📚📚 Read every day challenge - Fall 2022 🍁🍂

October 31 :maple_leaf: Home Post

Today I read 人間椅子 for :ghost: spooky day :ghost:, success! I wasn’t sure how it’d go, and it was definitely a humbling experience compared to how ブルーロック’s been lmao, but I made it through :muscle: I talked about it more in the book club thread but it was a really interesting read, all a good experience I think. I’m excited to get back to ブルーロック though, I miss them already :joy:

(On a completely unrelated note, some vindication for those of you who read バディミッションBOND as anything but “buddy” during that era: I’ve been looking at getting the drama cds and one of the listings on cdjapan definitely translates it as “body mission bond” :laughing:)

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Finished Chainsaw Man Volume 5. Today I didn’t have the same chances to read, so I am realistically only gonna be able to play some games later. I went pretty hard yesterday with studying, so I think today is gonna be one of those coasting days.

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:maple_leaf: :turkey: November 1st :turkey: :maple_leaf: (Home Post Link)

First day of November! Did a little re-cap of my threads today and compiled a list of all the words I marked down. Unfortunately I didn’t mark page numbers or chapter numbers to go find context/pictures for making flashcards, but I might start doing that with this next series.

Here is the document, in an easily csv-able spreadsheet for making anki cards if anyone (or me) in the future needs it.

October retrospective

When I started the challenge, my goal was to finish よつばと!by the end of December, and I managed that by the end of the first month! It felt really good to just be reading a ton and mostly understanding what I was reading, but it did take me some time to really get into the swing of it. The chapters at first were slow, and any chapter with adults talking to each other was also slow reading. I learned a lot of new vocab and lots of phrases to the point where I was chunking them internally, and could understand some things without much conscious effort. But, a lot of that came from getting the meaning of the nouns/verbs that I could look up and just intuiting the rest from context. That’s great! I was reading, enjoying it, and learning! But long-term that’s still probably a weakness to start thinking about.

November thoughts

The chapters for からかい上手の高木さん are generally shorter, around 15 pages instead of closer to 30 pages (~7 chapters/volume & 220 pages vs ~9 chapters/volume &150 pages). I skimmed through a few and it mostly seems similar in difficulty to よつばと!(at least, the avg difficulty. The easy parts of よつばと!look much easier, and the harder parts look much harder). In my push to finish よつばと!, I kind of slipped off on my grammar readings. This month, I’d like to finally finish Tae Kim, as well as keeping up some level of reading manga.

Until I get more comfortable with the style in the new series, I don’t want to bite off more than I can chew, so here’s what I’m thinking for now for goals:

  • からかい上手の高木さん, 2 chapters per day
  • at least 6 pages of Tae Kim per day

I do kind of expect to massively overshoot this, since much of Tae Kim will probably be review/reinforcing existing knowledge, and once I get the style down I will probably be comfortably reading 6-7 chapters of manga (matching the page count/day I was doing of よつばと!) Probably not a stretch to say I think it’s plausible to finish both Tae Kim and the 14 volumes of からかい上手の高木さん I currently have by the end of November, but for now this is a good start.


And with all that big picture stuff done and some goals set, back to actually reading!

  • Tae Kim 127 → 144 – mostly review, understanding underlying structure behind と and って and という, this stuff is so common I feel like I did just pick a lot of it up.
  • からかい上手の高木さん chapters 1, 2. These feel refreshingly quick compared to when I tried to read them last year. May be overshooting the 2 chs/day thing sooner than I anticipated lmao
Good Words

筆箱「ふでばこ」ー pencil case
まんまと ー successfully
廊下「ろうか」ー hallway
野良「のら」ー stray (animal)
嚙む「かむ」ー to bite
腹「はら」ー abdomen
生理「せいり」ー one’s period

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Exhausted after work but read a bit.

1/11 5 pages Spy Family, 6 pages Orange, 1 page 夜カフェ

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Main Post

On November the 1st I:

  • Read today’s NHK Easy News.
  • Watched

to 14 minutes 20 seconds.

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Nov 1, Tue of Week 6 of Fall 2022 :maple_leaf:

  • 人間椅子 29% => 45%

I don’t hold back on vocabulary collecting, just have to normalize the form as well.

In the end, I can’t get through it fast (nor do I need to).

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

20221101 - 吾輩は狸である progress: 66.31% :studio_microphone:

Back to Wagahai! After a long speech chapter 8 is concluded.

Feels weird that there aren’t many chapters left now!
(though chapter 9 looks like a pretty long one)

:fallen_leaf: Japanese found under the leaves :fallen_leaf:

Meowords

天稟「てんぴん」ー Natural talents
比喩「ひゆ」ー Simile; metaphor; allegory
綻びる「ほころびる」ー To come apart at the seams; to be ripped/torn
滔々「とうとう」ー Swiftly flowing (like a river); torrentially
隧道「すいどう」ー Tunnel (though the furigana given here is: トンネル)

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Chapter 11 is the real biggie – ch 8 = 50 pages, ch9 = 47 pages, ch10 = 65 pages, ch11 = 87 pages.

(I got to the end of chapter 10 and have put the book on hold for the next two weeks because I want fast-to-read books for the tadoku contest.)

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November 1st
:maple_leaf:Home post:maple_leaf:

Some thoughts on the Aria books themselves

First of all, I just want to mention how smitten I am with the masterpiece edition because the front- and back-cover simply look gorgeous and the art itself is also very pleasant and has that old-school touch to it (huh, almost as if it came out around 20 years ago).
I was eying the Aqua and Aria books for years because they’ve been around for a while in my country but I never got around to reading them. Thus I hope that I can make it through them in their original language however long it may take – unless I end up disliking and dropping them for some reason.

I was feeling a bit unwell today but I managed to read (or rather decipher) the first 4 pages of Aria:the masterpiece volume 1.

Luckily, I read about the first chapter having plenty of specific terms because of the worldbuilding in advance, so I didn’t panic immediately. The book club vocabulary list definitely helped, and I think I roughly understood the gist of those pages.

Some words of note

電離層 - ionosphere
I’m just listing it because I had to look up what exactly the ionosphere even was. Aside from that, I doubt I’ll be using this one daily, let alone frequently. :sweat_smile:

Other, less complicated and probably more useful words that caught my eye
世紀 - century
地表 - surface of the earth
追伸 - post scriptum
目的地 - destination
落ち着く - to settle down, (to calm down)
割 - one tenth, ten percent

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Home post :bookmark: Nov 1 :maple_leaf:

・本好きの下剋上 12 (7% → 9%)

Reading in bed while tired might not be the best idea. Especially when there’s a chance you keep falling asleep :see_no_evil:

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November 1 :heavy_check_mark: :open_umbrella:

体育館の殺人, start - 6%

I expected to finish this week’s portion of the Mystery Book Club in one day, but my brain felt reaaaally slow today for some reason, so about half of it it is.

I do that all the time. And when I fight against sleep in order to finish the paragraph/page/chapter, I find the next day that I remember nothing at all, and have to reread it anyway… :upside_down_face:

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:fallen_leaf: Day 32, 1st of November :maple_leaf:

:open_book: Back to my Home Post

Because I did quite a lot of grammar today I didn’t want to read something complicated, so I read another Tadoku book: チワワの(はな)すけ~(かげ)とお散歩(さんぽ) about a dog and its shadow. Where does this shadow belong to? Where did my shadow go? Important little dog questions.

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November 1st!

Today I read chapter 11 of Yoru Cafe. It took ages, and I was a bit tired so I kept falling asleep towards the end, but I got there eventually :sweat_smile:

(Home Post)

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:maple_leaf: :jack_o_lantern: :snowflake: :christmas_tree: November 1 :christmas_tree: :snowflake: :jack_o_lantern: :maple_leaf:
Home Post

夜カフェ :cake:

Read the second half of chapter 10. I definitely think I’ll just keep reading this every day until it ends, and considering I read about half a chapter a day, that means I’ll be done in four days. Atogaki will probably be read right after I finish the last chapter of the volume.

Kiro, my kitten, just decided to lay himself across my chest, staring at the computer screen. Gotta see what Mommy is doing. Also likes to put his paw on the track pad, and it works very well for him. xD

Btw someone commented today that he already looks bigger, and I guess he does. I don’t want him to grow too quick, although I will be happy to loose some of the kitten habits. :joy:

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:jack_o_lantern: :lady_beetle: Home :lady_beetle: :jack_o_lantern:

November 1

人間(にんげ)椅子(いす)
10% - 15%

Chugging along slowly :sweat_smile:

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Summary Post

Day 32: November 1st
What did I read?: きつねくんと先生
How much did I read?: 5 pages
How long did it take me?: 9 min

Hellooooo thread, I’m back, a bit late :upside_down_face: I had a lovely time on vacation and I’m generally feeling more positive/better emotions-wise, but man, am I struggling to get back into it. I’ve been so tired the past couple days, work is just wiping me out and I’m getting distracted by so many other stupid things (tl;dr, incompetent people and terrible systems are making things way harder than they need to be, so seemingly straightforward tasks are taking way more of my time and energy and mental space than they should :unamused:)

ANYWAY, I’m finding it really hard to pick up the things I let go, reading and forum-going included lol.
I finally managed to make myself read something today :upside_down_face: I figured the only way to get back into things is to make myself do at least a little bit. Won’t force myself to read a lot for now, but doing anything is a better step forward than doing nothing. So I read a tiny bit of this manga, which I think I actually started in the summer challenge, but tbh I completely forgot about it during the inter-challenge break and failed to pick it up again :joy: If you weren’t there or don’t remember, the premise is that a teacher discovers he has a little kitsune in his class and he sort of low-key adopts it xD

Today, Kitsune-kun is hiding in random places, and tbh, this looks like what I would like to be doing right now

Replies! (I had some catching up to do lol)

Welcome to the challenge! :smile: Aria is a fabulous first choice, I really enjoyed that series! If you’re going through the book club threads, I’m sure you’ll see me in there :joy:

Aww this legitimately makes me so happy to hear, thank you :face_holding_back_tears::heart: When I’m feeling a bit more energetic, I’ll be starting on the third volume of 夜の名前を呼んで, so uh…I’m sure there will be more enthusiastic screaming in the future, please look forward to it? :joy:

Then you can read it with the Yotsuba club! We resurrected ourselves for volume 15, so I’m sure we’ll be gathering back together again whenever Vol 16 finally comes out :joy:

:joy: amazing, I love it. Peak “throw some foreign words on a shirt and hope no one actually knows what they mean”

I LOVE THIS MANGA :ooooooo
Sorry for shouting but I love it and I got excited :joy: Also I’m pretty sure I did the exact same thing re: the 6 and 4. In what world is that a 4??

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Home post

Day 31:

Priority: :houses: 青桐. I loved the part about her being satisfied or not with herself as she is now. やっぱり自分が大事だった。 :disappointed_relieved: The whole section made me think a lot.

Free choice: :mag: 硝子の塔の殺人. @pocketcat I’m really enjoying this book! :blush: Just, also, this one aspect is starting to grate, lol.

Extra: :performing_arts: ヤマトナデシコ七変化 1, and finished it. :hibiscus: @pocketcat I’ve seen the drama as well! (Unless you meant the anime, which I haven’t seen.) According to my memory, it wasn’t quality and I enjoyed it a lot. :grin:

Mandarin?!: :merperson: 伯爵与妖精 1. My new system is working well. Right now I’m limiting my Mandarin vocabulary reviews to 200 a day while I catch up on a backlog due to previously mentioned redacted. So I do the first 50 with a drama on in the background (in Mandarin, seen before, and without English subtitles, so I can be hearing Mandarin while focusing on anki; currently this drama is 棋魂 aka ヒカルの碁), then read a bit of 伯爵与妖精 using Pleco, then do the next 50, Pleco, next 50, Pleco, sync any added cards from 伯爵与妖精 in anki, and then the last 50 reviews I can do more slowly to a drama in Mandarin that I haven’t seen before (currently 琅琊榜 or 开端). If my attention span wanders during the last 50, I do some Clozemaster or read about a grammar point. The main goal is to shove a whole bunch of Mandarin in my day without it sprawling out all over everything (aka Japanese time).

And my October is finished! I’d say it was a win overall despite some individual misses here and there.

O C T
:books::white_check_mark:
:interrobang::interrobang:
:interrobang::interrobang: :interrobang::interrobang: :wolf::mag: :rocket::mag: :rocket::mag: :rocket::mag: :rocket::mag: :scissors:
:rocket::mag: :rocket::wolf: :rocket::mag: :rocket::test_tube: :rocket::mag: :rocket::test_tube: :rocket::test_tube: :comet::boom:
:x::test_tube: :houses::test_tube: :houses::test_tube: :houses::mag: :houses::mag: :x::mag: :houses::mag: :test_tube:
:houses::mag: :houses::mag: :houses::mag: :x::mag: :x::mag: :x::mag: :houses::mag: :notebook:
:houses::mag: :houses::mag: :performing_arts:

Since I already finished my stretch goal for the week, I’ll make my next focus manga volume :shallow_pan_of_food: ダンジョン飯 4 again.

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That’s the one! Quality trash :joy:

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Read some of volume 6 of Chainsaw Man, plan to finish that today. Haven’t been back on Persona 5 in a bit. But the first couple times I started I took things pretty slow so its not super abnormal that I would step away. I want to get back at it soon though.

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01 November 2022

:house: Home Post


  • NHK Easy Articles
  • Textbook Work

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