Playlist for the book club 
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Week 3 is live, we read chapter 2!
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Week 4 is live, we read Chapter 3!
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So, as we are already nearing the end of volume 1 (last chapter will already be at the end of next week!) I want to ask now if there is an interest in continuing reading the series together, if yes when do we start and what is the pace 
all polls are anonymous!
Are you interested in continuing to read this manga in an offshoot club?
- Yes
- Maybe
- No
0
voters
If yes, do we have a break before starting volume 2?
- Yes, start date is June 8th
- No, start date is June 1st
0
voters
If yes to the first poll, what pace would you prefer?
- We continue reading one chapter per week, it takes around 6 weeks to read a volume
- We read two chapters per week, it takes around 3 weeks to read a volume
- No preference
0
voters
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Reading a manga as part of the club at such a brisk yet manageable pace is a nice treat (though this might be influenced by atelier’s relatively easy difficulty)
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Yeah I complained about the pace earlier but now that we read one chapter at a time it’s pretty nice. It’s like watching a TV show before Netflix!
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Week 5 is up! we read chapter 4
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Great, the poll for the start date ended in a tie 
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June 8th was ahead by one vote a couple hours before the end. I hadn’t voted on that poll by that time. Make of that what you will.
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Is it because you like to watch the world burn me being in distress? 
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Just go with June 8th. Better safe than sorry.
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Was thinking that too. At least people who need it have time to catch up
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Week 6 is live! We finish volume 1 
Next week there will be a break. The week after that we will start Volume 2 I will post the thread for Volume 2 some time next week, it will be only one thread per volume for とんがり帽子のアトリエ from then on. I’m planning on following the format of Shadow’s House like this for the weekly posts, so if you have wishes for something different let me know
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Just enough time for anyone barely keeping up with a one-chapter-per-week pace to start cramming unknown vocabulary from the next volume.
Disclaimer: Learning vocabulary from volume-specific frequency lists always carries the risk of out-of-context spoilers.
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You’re a hero, thanks! 
Prepping for volume 1 from the frequency lists on your site definitely made it more enjoyable to read, and although I was thinking of waiting to continue the series… that cliffhanger means I can’t help coming back for more. So… let’s get some vocab and kanji cramming going!
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For anyone wondering about a reference point of what x % known words on manga kotoba feels like...
This will be subjective, but - for Vol 1 I achieved a 67% coverage in the end. Before the club started I was around 57%. To reach the 67% I targeted 19 new kanji and related vocab (for me this covered almost all vocab appearing 6+ times and kanji appearing 7+ times) Reading on paper would have been too much of a pain at this level (lots of words at the 1-5 frequency! ). For the scenes with more daily use vocab, I could get into a flow with reading and have few lookups. But the more descriptive or fantasy style scenes were tougher and I leaned a lot more on the digital lookups.
Looking at the volume 2 data that is up now, I start this volume at 61% words known (yay! Better than my 57% last time). To get a similar coverage as last time (all 6+ frequency words etc), I’ll target 18 kanji and their vocabulary. (1 less than last time). Pretty small progress, but progress!
There’s only a couple words at the target frequency that I’m not convinced are useful, I’ll wait for those to come up and decide. I did that for volume 1 as well, for example, 陣 - I didn’t end up studying that for volume 1 even though it’s high frequency because I don’t come across it anywhere else and it was so easy to recognise in 魔方陣 and the discussions around how magic works. So I’m not tracking that as known on manga kotoba, but for the purposes of reading Tongari, I recognise it in context. There are a lot of kanji and words like that where I kinda know them.
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That’s interesting! When you talk about coverage do you mean specifically words that you have studied in your SRS applications? Because surely now that you have read through the first volume your practical understanding of its contents is probably much higher than 67%, right?
As an aside I can see many instances of what I was talking earlier with the lexing: ため and ために are considered separate entries, ことができる or 今のうち are not broken apart, 風邪をひく and 風邪を引く are treated like different words as are 長, 長い and 長い間.
The concept of what a “word” is in Japanese can be elusive…
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For this situation specifically, I opted to keep them separate because someone might know 風邪をひく, but not know the kanji 引. This allows one to track only words they can read without furigana.
Sometimes Ichiran breaks a kanji off from a word, and I’ve been meaning to look into whether I want to just suppress them on the site.
For me personally, reading through a volume alone (no SRS) helps me acquire about 0 to 2 new words. I always hope I’m an outlier and others are absorbing new words as they go!
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To be clear that wasn’t meant as a critique necessarily, your rationale is perfectly reasonable, I was just pointing out that there’s a significant amount of subjectivity and arbitrariness in how the boundary of individual words is decided which, in my experience, make all programmatic handling of vocab list a bit janky on the edges.
If they only appear once or twice then I can’t usually remember, but if they come back often I’ll end up remembering them eventually, at least in context. For instance I didn’t know 弟子 before starting this book club but it appeared a bunch here (and also appeared in Frieren which I read at the same time) so I remember it now without having to go through SRS (and even though it has a very irregular reading!).
I also find that it’s a lot easier for me to remember vocab written in kanji than kana vocab, and especially onomatopoeic kana vocab…
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Same and then I had it show up in my visual novel too! Loving it when it happens.
In my visual novel it was even question of a 愛弟子 (reading:まなでし meaning: favorite pupil), I wonder who is Quifrey’s 
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