The End of an Adventure (Tadoku 2011, Round 4 & Overall, Postmortem)

It’s late, I’m tired, and my brother’s playing the xylophone or some other high-pitched bell-like musical contraption. Conclusion: write a blog post.

The contest is over. It’s been a year of super intense reading, pushing myself to places I never thought I could go. There have been surprises, and there have been disappointments. But most of all, there’s been growth, and a hell of a lot of fun. I’ve read things, comfortably, I would have thought far out of my reach this time a year ago. And I’ve enjoyed doing it.

I’ve been saying this every round. Reading improves your language skills. And I don’t just have the numbers anymore. I went to Japan. I spoke Japanese with real native speakers. I ordered food and navigated the railway system and spent like $300 on anime/video game paraphernalia at Comiket. In Japanese. It’s not just statistics anymore. It’s the real deal. And I made it out of there alive. (Maybe a little traumatized by the times I got stuck, but that’s just a part of the process, eh?)

tl;dr: It works. Do it.

A little bit about this round: it was my lowest-scoring round this year, but I still pulled sixth. A little over 2700 pages in total, 45% of which came from books. I said I wanted to focus on reading books before the round started, and I think I did a decent job there. The games still tempted me, claiming around 33% of my score, but hey, a little variety’s not a bad thing. In the end, I accomplished my goal–to a degree. I improved my speed reading text dense in prose and narration, and I believe I’m also solidifying my ability to see the things being described, like I would reading a book in English.

I have a large stack of books I’m now working my way through, and hopefully I will be able to maintain some of the contest momentum.

This round’s reading list:

• Light Novels
• ダンガンロンパ／ゼロ（上） (256 pages)
  
• 変愛サイケデリック (301 pages)
• 扉の外 II (334 pages)
• サクラダリセット (312 pages)
• 扉の外III (37 / 324 pages)
• Manga
• 涼風 (Vol. 7-9 — I finally finished it!)
• Soul Eater (Vol. 20)
• Weekly stuff
• Games
• code_18 (PSP — didn’t get very far; kind of dull as hell)
• God of War: Chains of Olympus & Ghost of Sparta (PS3)
• Fate/stay night (PC, with added voices — a little through Day 3 of the Fate route)
• Some miscellaneous stuff

This round’s surprise victory goes to 変愛サイケデリック, which managed to be endlessly entertaining on top of being the perfect level of difficulty to challenge me and push me to the next level of comprehension. I will be buying the sequel as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

Anyway, I think that covers everything.

…

Oh yeah, I creamed the master ranking. (*´∀｀)

UPDATE: Using Your E-Reader for Evil

Back when I wrote the original Using Your E-Reader for Evil post, I mentioned how the PDFs 青P outputs don’t match the aspect ratio of the nook or other e-readers, which results in there being a whole lot of unused space. Well, in preparation for the coming round of Tadoku, I decided to take another crack at overcoming that issue, and I’ve come up with what I believe to be a fairly satisfying solution.

The Beginning of the End (Tadoku 2011, Round 4: Prologue)

Where the hell has all my time gone? Seriously. How is it already time for another round of the contest? I don’t feel like I’ve done enough to justify the amount of time that has passed, but at the same time I feel like I’m working my ass off (more on that some other day).

Well, since we’re here, I guess I’ll follow tradition and make a short post about what I want to read this round:

第一敗者の憂鬱 (Tadoku 2011, Round 3: Picking up the Pieces)

You win some you― Wait, no you don't.

The final day of the third round was full of surprises. I went to bed on the 30th feeling secure in my rank, but not quite ready to let go of my momentum. It was to be my eighth day playing Ever17, and―if things went according to plan―I was to be moving into the final route as the curtains fell on the contest.

I went to bed with about a 1300 page lead… and I woke up trailing behind by about 1500 pages. So that was a surprise. But what can you do? My highest score for a single day this round was 438 pages, and my highest score in a single day ever is 504 pages (from the second round). For as much as my competitive spirit hated losing my upper hand so close to the end with no hope of taking it back, I stuck with my original plan of attack and pushed through Ever17 as hard as I could. Because, really, that was the more important thing to worry about: reading Japanese like a monster.

Reinvigoration, Reexamination, and Rewrite: Redux (Review 編)

I wanted to post this with my Tadoku 2011, Round 3 Halftime Report, but I hadn’t finished the game yet, so I branched it off into a separate post.

Rewrite was a unique experience for me. If you count each episode of Umineko as separate games, Rewrite is probably the longest single text I have read in any language. It took me just short of a month to complete (June 27 – July 20), spending upwards of ten hours every day reading. This shows I’m obviously not at a fluent reading level (or speed), but it certainly shows progress.

As a story, Rewrite has a lot of ups and downs. Because of how long it is, and how much variation there tended to be in my opinions of the routes, I needed a place to organize my thoughts, as I was going. And from that spawned this review.

Reinvigoration, Reexamination, and Rewrite (Tadoku 2011, Round 3 Halftime Report)

I bet you didn’t see that one coming.

Yeah, well neither did I.

Self-Preservation and Self-Mutilation (Tadoku 2011, Round 3)

The third round of Tadoku 2011 is just around the corner, so I thought I’d drop in with a list of things I plan to read and my overall expectations for the contest–since that’s pretty much all I ever do on this blog. (Actually, the real reason I’m making this post is so LordSilent doesn’t wring my neck. He’s been threatening everyone for the past few days, trying to get reading lists.)