Last Saturday I finished vol. 1 of ５等分の花嫁 and wanted to try and finish vol. 2 in one week (workload of about 30 pages per day). I ended up stuck at work very late last night with a lot of downtime between tasks, so I ended up reading 100 (manga) pages in just one day. I’m on to vol. 3 now, so I only have a few more chapters before I’m caught up with the anime.

It’s novel for me to be reading ahead — so far it’s always been the case that I watch the show first (which occasionally makes me wonder if I’m actually comprehending the text or just remembering what happened). I picked up a new grammar point, which was pretty fun (ずとも, “without even doing” from N1). I basically crammed all the grammar points up to N3 and then started reading, so I don’t often run into new ones.

I’m also “discovering” fewer new words that I have to look up; those 100 pages only produced 25 new vocab flash cards. Not to say that I knew every single word except for those 25, just that I’m having to look up fewer and fewer words in order to grasp the meaning of a given sentence. Feels like progress.