One of my New Year's Resolutions was to dive back into my Tobira textbook for a while. While I haven't picked up the textbook, I have finally started reading a book I have owned for a good 4 years or so. I bought the pink book below, when I first started becoming interested in the Japanese music scene. At the time (and arguably until today) one of the most well known artists was AKB48. I had watched some of their television shows and found them interesting, so I decided to buy this book thinking, hey, I know hiragana, katakana and about 200 kanji, I'm sure I can read a good part of this. Yeah, no. I got the book and immediately set it aside for the "future" where I would be "better" at Japanese and recognize more of the kanji.
I definitely recognize more kanji, but I've also forgotten a ton of them. So, despite these drawbacks, I decided to start reading it this week. It has been a very very very slow start. I feel like the second picture says it all....especially taking into account that it took me like 3 hours to get through the prologue. Jeez! Luckily the next page was not that bad and I actually got through it pretty quickly (pretty quickly being in about 1 hour and a 1/2). The third page was the easiest because it has words said by the members themselves. I find it a lot easier to read dialogue so that went by pretty fast. I'm really proud of myself for having at least started this and hope that by March I'll have 2 chapters done (this is my goal. It's kind of a sad goal, but if I reach it I will be super proud of myself. Never mind that each chapter is like 8 pages long >.<)