In my last report I had just started reading vol. 3 of ５花嫁, and now I’m about 40% through vol. 4. The original plan was to have finished vol. 4 by today, but this week has been rough between work and feeling unwell at home, so the fact that I’ve managed to make time for at least some reading on top of my baseline vocab/grammar reviews feels like a victory. Hoping I can do better this coming week.

My strategy of only looking up words when I wouldn’t understand the scene otherwise continues to be pretty effective, though I did get tripped up by some bad assumptions a couple of times this week: 隠し味 is “secret ingredient”, not something to hide bad flavors; and 仲たがい means breaking up, not making up. Fortunately in both of these cases it didn’t take long for me to realize my mistake, and now both of those words are pretty firmly embedded in my memory. I don’t think I even ended up making flashcards for either of them…I’ve actually been making fewer cards lately because a lot of the words I’m coming across are repeated in the book itself, which ends up reinforcing them naturally instead of out-of-context.