November 30th (Home Post Link)
We made it!! Congratulations to everyone!! It was really encouraging to see so many people posting their progress, and I definitely wouldn’t have read as much as I did without this group here, so thank you to everyone who posted and thank you to @windupbird for hosting! I will be sticking around and posting through december probably; I have no plans to break my reading streak unless something goes horribly horribly wrong. Not feeling like I’m really hitting a wall yet with reading without more focused kanji or harder grammar study (yet), and I would like to push this up until I get closer to that point. Honestly, not doing anki or wk reviews for two months has been refreshing, and I’m enjoying reading way more without them. I might need them again someday, but for now I just am enjoying reading.
Over the course of the challenge, I read 12 volumes of よつばと!, 4 volumes of からかい上手の高木さん, reread about half of Tae Kim’s Grammar Guide (starting from the grammar parts that mattered to me), the one volume of 耳をすませば, my first short story 赤い手袋, and 2 volumes of ホリミヤ. My original goal was to read at least one chapter of manga per day, and enjoy myself doing it. I ended up reading every day, averaged ~2.2 chapters/day (and change, didn’t go count up any online chapters I read for stuff like イジらないで、長瀞さん, or 古見さんは、コミュ症です), and absolutely enjoyed myself doing it, so I’d call this an unqualified success of a reading challenge. Still a long way to go before I’m reading unassisted and with the speed and comprehension at the level I’m after, but progress is progress. No doubt about that.
Moving forward, I’d like to keep up the minimum 1 manga chapter/day goal, since that seems to be manageable for me even on days where I’m not feeling the greatest (and based on my SLA research review,15-20 minutes a day is already more than enough to see considerable benefits from extensive reading programs). But I’d also like to start incorporating NHK easy articles to get some more practice reading more formal writing without the image context in manga (with the goal being to eventually transition this into jp wikipedia or full jp news articles.) The jump from manga to light novels and novels is going to be pretty big, I think, but I’m moving in that direction.
Finishing ホリミヤ before the end of December seems doable, so I think that will be my series reading goal for now, plus one NHK easy article per day.
Read:
- ホリミヤ ch 14 - more and more cuteness GUUUH
- よつばと!ch 23 - this was the first chapter I read during the challenge, and at the time I considered it to be the hardest chapter of the series that I’d read so far. I thought it would be fun to go back and do a direct comparison. Now I’d say it’s probably easier than most of what I’m reading. Grammar is noticeably simpler, and I picked up on some parts of the conversation that totally went over my head 2 months ago. In short: remarkable improvements!
Mood.
Good Words
ホリミヤ
無断「むだん」ー without permission
拍子「ひょうし」ー tempo, beat, rhythm (here metaphorically)
塞がる「ふさがる」ー to be closed up, to be healed
よつばと!
養殖「ようしょく」ー aquaculture
飲み込む「のみこむ」ー to swallow, to gulp down