しろくまカフェ Vol 1: Absolute Beginner Book Club

Life happens. But it really is a good feeling when you read every page to the end. The books I have actually completed have pride of place on my bookshelf! :books::grinning::+1:

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Is that a general Beginner BookClub doc, or is it specifically for しろくまカフェ?
Cause, if the anime is faithful enough (never read the manga myself, so I can’t say for sure), animelon has the transcripts with kanji/kana/romaji/english translation available. One could maybe try browsing through and add the stuff that is more likely to recur (and might not appear until later levels in WK)?

I’d be happy to help, and, yes the anime has 50 episodes, but we definitely wouldn’t need to cover that many (as there’s 50 ep and 5 volumes, perhaps 10 ep will cover it?).
Thought I’d mention it anyway in case anxious beginners like me people wanted to use the time between here and March to get some kind of preparation ^^

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My book came in today and I am super excited to start this. I may try reading it a little before the club actually starts to get a feel for difficulty and what I’ll need to do to keep up with the book club.

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T_T my book that said it was going to arrive by march 15th when i ordered it has just shipped and says it will arrive between march 15th and April 20th. ughhhhhhh.

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I feel your pain.
murgh

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I was about to come in here and make a big happy post about how my books just came, but then I read the posts from @mystcloud and @Naytrib… and now the troubles that I went through to get them seem like nothing.

Here they are

しろくまカフェ 1 bis; 黒ねこサンゴロウ 1: 旅のはじまり; ふしぎ駄菓子屋銭天堂; and Try! N3


I am happy to get them, and it took less than a week to ship to US from Amazon Japan.

The most troubling trouble that happened while I was getting the books was that my card info was stolen somewhere along the line and so it had to be blocked before the order had gone through. But luckily it was the very first attempted purchase that flagged the fraud protection service, so I didn’t lose any money. Besides, I was able to get a new card the same day and just change the payment info on my book order instead of having to place an entirely new one. Phew! Quite a hassle, but at least everything turned out ok in the end :sweat_smile:

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It‘s interesting how different the shipping time is from country to country. My last order arrived in only two days.

I just got my copy yesterday!



Dom Perignooooon or should I say ドンペリ風ウフフフフ?

The bear seems to enjoy the good stuff.

I’ll start working on the chapter 2 vocab. This might take a while…

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Then i will focus on chapter 3 vocab

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I already finished one but I kinda messed up with my bookmark and ended up doing chapter 6 :joy: which btw has a few of those crazy puns…

I’ll try to transfer it to the list later

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I was so unhappy with the size of the “biz” edition that today I popped into Book Off to see if they had any of the old editions on sale. Yep, got one for 241 yen! Perfect condition. Very happy! (Giving the tiny “biz” edition to a friend).

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One question though, what should I do about the する verbs, like: 朝起きする?

Do I just use the 朝起き or keep it as 朝起きする?

Since my confusion is pretty much clear out about what books to purchase, I’ve come to decide to buy both the old and new edition. It’ll be good for my books collection too :3 Hopefully, it’ll arrive on time!

I’ll be travelling to Osaka on the first week of March and will be back home exactly at the Start date of reading.

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I’d say. probably

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Yeah I’d keep it as it appears in the text ^^

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Ahhh, I was thinking that I would be at least a little into Genki by the time that this started, but I won’t be. I’ll probably lag behind it.

@Kazzeon @MissMisc: alright I’ll just keep it as is.

Chapter 2 and 6 are online, if someone can review the file at a later date I’ll be very thankful!

I don’t know when I’ll have another day off but I’ll try to do some more as I actually enjoy translating stuff.

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Keep doing your WK but if you’re going to read the book it’s best to get some grammar under your belt first between now and when we start. I would say that while it’s an absolute beginner book club, it’s not for absolute beginners to Japanese, it’s for those whose Japanese has got to the point they can start tackling their first books.

I’d suggest making sure you have your head around how to form the て form of verbs, and plain forms of verbs in past and non past, and in affirmative and negative. They will come up a lot! If you’ve reached that point in a textbook I think you’ll have enough of a foundation for joining in the reading and picking up the rest from the discussion. That’s about chapter 11 in Genki, or approaching JLPT N5.

For example take this part that VictorLino posted yesterday. The word 咲く has a WK level 48 kanji, which is not a problem as you can just look it up using the furigana. But if you don’t know basics like how to turn the dictionary form into the plain past 咲いた, then you are going to struggle. image

I’d also make sure you’ve got your head around katakana. That would certainly be a グッドアイディア…

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I agree with this! What’s on the list Marcus? Perhaps a photo of them sitting proudly on the bookshelf?

なぜどうして will be my first book completed in japanese in just a few weeks time!

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Yeah, so far the phrases haven’t been very complex. Just a lot of new (at least to me) vocabulary. But it’s definitely advised to at least know a little into how verbs conjugate, since that can change the whole meaning of the phrase.

Some of the katakana it’s straight up foreign words like アフロヘア(afro-hair), シャンパン(champagne) ,ポワーヨーガ (power yoga).

Some of it you would expect to come in hiragana but the Panda seems to think it’s cute to speak like that, so maybe it’s to add extra emphasis?

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