I haven’t read it myself, but it seems like something you could tackle, with very minor difficulty (the stuff you’d be reading to learn/reinforce), at about an N5 level of grammar; that’s roughly what’s covered in Genki I or any other first-year textbook.
If you’ve never touched Japanese outside of WaniKani, you might struggle, but if you know the structure of basic sentences and have some vocab picked up from other sources, you should be able to learn alongside everyone else. If nothing else, you’ll at least have a fun, easy book on hand and a rich question-and-answer thread (in mostly page-number order) to follow along with when you’re ready.
I’ll add too that someone’s WaniKani level isn’t necessarily a reflection of their overall progress in learning Japanese. Some of us who are fairly far along in WK are still very much beginners when it comes to grammar and speaking.
So don’t let that intimidate you. If the book ends up being too hard for you right now, you may struggle, but you certainly won’t be alone.
Got my copy today after only 5 days (3 business days). It travelled all the way from Osaka, Japan to Toronto, Canada in that time. Thanks to Amazon.co.jp and DHL! It’s in perfect condition and the full-colour pages look really nice. I usually get eBooks, but this book makes great use of paper.
I got mine today! I bought all 5 books (2 with cats, 3 with dogs - I do hope we’ll do them all!)
Wow they are beautiful! So nice and big, and much thicker than I thought!
But also nice big text and nice illustrations. <3
I was surprised to find 6 books, turns out my Pokemon manga (about how pokemon was first created) is actually a hard back book too! =D
I expected a typical takubon size
I’ll be trying my hand at reading Satoshi Tajiri on my own along side the other reading groups =P
Oh bummer. Just checked and it says my copy shipped on June 12 and will arrive between July 19-August 15 and has no tracking info. I don’t know if I wasn’t paying enough attention when I ordered or what. Guess I’ll catch up with the discussion when I can… On the bright side, I paid half of what it’s selling for now, so, yay?
I just wanted to mention I received my copy just yesterday when it has a received date of Jul 18 - Aug 14. I have a good feeling yours should be coming in soon!!!
Hi everyone,
I’ll join you too, if you’ll have me.
And yay I did it: Got my PayPal setup in time to grab a copy from bookwalker today.
I hit WK lvl 3 yesterday and have zero reading experience outside textbooks (this is my first book club ever too), so please be gentle if I start struggling in the first sentence, but I’ve been following this thread and am highly motivated by all the kind words said already and all of you joining too
Let’s have lots of fun reading this
Title breakdown spoiler-blurred below, in case anyone wants to try to parse it for themselves before checking.
全国 nation-wide (full-country)
学校 school
図書館 library
協議会 council (I’m guessing from what I’ve learned and how 会 tends to tie concepts together into an event or group of people; I’ve never seen this vocab before : cooperation, deliberation, meeting)
選定 selection, like a curated choice
It looks like it’s part of a list some council, maybe a schoolboard, approved for school libraries.
It’s really rare, in anything I’ve read, to see a long string of kanji like this unless it’s some sort of official name. You won’t be running into stuff that intimidating, or grammar-free, very often.
I’ve got notifications turned on and I’m in the middle of a hurry-up-and-wait cycle at work at the moment, so…
And, yeah, where there’s no kana in a sentence, it weirds me out, too. But I recently realised just how effective WK, daily example sentence practice, and reading have been when my brain finally stopped refusing to try to read stuff like that and it turned out to really not be too hard to spot the word boundaries. Kana-soup is still problematic, though.
However, for the first year, had I seen a block like that, I’d have just looked for something easier to read, the same way I tried to avoid anything longer than one sentence when starting out before reading my first volume of manga. It can be a tough hurdle to overcome, but it’s amazing how much less daunting it becomes the more you work through native material.
