up has increased, and my recognizing more kanji tends to make lookups go faster, and my stamina for reading in Japanese has definitely increased, so I am able to read more compared to a year ago, but I still don’t think my actual reading speed itself has increased significantly yet, and it’s frustrating as hell. It’s torture not being able to read everything I want to read! あぁ、ほんとに活字中毒ですね……