Tadoku Log: Days 7 and 8

Because who has two minutes to spare to post a status update when you have seven more episodes of Umineko to read through? Exactly.

At any rate, I’ve tacked on another 121.83 pages since last update, so let’s call that roughly 61 pages per day, for a current total of 426.82 pages. Phew. And with that, I’ve completely finished the first part of Umineko, and have begun episode 2… so it’s pretty safe to say that I’m hopelessly addicted. Personally, I can’t imagine a better thing to be hooked to, as I learned so many words and new kanji from the first episode alone, not to mention making sense of dozens of grammatical bits that I’ve had trouble with for ages now.

Feels pretty awesome having finished my first visual novel entirely in Japanese, not to mention one of a relatively high level of Japanese such as this badboy. Perhaps I’ll have more to say in a few days or so about the whole process and what I’ve learned.

One small change I’m gonna make with episode 2, however, is copying down (into a text file) the commonly used or otherwise important words that I have trouble memorizing, and slapping those muthas in a brand new Umineko vocabulary deck. I certainly get plenty out of pure reading, but I feel like the good ol’ SRS can aid me tremendously here in sealing those cracks. We’ll see how it goes.

Tadoku Log: Day 6

44.76 pages for a total of 304.99… which for all practical purposes is really 305, but let’s be fair here.

Stopped last night after a super-exciting scene (of guess what?) and just couldn’t put it down until the chapter break. By the looks of things, this may be the last chapter… or damn close.

Tadoku Log: Day 5

75.33 pages, total of 260.32, easily being the largest amount of Japanese I’ve ever read in a single day. With luck, I’ll be able to finish Umineko 1 tomorrow… and if not, I’ll be damn close, I think.

きひひひひひひひひひひひひ。

260.32260

Tadoku Log: Day 4

34.5 pages, 184.99 pages total, all Umineko, all the time.

<Burritolinguist> my brain has forgotten how to process Japanese grammar in the past few days, apparently
<Burritolinguist> I rock at learning foreign languages

Tadoku Log: Day 3

38.64 pages today, for a total of 150.49. All of those came from the Sea Kitties.

I had planned on going all-out today, as I had quite a bit of free time to burn, with the intention of logging a good 100 pages worth of Umineko. Unfortunately, today was just one of them days when I just couldn’t seem to stay focused on reading for long periods, so it ended up being a “light” day of reading instead. My comprehension seemed to drop off sharply as well, though it usually takes me a bit of reading to “warm up”, and without the concentration today, that warm up was more like a lukewarm pizza sitting in a box on the counter – you know, still perfectly delicious and packed with toppings and a blend of zesty cheese and spices, but only a shadow of its former self. Poor time management and arguing politics (friendly, of course!) for two hours with a good buddy didn’t help matters.

Ah well. I’m still within my quota of 50 pages a day average, and tomorrow should go a lot better.

Tadoku Log: Day 2

70.79 pages today, for a total of 111.82, quite an improvement if I do say so myself. The vast majority came from Umineko (which is incredibly exciting and suspenseful now), a tad from playing the first bit of 紅魔城伝説II 妖幻の鎮魂歌 (which I’ll lovingly refer to from this point forth as Touhouvania), as well as a couple chapters of よつばと！ for a few laughs after a particularly intense Umineko scene.

Changing up the way I read Umineko ever so slightly, mainly doing less look-ups of unknown words (of which this series is filled to the brim with), which seriously slows me down, breaks my focus and just generally doesn’t do very good things for my comprehension. I realized today that, despite all the Umineko I’d been reading, I still haven’t really learned a lot of the vocab it’s been repeating lately. As soon as I eased up on the mindless look-ups and just read, only looking up the more important words, I quickly began actually learning things again. Such is the power of Tadoku, and common sense.

And now, back to the murder mystery…

Tadoku Log: Day 1

41.03 pages, about a quarter of those coming from Berserk, and the rest from Umineko. Almost read more than I did in one day than I did in the entire first Tadoku! I had made a tentative goal to read roughly 50 pages today, and although I fell a little short, I’m still very pleased with my progress. Helps that I have some real reading material that I seriously want to plow through; nothing against the RPGs I was playing last time. Definitely sticking with Umineko as much as possible, despite its often soul-crushingly-difficult vocabulary – it’s just too damn enjoyable when I’m really into it. On the manga side, Berserk never fails me, and the current arc is getting seriously awesome, so I’ll definitely be sticking with that too.

As for material on my nook, I’ve yet to read much for Tadoku yet. Was recently introduced to Kino no Tabi, which not only sounds super appealing to my tastes personally, but also a great introduction to light novels. Between that, Slayers and Harry Potter, I’m sure I’ll fall into an ereader groove eventually.

Really exciting seeing all the activity over the past 24 hours – I never imagined it would be this competitive. I’ve been challenging myself to stay in the top 20, and that’s been quite a task. Keeps me on my toes (and my eyes on the pages), at the very least!

Thinking in the long term, if I’m able to average 50 pages a day, I’ll end up with around 1500 pages total by the end – an amount that anyone who’s paced themselves through RTK knows is entirely doable. I’m in this marathon to the end.

In preparation for the coming storm

As I’m sure most of you know all too well (and in the unlikely scenario that you don’t, I heartily recommend cruising over to the ReadMOD blog and checking it out), the second Tadoku event is almost upon us, with only a week and a handful of days to go. By the look of things, it’s gonna be bigger, beefier and badder than ever before, with an impressive pool of participants registered as we speak, and more trickling in as the event approaches. The excitement is building, and if all goes well, all participants will end up walking away with the grand prize: the enormous benefit of gettin’ your read on.

As I recently mentioned, the vast bulk of my studying for the past some months has consisted of reading, with SRSing serving only as a very basic (and sporadic…) supplement mostly for kanji recognition and writing, and a small handful of grammar, expressions and vocabulary bits. Vast amounts of reading have made much of my old study habits redundant, not to mention boring in comparison, so I’m pleased to have made the transition. The more I read, the easier it gets; the more naturally phrases flow, the more vocabulary I pick up, the faster my reading gets and the more my overall comprehension improves. In turn, I gain access to more difficult material that was too difficult only a few months prior, and the process snowballs. The benefits of large amounts of reading in your L2 are vast, and the extensive reading approach is immediately accessible and simple, and thus the philosophy behind the sometimes usually occasionally always friendly competition that is Tadoku.

I’ve been slowly amassing a small pool of material I plan to read during the month of January. If possible, I plan to stick with one item to completion before moving on to another, though knowing me, I’ll likely end up jumping between two or three, especially given the fact that I deliberately chose one or two items from different formats for diversity’s sake. But unlike last Tadoku, I’ll be focused and honed to a razor-sharpness, and barring any more real-life family medical emergencies that require my full attention (did I mention that August was an awful month?), I’m aiming for some very high marks this time around indeed.

Tentatively, here’s a list of what I’m planning to indulge in:

Manga

• ベルセルク (volumes 15 and up, hoping to at least finish the Lost Children arc)
• ヒストリエ (just peeked at the first few pages the other day, already in love with it, I’m a weak weak man)
• プラネテス (been meaning to read for ages)
• ヴィンランド・サガ (totally badass from the few chapters I’ve already read)
• 聖☆おにいさん (about Jesus and Buddha as roommates in modern day Japan, by the mangaka of 荒川アンダーザブリッジ, so you know it’s gonna be hilarious, and it is.)

Video Games

• ドラゴンクエスト9 (where most of my reading came from last Tadoku, such as it was; haven’t made much progress in the game since)
• Final Fantasy 7 (about 12 hours in currently, things are starting to heat up and 神々 knows I can’t play through this game enough times)

Visual Novels

• うみねこのなく頃に (I may or may not be done with episode 1 by the time Tadoku comes – we’ll see, but I’d love to make some major progress in this mutha, despite its brutal difficulty)

Books, Light Novels

• ハリーポッターと賢者の石 (a few dozen pages in so far, seems to be just around my level, and I’ve never read the books in English so hey, what the heck?)
• スレイヤーズ！ (seems like a good light novel to start with, and I loves me some Slayers)

And that should last me well into January and beyond, I believe. Come February, I should be able to function quite well in any variety of fantasy settings and/or Japanese Renaissance Fairs. This list doesn’t include miscellaneous tidbits I’ll almost certainly be reading, such as web articles, and chances are I’ll manage to add something to the list in the next week or two. We’ll see!

On a minor note, I’ve still yet to get manga set up satisfactorily on my nook, so chances are I’ll simply stick to ComicRack and dead-tree formats rather than having to squint to make out words in Berserk (and forget about furigana). A little disappointing, but not entirely unexpected. I’ve discovered that some manga are far easier to read on an ebook screen than others, so perhaps I’ll find a compromise somewhere down the line. I will, however, give this thing a workout with the various books I’m gonna read, combined with BDH’s A.B.A.P. (As Baller As Possible) scripts for maximum awesome.