For an idea of the difficulty, go to the BookWalker listing and click on the image for a preview. As a club we’ll be putting together a vocabulary list as we go and answering each other’s questions, and we’ll read just a few pages each week.
Schedule & Discussion Thread Links
We will take a one-week break between each of the three stories.
This sounds so awesome:0 What do you think, what WK level will be needed approximately (i know you can always look up things and there is no boundary but still…)? It doesn’t look like too much, but then again I don’t really know enough to assess.
(“reach lvl x before april so you can participate” is a really good type of goal i you think about it xD)
Oh… well I guess there goes my plan finishing it with the book club before I head off to Japan
takes a look inside the book for the first time
Hmmm… I don’t notice that much of a difference but yeah, maybe a bit more text dense. So I think the “slower reading pace” is warranted (and of course always a plus for new readers or busy people!)
But hey, I’m pleasently surpised by the artwork! Just judging from the covers, I thought, I might not like it as much as the artwork in the kitty books but it’s really beautiful and cute!
Edit: Too bad that the even the black/white artworks seem to be actually colored ones turned black & white now I would love to see them in color!
To be somewhat unhelpful, your grammar knowledge is more important than WaniKani level this book doesn’t use too many kanji, and where it does there will be furigana so you can still look words up easily.
The kanji it does use probably don’t align particularly nicely with WaniKani level either that said, better kanji recognition will definitely increase your comprehension speed, so learning as many as possible isn’t a bad idea.
What kind of grammar knowledge do you have?
I did a comparison across seven pages, and it’s a surprising difference. The standard page has more text, but there also aren’t really any of those pages we got in Kitty Detectives which just had one or two sentences on - those really helped to lighten the overall weekly load, I think.
I agonised a lot over the pace so I’d definitely appreciate feedback as we go. It’s possible people will be able to manage more dense pages better than they can manage lots of pages… But then again each page might feel more like a mountain.
If you follow the Amazon link in the OP, you can have a look at some of the pages to get an idea of difficulty. An understanding of basic sentence structure and particle use would be a minimum for this to not be a version of purgatory, I would say.
I’ll refer you back to Radish8’s comments then, adding that WK vocab is aimed at reinforcing the kanji, not as being the most common vocab in daily use.
That said, since the reading schedule stretches over 24 weeks (including breaks) you will probably progress a fair bit in WK as we go. I know there were several pages in the last book where I thought, ‘Hey, I just learned that kanji / kanji-combo yesterday!’
If it’s your first time reading a book in Japanese and you don’t have much grammar knowledge yet, I’d rather recommend the book the absolute beginner book club is currently reading. I think the grammar is simpler compared to the Kitty books (and I’d assume the Doggie books are similar). It’s geared at 2nd year elementary school kids and according to this chart you’ll probably know all kanji in there by level 18 and more than 50% by level 6.
Btw, for vocab, the book clubs usually provide a handy vocab sheet.
@Chaly, I don’t have a good sense of how different grammar resources compare, but I’d say that if you’d finished Genki 1 you’d have a reasonably comfortable time. There would be plenty of new grammar constructions to ask about, but you’d have basic sentences down.
Does anyone who read Kitty Detectives have a good metric for how much grammar they knew / how difficult it was?
Oh, speaking of vocab and vocab sheets, I read again today that Kitsun has / is going to have the capacity to collaborate on making decks; @Radish8 - do you know if this is possible yet? It would be good to take the vocab from the sheets each week and add them to an SRS deck…
Oooooooops, sorry, I totally said I was gonna make one for Kitty Detectives I pared my SRS use down hugely this year, so I haven’t been keeping up with Kitsun, but I’m happy to investigate and look at setting one up at least.
My Japanese learning has been less-than-systematic, but I would agree that finishing Genki I or equivalent would make your reading more enjoyable/ less of a struggle.
My emphasis here was on the fact that it said COLLABORATIVE - it wouldn’t have to fall on one person’s shoulders. As long as we are clear on format, then we could each do some (weekly rota, or some such).
Can anyone talk about the pros & cons of the different ebook stores?
I want to pick one and stick with it so I don’t end up with different books in different stores.
I already have some purchased books on the US Kindle store. How much of a hassle is it to switch back and forth if I buy some Japanese books on amazon.jp?
Are any of the stores more calibre-friendly than the others?
books are the first in the わんにゃん探偵団 series, and we’re going to be reading volume one. So this is the perfect place to start 
now I would love to see them in color!
this book doesn’t use too many kanji, and where it does there will be furigana so you can still look words up easily.
that said, better kanji recognition will definitely increase your comprehension speed, so learning as many as possible isn’t a bad idea.
I pared my SRS use down hugely this year, so I haven’t been keeping up with Kitsun, but I’m happy to investigate and look at setting one up at least.
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