Nearly caught up with 夜カフェ but not quite, and haven’t read the IBC this week. But from tomorrow I have 5 book clubs for now, and I’m ahead in all the manga. I have flights ahead of me on 6th then 9th so should get more reading in.
Guess what, I finished a whole Honzuki book in four days Couldn’t have picked a better book to nyoom through as a Honzuki speed read challenge. I was so entertained, I can’t help but want more :'D Good news is that there are 15 more volumes waiting for me
I feel a bit bad for not gushing more but if I were to mention all the moments I liked, I’d be stuck here until next year for a while
On another note, it feels absurd how I’ve reached one of the goals I mentioned in the Summer '21 challenge:
I can’t believe it This must be a dream or something
I started reading 半落ち and oh my gosh, I’m feeling drained. I’m reading it in paperback and doing a very close read (I’m striving to understand every sentence as perfectly as I can to sharpen my grammar skills). I’m worried about falling behind the club due to this hence the slight early start. I’m not even halfway through the first reading and I’ve already taken so many notes. An ebook would have been much easier…
The writing is lovely, though, and taking the time to make sure I understand everything has me savoring it more.
Also I bought this the other day and omg I love it. As I get deeper into paperbacks it can be a pain to hold them open when copying out sentences. This helps so much (my hand gets so tired!) and since it’s real wood it smells soooo good. I saw other vendors had pretty ones made of resin and whatnot, but I’m glad I chose wood.
Pic from vendor page for people who don't want to click link
Today I read chapter 37 of Happiness, and then a few pages of the final chapter of Orange Volume 5.
I decided I was a kind of tired for reading Orange, and I want to be able to fully appreciate it since its the final chapter of the main story so I stopped and decided to finish it tomorrow instead
Yay BU$TAFELLOWS day! Started the new chapter and I’m still enjoying it a lot, I’m very fond of the characters already which probably doesn’t bode well for my emotions as we get deeper into plot things but that’s a later problem I accidentally quick saved several times because quick save is the minus button, which is the log button in 13 Sentinels I see this happening lots in my future lmao, I don’t remember what Y does in 13 Sentinels but hopefully nothing game-wrecking!
Thank you! Another rave review to add to the list haha, I’m very excited to get further into it
Woah that’s awesome, these threads really work huh :')
I tried to be good to myself today and read a lot last night. 62 is the last manga volume I need to read to make my 50 vols in a year goal! 62 is a bit longer than a typical volume though and it’s about 220 pages instead of the usual 180-190. I’ve got a lot to read today! Later!
Just a quick little post before I rush to bed. Almost skipped out but it would suck to drop out near the very end of the thread.
Word of the Day: 概ね - generally, roughly, main idea. Always funny when I see too words represented with completely different kanji (大) and (旨) fused into one word with a separate kanji. Really makes the quirks of Japanese language evolution clear.
Yesterday: Finished chapter 17, continued up to page 176. Today: Finished volume 4.
Aand done!
This officially marks the end of my late autumn/winter challenge. I didn’t have everything ready to join back in October, so my challenge lasted from November 1st to the December 31st instead.
Word or expression of the day:
実家 - (じっか) - (one’s parent’s) home
Small recap of my first read-every-day-challenge:
I’m pleasantly surprised that I managed to read around 8 manga volumes (I count the Aria: the masterpiece volumes as two volumes each) within 2 months. This is especially kind of astonishing because I had never read a full book/manga before. Years ago, I attempted reading a manga once but didn’t make it far because I got fed up with my lack of (Kanji) knowledge and I couldn’t find the motivation to push through – on the contrary, I was very disheartened and beat myself up over it.
Frankly, I think that my fate this time would have been similar – I may have tried reading Aria, put it on hiatus after struggling and opted for NHK easy articles or something instead – if it weren’t for this challenge and the corresponding book club pages.
With this challenge, I was capable of sticking to reading every day and see others thrive (and struggle) which gave me more incentive to continue reading despite struggling quite a bit. I noticed that my reading speed became a little bit faster too and I hope that it will steadily improve over time. Who knows, I may have a similar realisation and improvement like @Redglare in a year or so. By the way, @Redglare I’m happy to hear that you managed to achieve your goal.
One thing became clear, though: I need to focus more on grammar for now. While I tend to understand the gist in general, there is still so much that flies under my radar which hinders my understanding of dialogue and other explanations. So, for the next reading challenge, I will dedicate less time for reading and thus make slower progress but I thanks to this, I will have more time to revise (and learn new) grammar.
Thanks again, @windupbird for hosting this challenge and the following one – see (almost all of) you in the next reading challenge next year! Soo, literally later today/tomorrow
I didn’t read in Japanese yesterday, at least not any I would count. It is so weird to me that random sentences I might have read doesn’t even blip on my radar anymore. A happy thing for sure.
Mostly I’m making this post so I could reply to a couple of people. Also to motivate myself to find some time for Bustafellows reading today, otherwise I’ll just fall further and further behind.
Congratulations, @Redglare! Practice makes perfect better, as they say (or as they should say, perfection, bah!) Your effort matters. I hope you’re proud of yourself.
@pocketcat That is a cool book thingymajing! (Is there an official spelling for that word? My spellchecker couldn’t guess what I tried to type. xD)
@Midnightblue Sounds like you had a good challenge! I’m happy for you.
The challenges really do make a different. When I started reading Orange in July, so after my first challenge (technically second but I had a 6 month break between first and second challenges and for my real first I think I only kept up with reading for a month, and only every other day so… I’m not counting it much), I couldn’t read one chapter in one go. Maybe about half of it. I didn’t have the stamina, and I also had to do a lot more look ups. As I finished volume 5 a week or so ago, I easily read a whole chapter in one go. In fact I read the second to last and last chapter back to back (except for a quick forum posting break xD), and the last chapter was the longest chapter so far.
So yeah, so much more stamina now. And I recognize so many more grammar structures without even thinking about them. So yeah, these challenges are great.
Although I like the original series, I don’t want to be too ahead of the club. (Though, I might change my mind later.)
Also, this spin-off was recommended to me a long while ago. (Too many other spin-offs, in fact.)
I think I saw this before somewhere...
In some year number? Some ads?
うたわれるもの
Interesting words
めんこい = adorable
へちゃむくれ = unattractive looking; weak looking person
おろそか = negligent. Kanji form is 疎か.
象る = to represent; to model after
陥る = to fall into (e.g. a trap)
乗り切る = to sail through a storm
日に日に = day by day
過度 = excessive
怒声 = angry voice. Similar to 怒鳴り.
指揮 = commanding
強靭 = sturdy; tough. This one has Furigana.
掃除 = sweeping. Just confused because the last Kanji is usually read じょ as in 排除.
虚無 = nothingness
酸味 = acidic taste. Some counterparts, 甘味 (sweet), 辛味 (spicy).
香草 = fragrant grass
発酵 = fermentation
遊牧 = nomadism
燻製 = food smoking
定番 = standard item
箸休め = intermezzo; dish served between courses
端麗 = fine-looking
面立ち = facial features = 顔立ち
破顔 = giving a broad smile
祖国 = native country
人波 = wave of people; stampede. Sound alike of 人並み.
精巧 = exquisite
道順 = route
経由 = going through
下行大動脈 = ascending aorta. First two Kanji are descending, and the latter three are aorta. I confuse it with 不行 in 不行跡, which also has another meaning in Chinese.
新米 = newbie / first rice crop of the year. Probably similar to 新人 or 新入り.
淋菌 = gonococcus. First Kanji, other than crying loneliness (淋しい), it can also mean lymph, and then a Kanji substitution for Gonorrhea (痳).
豪快 = magnificent; glorious
悪玉 = villain. In context as 悪玉コレステロール (LDL), and then I found 超悪玉コレステロール (sd LDL), which I don’t know much about.
抗酸化 = antioxidant
解毒 = detox
毒物 = poisonous substance
摂取 = intake
吸収 = absorption
検出 = detection
受容体 = receptor
休息 = relaxation
大輪の花 = large blooming flower. Doesn’t appear to have to be a ring.
模する = to mock
雛 = young chick. Doesn’t have Furigana in context.
好々爺 = good-natured old man. No Furigana. Unexpected 々, so I take a little lookup – https://www.pouchs.jp/hAGYb
翻弄 = having at one’s mercy. Has Furigana.
和気藹々 = congenial and happy. Although not the first time to see this word, it’s probably the first time to see the third Kanji. Has Furigana.
Only did a tiny bit of reading yesterday and today, but it still counts.
And this concludes the reading updates for this year. See you all in the Winter thread, and have a Happy New Year!
Thingamajig is accepted by my spellchecker, but I’ve abused its dictionary over the years so who knows I didn’t even know these things existed and when I saw it (looking for something else entirely) I was at how useful it looked. I bought one for my mom and sister as well
My spellchecker seems to suggest this is the right spelling. I really wasn’t far off. So why couldn’t it figure out the word I was going for?
Usually in these situations I google it because google is usually pretty good at figuring out what word I’m going for. But I didn’t feel like it. I had a feeling I was very little off so people would understand anyway. xD
I was already a few pages into ch 1 of Stage of the Ground, but I decided to start the chapter afresh. I probably coulda started from the beginning of the prologue, but eh. Anyway, I read 8 pages, leaving off on pg 25.
The main character Yukito and his best—and it seems only—friend Suguru will call each other 親友 (Suguru) and 相棒 (Yukito) (and always in response to each other), which I find endearing. There’s one more guy who’s a main character whom we haven’t met yet, so since Suguru’s his only friend, I’m gonna go ahead and guess that Yukito and this other guy won’t particularly get along at first before they eventually become friends. Or maybe it’s just that I like a good enemies/rivals-to-friends(-to-lovers too for that matter, though I definitely don’t expect that to happen here) when done well, so that’s what I’m hoping for lol
Some vocab of note:
底抜け (そこぬけ) [な-adj.] unbounded (good nature, optimism, etc.); boundless; extreme; uninhibited. A lot of ~抜け words lately lol I just recently did the lessons for 腰抜け and 間抜け on WK.
ベッドタウン [noun] commuter town; bedroom community; dormitory town
我が意を得る (わがいをえる) [expression, 一] to approve of
Today I read 50 pages and finished the first manga volume of 化物語. Yeah the manga is pretty hard at least compared to all the other manga I read.
2022 was a terrible year I read only 8585 pages according to learn natively which is pretty disappointing. Of course not everything I read is on that site therefore you could add around 200 more pages but that is still far away from the 10000 pages I wanted to read. I only finished 2 books and the 3 Shin Kanzen Master Reading books for level N3-N1, 1 video game and 39 manga volumes . In 2023 I plan to go all out and read much more than that.
And that’ll be it from me for this thread! Actually got all the reading I wanted to do today out of the way early (despite not getting any sleep today), so I figured I would actually post at a reasonable time lmao.
Not too much to talk about here regarding the challenge itself, I basically used it as an extension of what my ongoing reading practice. Making these posts daily was a nice way to keep me honest though, especially on days where I wanted to just skip. It was fun enough and I’ll definitely keep continuing in the winter thread.
My reading speed has increased somewhat over the last couple of months but still nowhere near the progress I made at the beginning, which I suppose is only to be expected. I’m also getting hit with the realization that I need more genuine grammar practice, as someone who hasn’t even finished Genki I… sometimes I’ll be reading and my brain might passively understand a sentence but the second I go back to it and realize I never really understood the grammar being used, I just lose the thread. Being able to use context is great but sometimes I feel like I’m not actually gleaning any insights into grammar from what I read, so I definitely need to be more proactive about it if I want to make that next step.
Word of the Day: 牙城 - stronghold or bastion. A castle with fangs is a great little mental image for the most closely protected of defensive points.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got! Happy new year, and see you guys in the winter challenge!