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

Yeah, when you buy from ebookjapan (the new yahoo one), it should give you an option to download the windows reader. However, finding the download page is a big pain. There’s a link here.

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I guess I missed the option.
Thank you for the link as well!

I’m joining in late as well! :smile_cat:

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Hey, so, I am new to all of this. My books will be tomorrow and very excited to start “reading”.

Are there two “absolute beginner book clubs” for the same book? Or is this the only one?

There’s an master “Absolute Beginner Book Club” thread, which just holds information about the book club as a whole. That thread is at Absolute Beginners Book Club // Now reading: Hunter × Hunter

Then there’s an individual thread for each book that is read, both current and past. This is the thread for the current one. The other ones (for past clubs) are linked in the master thread.

There are also individual weekly threads. This current club has them, though past ones did not. The current one is しろくまカフェ: Week 2 Discussion (Chapters 3 and 4), for chapters 3 and 4, though a new thread should be going up soon for this next week, for chapters 5 and 6.

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Oops, thanks for reminding me about that, I’ll need to make it today:DDD

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Wow this book club has the most brutal attrition I’ve ever seen. More than 400 said they’d join, but as of last week only 35 were still in. That’s more than 90% of the people gone!!

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Brutal in terms of raw numbers or in terms of percentage? Because 90% seems kinda fair.

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Both, actually. It’s technically 93% attrition, 485 → 35
I mean, obviously, the initial number is probably crazy inflated by all the people who just click join without thinking, but still.

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This is my first book club so I didn’t really know what to expect. But 500 people did seemed like an inflated number. I guess it’s probably because it’s tougher than most people expected :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

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It’s especially unfortunate to see such a big drop because this comic makes for a good first experience, so long as one doesn’t spend time learning all the vocabulary from the puns. (If they’re important words, they’ll be seen again in future reading.)

I find the week to week numbers to be of interest. Not everyone reading will vote each week, but we can see a drop-off from 75 people in week one (either reading along or planning to catch up) down to 45 in week two. The variance may represent the number of people who gave it a shot, but either found they didn’t have the time necessary, or they felt they are not ready for reading yet.

The number of voters still reading has slowly dropped to 34 last week.

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I’m behind by 2 weeks and haven’t voted this time.

When I do manage to catch up I read through the threads and the grammar explanations.
My Japanese is so so low that I can’t contribute anything to the grammar explanations.
It’s hard to just contribute commentary on the book too seeing as there’s not that much going on. I really enjoy them but hard to find something to say!

Maybe others have a similar situation :frowning:

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Asking questions contributes too. Maybe someone else was wondering the same. Maybe the person who puts themself forward to answer your question suddenly discovers they skipped over that speech bubble without paying close attention to the grammar, and your question was exactly the kick in the pants they needed to go learn something new.

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yeah, i had to quit too. i’m way to slow and i have to look up literally everything :sweat_smile: this kinda takes away the enjoyment for me. i give this book club another chance when shirokuma is done. maybe the next one will be easier. especially the discussions about the misunderstood vocab in shirokuma is to much for me. i would probably have liked chi’s sweet home much more.

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I slacked off the bast two weeks, for me it wasn’t that the manga is hard but i feel like i don’t really learn anything. I said that before, but after I read Yotsubato i felt like i learn more from it than from Shirokuma
And yeah another reason are the puns, I’m not a big fan of those

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I don’t know why you’re deleting your reply but i want to respond to you. No need to worry about vocabulary at all, don’t even consider it a measurement for how hard a book can be. If you understand the grammar and have a book in hand then you’re ~70% good to go
This is how we learn vocabulary normally, we encounter them in the wild not in an SRS system

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I dropped off reading this manga for several reasons. First of all, I found the contents not to be too interesting (a few guys hanging out with each other, so what), and the language was either very casual (which I still find hard to understand) or it switched to the puns which came across for me like a Sesame Street-style difficult-word-explanation/tell-apart thing for children (which can be really nice in principle, but I found the words to not be too useful for my current language level).

Maybe I would have stayed if only for the discussions, but somehow the discussions (who were crazy cool for the first week) pretty much died down after a while (interestingly at the same time when the page-by-page translations were started - I wonder if there is a coincidence).

And then, there are two other books that need my attention (one of which I’m badly lagging behind…) so it was easy for me to drop this one.

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I just haven’t been able to find the books other than from sellers that say shipping is like 2 months :'(.

I did find Azumanga Daioh and Yotsuba while in Japan so now I have too much to read.

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I’ve been wondering about this, too. People might not be asking questions because they’re already answered with the full translations and/or waiting for the translations rather than asking questions in the first place.

I enjoy doing the translations, and they definitely help me learn quite a bit (researching things, people correcting me and seeing others’ translations), but if they’re killing almost all discussion, maybe they’re not worth it?

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That… would make a lot of sense? I think that might be what’s happening? I mean, I find the translation breakdowns useful, but also the only discussion seems to be when there’s some confusion about something in them.