夜カフェ ☕ Home Thread (Beginner Book Club)

Hey everyone! I’ll be joining y’all a bit late in this book club (first time reading in a book club!) I’ll try to catch up as fast as I can to everyone!

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Best of luck then, and you’re welcome to join at any time!

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Short reminder: It’s week 3! <3
There will be no new thread this week, because we have chapter based threads and we are continuing chapter 2!

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Joining in late but, hopefully I could catch up soon! Finally found a reading practice material that’s fairly easy but not too outside my demographic. 頑張れ皆さん!!

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Just started today and I’m on page 13 now.

This is like my first time reading something that’s not just an isolated sentence example and dedicating to it(lol). I kinda speedrun through the ‘reading’ of it and not necessarily paying attention to the meaning. But I’m definitely going to reread it again slower alongside a dictionary to catch the story before moving on to the second chapter.

I’m still trying to map out the grammar that I’ve learned to sentences with a looser form (than the ones in textbooks). From what I can gather it’s a story about our main girl 花美 who’s just started her first year in a private middle school after failing the other school test. She’s a bit of a lonely girl, was bullied in the past and now trying to become a new person.

Let me know if I got it right or wrong :durtle_megane:. And tell how were you guy’s experience on reading your first real reading material?

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Chapter 3 thread is up!

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Ah, didn’t see your comment until now. Yeah that’s the gist of it up to that point (Not sure if it should be hidden as a spoiler though lol).

I have read manga before but the “wall” of dense text here is definitely a different experience. But so far it’s been quite fun and interesting, and I feel like I’m making more overall progress this time around.

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Yes that’s roughly right - however she actually has to go to the local public middle school.

To get more feedback on people’s thoughts and bits they were struggling on, have a look at the weekly threads linked to at the top.

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Ah whoops my bad lol. I also realized I posted this on the wrong forum too XD. I had this thread and the first chapter thread opened at the same time. Also reading vertically is also unexpectedly challenging.

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Yeah I got that mixed up lol. I reread it with the help of a dictionary recently.

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Chapter 4 Thread is up! :coffee:

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Ran this one literally down to the wire, but Chapter 5 vocab has been cleaned up and roughly numbered, should somebody with a physical copy want to double-check that work. I’ll have some free time at my appointment tomorrow (4 hours, so plenty of time to kill), so I’ll likely try and go through Chapter 6 then. If not, I’ll certainly have it done by Sunday. This is my first non-busy weekend in a while, so finally feeling like I’m not just barely keeping up with all my reading commitments. :sweat_smile:

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Ha, considering I’m still trying to finish up chapter 4, you’re doing fine trust me XD

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Chapter 5 thread is up:

(and I haven’t finished chapter 4 yet, oh no~)

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I wasn’t able to get to the Chapter 6 vocab sheet last weekend after all, but I did the usual clean-up today, hopefully before too many folks started reading the chapter!

Couple of notes:

First, I fully expect the page numbers to be a bit more off this time. There were a number of words that could belong to either a final line or a starting line of a page, and I just sort of had to guess which one to put it on. In addition to that, anytime there are illustration inserts, the numbers can get a little wacky to begin with, let alone when there’s two back-to-back as in this week’s chapter. Somebody with a physical copy should definitely line the page numbers up properly this week. :sweat_smile:

Second, this is the final week where the vocabulary was provided in advance! So now the real fun begins regarding vocab. I doubt if I’ll be able to pre-read enough to create as thorough of a sheet as there has been up till now, but I’ll do what I can. Regardless, from here on out, I wanted to prepare everyone (especially for those who may be new to the book clubs) to be aware that the sheets will likely start out each week a little sparse from here on out until more people do their readings and contribute to them!

For those who do begin to contribute now that the sheet isn’t pre-filled (thanks again to @Hantsuki for all of their hard work on this!), this is just a refresher of the basic tenets of keeping the sheet as usable as possible:

  • Try and keep the definition as narrowed to the text as possible, using definitions which fit the provided column length, and are preferably from a JP>EN dictionary such as Jisho or something equivalent. This just keeps things consistent and easy to reference
  • Use only dictionary forms for verbs and not their conjugations. At most, make a quick note about a conjugation form in the Notes column for the word
  • Only add a word if you are sure of the definition; if you are unsure about a word, post about it in the discussion thread
  • When copying and pasting unformatted text, make sure to double-click into the cells to paste the text; this way it doesn’t mess with the sheet’s formatting
  • If a word shows up without kanji in the text, it is best to put the kanji form of the word in the Notes column instead of the Kanji column; this just makes quicker look-ups easier, since if there is kanji in the kanji column, it will generally be assumed that the kanji is in the text, so a word could easily get looked over as a result of that

Pretty much all of this information is in the Guidelines page on the vocabulary sheet, but I figure posting a quick reminder wouldn’t be amiss! My deepest thanks to everyone who contributes to the vocabulary sheet! :grin:

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Sorry, I’m later than usual, buuut, here we go:

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No worries :smiley: We’re all busy sometimes lol. Thanks for setting up the thread

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Chapter 7 thread is up:

There won’t be a new thread next week as we have a break week for catching up :slight_smile:

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I have filled out vocab for chapter 8. Of course, if there are other words people want to add, they should definitely feel free to do so! :grin:

I’ve also done the page numbers for all words I added, but as always, somebody with a physical copy should double-check those, especially for any words that sit on the border of pages. I would have done the Kindle %, but my percentage is never consistent on there for some reason. If I flip back and forth between pages, it’s like it gets stuck on a number, then suddenly jumps again, so I didn’t bother because I don’t trust it to be accurate in any way.

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I read ahead today and added some vocab for ch 9-11, though it’s just most of what I had to look up and was reasonably certain hadn’t shown up earlier in the book, as well as all the new names, so there’s certainly going to be vocab items I passed over that others may want to add when we get to those chapters. I have the physical copy so those page numbers are accurate. I can’t promise that I’ll double-check the ch 8 page numbers, but I will if I remember and have the spoons to.

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