started reading 時をかける少女 | L24 because it’s been on my to read list for a while and it’s a short book.
And also because it fits neatly in my bingo card for the reading bingo challenge.
A lot of words that I’m used to seeing in kanji form are written in hiragana which trips me up a bit.
Ex-yakuza house husband MC. He & (most?) others speak Kansai-ben. Seemingly people are trying to drag him back into things, while he just wants to do his domestic life stuff. Yakuza isn’t generally something in interested in, but I figured I’d give it a try
Rereading 自転車屋さんの高橋くん 1 | L24 with the Speed Run Book Club over at WaniKani forums. There’s 6 of us rn. Feel free to join, if interested
I’ve only read the prologue, but was initially a bit thrown off by the very 朗らかな cover & inner illustrations. Cuz iirc (from a year ago), Vol 7 ended on some Drama… Which the prologue did eventually reference (but otherwise followed its normal pattern). I really hope the author isn’t going to just gloss over it. Cuz I’ve been really looking forward to it since like Book 4
Arrived earlier today. I grabbed it for ケロちゃん’s kansai-ben, but it will be nice to have finally read it. His speech is pretty こてこて 大阪弁 and of course a bit archaic (cuz 役割語 role speak). Overall besides a certain subplot, I’m looking forward to it. The handwriting is pretty hard for me though
Between the handwriting & the thick Kansai ben, I’m a little surprised it’s only L20.
That puts me up to:
Which would be pretty stressful, but they’re mostly “read a page or few a day, for the Kansai-ben”, and I just go with whichever ones I feel like on a given day. The point is to get Kansai immersion. Finishing anything is just a bonus 
I probably won’t make any progress on 灰と幻想のグリムガル level.17 いつか戦いの日にさらばと告げよう | L31 until I finish クラにか 8. Cuz competing LNs will stress me out. クラにか 2 is a book club read, and very towards the end - so that’s not a huge deal
Edit: was not expecting one of the characters in 今日はまだフツーになれない【イラスト特典付】 | L27 to be KY （空気読めへん）
I read it way way way way long ago and didn’t have trouble with it. Sometimes I didn’t know what Kero was saying, but it never caused severe comprehension issues for me.
fwiw, that handwriting feels very shojo (like young, RMC shojo) manga to me. For me, totally legible, but I also read a lot of RMC
Right… I was also able to fudge through the bit I read in 2024 (and the anime in 2023), but like at least in the first 30 or so pages, L20 seems fitting without taking into account the Kansai-ben. And since it’s a lower level manga, I’m inclined to see the Kansai-ben as relevant to the difficulty (with highs level material, I don’t consider it so much)
To be fair, my perspective is probly a bit biased by me being over-focused on Kansai-ben rn. So I may be missing the forest for the trees. Guess I’ll see how I feel at the end.
Totally. I just haven’t read too much like that, so it’s a little challenging for now. I’m sure I’ll get used to it by the end of the volume
tbf, ない->へん, いる->おる, and いい->ええ gets you pretty far. imo, it’s easier to read when you’re less used to it than listening too.
I still maintain that this manga plus anime is like 40% of my foundation in Kansai ben
Also あかん is useful.
And these would cover most of the rest of the 1st chapter
ってる→っとる
っていう→ちゅう
〜なきゃならない→〜なあかん
〜だ→や
〜ておく→〜とく
だから→さかい
〜やで→だよ
Though there’s also 〜ねん… But it’s semi-filler anyway, and can mostly be ignored.
Idk I vaguely feel like watching is the easier of the two… But I’d have to watch again to confirm. The main thing I remember from back then is こにゃにゃちはー
This is really just an extension of いる–>おる
I think this is pretty common in standard Japanese too.
True, but it’s not automatic/default in standard, and I don’t think you’d ever end up with 〜とく/どく in a sentence like this:
Finished サリバン家のお引越しクレギオン | L35 - still really like this series. This one starts off very slow, has some silly action sequences, some really dramatic action sequences, and just some nice science fiction. This book’s main sci-fi thing it’s exploring is an O’Neil cylinder space colony.
Starting 竜の姫ブリュンヒルド | L37?? - I gather that it wasn’t as well received as the first one but I still have high expectations, and read the first one long enough ago that I’m not directly comparing them. The stories don’t seem to be connected directly in any case.
As part of my “let’s finish the oldest things in my TBR” yearly goal (… since I just remembered it) I read 君に届け 1 | L23, the oldest manga in there.
I really enjoyed it, the main characters are really cute too. I knew the plot (?) from cultural osmosis, but it’s great to actually read it myself. The end kiiiinda makes me want to just keep going with the series, but there are so many other things I bought recently. Even though “manga do not count” when it comes to my 積読 pile, it still feels like a bad idea.
I read quite a bit more than usual the last two weeks due to having some free time. I’ll probably continue to read a bit more than before both because I’m in a groove and I think I’ll manage not to waste too much time with anime this season (I’m not even watching in Japanese/without subs).
I started reading the first 3 volumes of ひらやすみ | L22 back when it lost a BC on wanikani and now caught up with the latest volume. I like the series a lot and I added it to my favorites. The people on the cover are 18 and 29 years old, even though I first thought they looked like 8 and 9. I’m thinking how to describe what makes this series so great for me and different from other slice of life manga. I think it’s main strength is in depicting this large and diverse (in personality) cast. There is some drama, but it’s fairly slice of life and there to show off the characters rather than being moving. The series recently won the wankani BC, so you can start reading it with them soon.
I read モブ子の恋 22巻 | L21. This series just goes on and on with a fairly fast release schedule. I had no idea it would be this long when I started. These days I’m mostly staying for the side characters. Unfortunately volume 22 was one with a bigger focus on the main couple. (Is it awful if I started this because I thought the shy and self-conscious protagonist was cute, and now that she is all confident, she is less interesting to me?).
I read であいもん 10 | L29. A 和菓子 story set in 京都 (and yes, there is kansai ben). I complained about the image quality and dialect in this before. Plus, I realized I don’t find all the talk about 和菓子 interesting at all. Volume 10 finally proceeded the plot though (it basically finally finished what was set up in the first volume). It was moving and quite nice and gave me motivation again to read this series. Unfortunately volume 11 has lots of 和菓子-nonsense again.
I’m currently reading volume 21 of 本好きの下剋上 (the ultimate volume of the penultimate part IV). I was quite surprised to reach the “Epilogue” at only a little over half of the book. There are a lot of extra stories in this one. It was a quite nice ending of part IV. Finishing this will complete one of my goals for 2025, and that’s probably going to be the only goal I’ll actually finish.
Finished 付き合ってあげてもいいかな 3 | L24. I thought the end was promising in therms of interesting developments: Miwako meets her high school crush again.
Wow, no kidding. Seems like an interesting series from the rest of your description
Thank you for the reminder 
I also thought they looked really young from the cover, but I liked what I saw from the preview I read a while back. I’m excited to start reading it with the book club now that they picked it.
I picked up 女装してめんどくさい事になってるネクラとヤンキーの両片想い 2 | L24 on a bit of a whim tonight, and oh my goodness I’d forgotten how cute the series was! It’s a shame the newer volumes don’t seem to be as good, judging from @Naphthalene’s ratings/comments?
I keep on meaning to get back to that one, but I only have the first two so it would require me to buy more, and I’m trying not to buy more
Yes, it’s a shame and I don’t know how much is due to editorial pressure, but it is frustrating. Basically, (spoiler, since I mention what isn’t happening) in a story that involves a multitude of trans feminine people (including one who presents fem 24/7), there’s 0 trans women, and the option to transition itself isn’t even mentioned. It creates a lot of completely incomprehensible problems for the plot, while you could have just as much drama (in a more realistic way) by having the character(s) directly question their gender instead.
I am reading ミモザの告白 | L28 which is about a trans girl. Since I am interested in how trans people feel about it, I am also watching a review from a trans woman about how she feels about this book. She is quoting from the official English translation and I am watching it as I go along the book.
There was one scene where the translation really surprised me as that was not how I read the tone of the original Japanese scene at all. In case anyone is interested (mild spoilers ahead, it’s from the middle of the book):
顔も性格もいい幼馴染が、俺のために絆創膏を貼ってくれる。こんなの、相手が女の子なら一瞬で恋に落ちるイベントだ。でも、汐は男なのだ。正確には、汐の身体が。その理想と現実のギャップに、俺は落ち込んでしまった。
心の中で嘆く。どうして神様は、男の身体に汐の心を割り当てたのだろう。心と性別さえ合っていたら、誰も悩まずに済んだのに。それとも、病気みたいなものだと思って、諦めるしかないのだろうか。
She was attractive. She had a great personality. She was a good friend
whom I had a ton of history with, and she liked me. And if she weren’t biologically male, I very well might have fallen for her right then and there when she wrapped that bandage around my finger. But despite being her friend and supporting her transition, I just couldn’t mentally bridge that gap between what she’d been born as and what she identified as. And that was a really, really depressing realization to me.
All I could do was lament the sad reality of it all. I deplored whatever
divine creator had seen fit to put Ushio in a body she didn’t belong in. If only her sex and gender were aligned, there’d be no reason for her to have to struggle so hard to come to terms with her identity. Or worse-to try to convince herself that it was an illness or mental deficiency, and she just needed to “let it go.”
Especially “Or worse-to try to convince herself that it was an illness or mental deficiency, and she just needed to “let it go.”” is not how I read “それとも、病気みたいなものだと思って、諦めるしかないのだろうか。” at all. I never had the feeling he took her perspective at all. But maybe my Japanese is not good enough to grasp that.
“But despite being her friend and supporting her transition” feels made up and not fitting the original tone of the scene, in my opinion. The author doesn’t like to use words like ‘transition’ (as he thinks those are a bit specialized terms and he wanted to keep the story as accessible as possible) and explains this in the afterword which is also translated, so I wonder why it was decided to put it in here after all. Additionally, he wasn’t very supportive of her until this point, so it makes even less sense to put it here.
神様 becoming “divine creator” also stood out to me as odd. I am not a native English speaker, so it might sound less weird for natives, but I thought that was a very odd word choice and it would’ve confused me. I feel like the translation is a bit more grand and the Japanese original is more concise and I prefer it.
What was especially different to me is how the translation made the narrator talk about the perspective of his trans friend, while I feel like in the original Japanese he is just lamenting his own “suffering” of having a cool, beautiful friend who he could date if she was just born a girl (his words, not mine), which is (in my interpretation) in his perspective a bad and egoistical thing which he also comments on being a bad feeling.
" 風を切りながら、汐の部屋で抱いた感情を掘り下げる。すると
つまり俺は、残念がっていたのだ。
汐が本当に女の子ならよかったのに──そう考えてしまった。"
That’s why I find it strange to take her perspective and her suffering in his monologue. But then again, I might just read the text wrong because I am just a learner and I find especially reading tone and emotions still very hard in Japanese. If anyone else wants to comment I’d be very interested as to how other people interpret the scene!
I have that on my shortlist right now… I’ll have to try and remember to come back to this comment when I get tnere…
He is saying 誰も, so everyone is involved including her, but I agree that it’s not just her, which the translation says.
There’s also no “or worse” in there.
And it’s not even there in the original 
I agree that the translation is not the most accurate.
It’s a LN?? That’s an unexpected topic for that. Wishlisted!
