My decision to read both KD2 and Flying Witch was nuts. I thought Flying Witch would be easier because it was manga, but after beating my head against the gender-driven local dialect for what seemed like 1,000 pages, I realized I was in over my head and that was it.
Unfortunately, by that time I was well behind with KD2 and the busy season at work did not help. The book club thread became a spoiler minefield for me so I stopped participating. I hope to get back in the swing of things for story three.
posting a little early cos I’m with family and may not be able to post later
Story Two… complete! Congrats to everyone who finished it.
This week is our second break, so there’s no discussion thread.
We’ll be starting Story Three on the 30th of December.
If anyone is considering jumping in at this point, please do! The middle story was very short, so there’s still nearly half the book left to read together.
Just in case the description of my new methodology for tackling native material is helpful to someone else in this group, here’s an edited exerpt from my study log:
Hi Radish - so sorry I missed your ping, but I’ve been out of state for a while. Seems I have some catching up to do! At least this time I remembered to put WK on vacation mode before I lit out.
I don’t recall anyone else talking about either of the recommendation pages, but will take this opportunity to say if anyone’s skipped over them, give them a browse. His take on Three Little Pigs is great.
From now on, whenever I hear the expression “don’t judge a book by its cover”, I’ll immediately think of Capone.
I’ve put it down as being from page 100 to page 108, but the last page is actually part of a double-page spread with a tiny bit of handwritten text on page 109, so feel free to look at that too
I was also happy to see Kobutori Jiisan get a look in, although I’m not sure what “ポヨーン” is in Capone’s explanation. There is a cool animated version of this story available on Youtube (from 1929!) The second story on that page is another traditional folk tale - the Tongue Cut Sparrow. I feel the jokes land a little better if you know the original stories.
You’ll often find onomatopoeia in an adverb-like role, and it’s recognizable by the inclusion of the particle と. For example:
「ほっぺたが ポヨーンと 膨らんでいる」
This と is the quotation marker. His cheek is bulging with a “pyong” sound effect to describe it.
And with that, I now know why I’ve never had any success looking up how と turns certain words into an adverb, no matter how many times I’ve looked it up before. (And I’ve looked it up at least a few times in the past year.) This time I did a web search for “onomatopoeia” and “と” and came across this very informative post that covers it.
I’m still stuck somewhere in the second story I’m afraid. My cat sadly passed away a little over a week ago so for now I’m just trying to slow down my wanikani for a bit to not get swamped. I definitely want to finish the book but I’m going to do it at my own pace :).
My dog passed last month, and I also had a weepy week last week because of it and got behind; self care at times like these is important. Please have an empathy hug from a fellow pet parent
I hope to get back in the swing of things for story three. 
so for now I’m just trying to slow down my wanikani for a bit to not get swamped. I definitely want to finish the book but I’m going to do it at my own pace :).