Yeah, I think both learners and natives forget that a lot. I got asked by learners of German what I read as a child because they assumed it would be easy and I am like… 17th century ballads. (I may have been a slightly odd child, tbf. )
Children might not be able to grasp all the concepts yet but their vocabulary is already far superior to a (even intermediate) learner by the time they can read on their own. and adults not only have the vocabulary but often also the cultural and historical background information that might be needed to fully understand a work. Also, what can make a work really nice to read for an adult (flowery language, etc.), can be a nightmare for a learner.
Looking forward to the advent calendar. Always a nice challenge reading about… poop?
Thought I’d do some lazy, half-assed study tonight (somehow my energy to study is losing steam the closer I get to the exam?) and uh… You ok there Migii?
Sorry for the sudden intrusion, I just clicked on this thread and saw this. I’m about a third of the way through the second book (下巻) right now and I found this very hard to believe so I looked up the list you mentioned. I guess the “気軽に楽しめる” part of the list title must be referring only to the fact that you can easily access it on Aozora because even the creator of the list wrote:
難解な作品としても知られており、腰をすえて挑戦するのがおすすめです。
Why that kind of list would come up when you search for 読みやすい is beyond me though
Tbh I didn’t read the list in full, I saw the title, saw the books on it and was like “this author and I have entirely different ideas of what what 気軽に楽しめる means”
Iirc it had some Ranpo (for kids, like 怪人二十面相) on there as well right? But if they’re adding ドグラ・マグラ then at that point shoot, just throw in the adult Ranpo
There are a few days til the N1 and since I wasn’t able to study for a week recently due to Life I’ve kind of fallen off doing it entirely But also all the practice sections I was doing I was getting passing scores even if they weren’t scores I was thrilled about (looking at you grammar). So I think I’m going to shift gears a bit and focus on what I want to do by the end of the year.
I’m almost caught up to my current book clubs (理由 and 水車館) and I have these staring at me whenever I come to the forums…
I’ll be honest - I’m probably not going to go back to 春琴抄 this year. It was exhausting to read and I need more mental energy if I’m going to tackle that.
The other two though, I may have a chance of wrapping in December. 私が失敗した理由 is only 308 pages so even starting from the top it’s doable. I was 18% through 不機嫌な果実, had less than 300 pages remaining, and still actually remember what was happening and who was who pretty well.
Of my other remaining books:
レゾンデートル - I usually love this author but this book just drags for me somehow. I only have 145 pages left though, so I may as well try to finish it out.
聖なる黒夜 上 - I’m probably going to reset this as I’ve forgotten a lot. No finishing it this year.
可燃物 - this was short stories. I’ll probably reset the story that I’m on as I don’t remember it well. It will go into 2025
三面記事から見る 戦前のエロ事件 - I can probably finish this this year with only 74 pages remaining
琥珀の夏 - I have 318 of the 514 pages left. I might finish it this year.
絶対に面白い化学入門 世界史は化学でできている - yeah no This book is mildly interesting but it’s not something I can binge read
ソーシャルジャスティス 小児精神科医、社会を診る - ehhh. It’s pretty dry and also talks a lot about pandemic era stuff that I need to be in the right mood to read about
私は幽霊を見ない - nah. This is a collection of essays and I’m dragging it along year to year
消滅 - I will definitely finish this before the end of the year. I’m so invested in the story
and then 水車館の殺人事件 is set to wrap end of year as well. If I take all my outstanding pages I just said I’d like to finish and add them up…1817 pages With 32 days remaining in the year that’s ~57 pages a day. Actually more doable than I expected! Although I will have and extra ~50 pages/week of 理由 in there alongside the Aozora Advent…
N1 was exhausting. I’m fairly certain I passed the first sections (vocab, grammar, reading) but am very leery of listening as my brain was basically…turning off I just had no focus left in me after already 2-ish hours of sitting still filling out bubbles.
Anyways, I won’t know the results for a bit so I’m going to try to forget about it til then
It’s December now which means goal planning, and I’ve already been drafting up some goals. I’m actually loosening my goals for next year very intentionally. I feel like I have been overextending myself on goals and feeling like I don’t have enough time to do all the things I want. Things I want being: reading whatever BS pleases me, watching Japanese tv/youtube/movies without stressing about timing it, working out consistently, seeing friends and making new ones
So, this is a bit drafty still as I’m tumbling ideas about but:
Swedish
Work through a Swedish textbook, or combo of
I have 3 textbooks so I’m going to mix and match to see what clicks
Learn 5000 swedish words (note: I reset my anki deck, so I have quite the leg up on this goal)
Read my graded readers (4 in total)
Listen to 50 hours of Swedish content
Japanese
5k pages
I have this goal every year. It’s just my yearly minimum. I’m at ~8000 pages currently.
125 hours of audiobooks, don’t bother to track the rest of my listening
I noticed that I don’t want to watch tv shows/movies/youtube because ‘ugh I have to track it’. It’s worth noting that I often skip scenes, watch half an episode, 2/3 of video, etc. So tracking listening has always been less smooth than tracking pages. I feel like I naturally want to watch Japanese content, so tracking matters less for getting those hours in
20 hours of shadowing in Japanese
This seems tiny but I think I did zero this year soooo
Relearn how to handwrite 100 kanji
Again, focusing on small goals to leave room for other stuff
Learn 728 (2/day) names from the Japanese name deck
I’ll probably copy/paste this whenever someone puts up a goals thread (it was me last year but geez I get enough forum notifications now ) but I’m also still kind of tumbling thoughts around and comparing these language goals to my other goals and seeing if I am indeed scaling back enough to fit everything in
Decided I won’t finish 私が失敗した理由 this yeah since I’d be restarting it anyways, which makes my pages to finish before EOY slightly more reasonable. Unfortunately I have been on a Netflix binge so while my Japanese listening is surely improving, my page count to finish this month is barely decreasing. It doesn’t help that the reason some of these books have lingered is that they simply don’t hook me as much.
Also, today I picked up quite a few new books, which you’ll see in the Japanese physical media megathread. I already catalogued my digital collection, but I realized today while crosschecking to make sure I didn’t buy a book I already own that while a Google sheet “database” is lovely on my computer, it’s honestly clunky to use on mobile. I’ll take suggestions there if people have them. I’m fine porting my collection if needed, so long as I can have my custom searchable fields (ex: files backed up, notes, pdf included, etc).
In any case, I think the time may have come to consider cataloging my physical trove of books
I was just thinking recently that I don’t remember a lot of what I have. I’ve come close to double buying but haven’t quite, thankfully. If having a book cataloging group would help to get it done, that’d probably also get me to do it
I used bookmeter for that since they have an app that let’s you scan a barcode… major time saver… but you don’t get the custom fields for that… the only way to do that is through “tags” which basically put them on a virtual shelf that you can browse…
I would probably just integrate them into calibre, if I were you, since that’s where I catalogue my digital books and it’s customizable to within an inch of its life. (also, you can download meta data automatically, which is huge, imo)
I’ve sideloaded apps before but I have to be really thinking they’ll solve my problems (ex, I sideloaded Honto back when I bought books from them). I’m not convinced Bookmeter is going to do what I need it to
*to access your library on mobile/tablet, you have to have it running on your PC that is connected to the webs (it is then accessible via an URL) but calibre also has an export function giving you a CSV file with any data you wish to include.
**It won’t have a file in the background, but it will show up as an entry. You can scan the ISBNs and then just copy&dump them into it and then just have it fetch the relevant data. Tbh, I have not tried this with Japanese books, but it worked for English/German in the past.
So a friend pointed me to Notion databases (note: these are also basically spreadsheets) but they’re sooo much easier to search on mobile and I could import my existing spreadsheet quite easily. There is a simple ‘search’ field that I can use which works for all fields so I can find things by title or author without fiddling with the awkward individual column filters for Google sheets in mobile (it’s fine on desktop, but mobile… )
That crossed my mind as I have seen so many ppl migrate to notion for a lot of things but since I have never used it, I wasn’t sure how it actually works. I am getting left behind by the software… even the stuff we use at work, I am like… can we please just use folders and file names that make sense?
In all honesty, I have the app on my iPhone but it’s so sh**e that I use the webpage about 90% of the time.
For cataloguing, I have all my books in both bookmeter and Natively. On bookmeter I also have my wishlist and I use the stars to denote „only available physically“ to make my wishlisted books easier to search when I‘m in a bookstore. On Natively I use tags and comments for various things.
Recently a friend of mine told me about it, and he was super hyped about it. I have not (yet) caught that virus though
(I may have been a slightly odd child, tbf. 
) 
and adults not only have the vocabulary but often also the cultural and historical background information that might be needed to fully understand a work. Also, what can make a work really nice to read for an adult (flowery language, etc.), can be a nightmare for a learner. 
Or am I misremembering?
I’ve kind of fallen off doing it entirely 
