also re: the discussion above - I’ve been studying Japanese for a few years and I’m level 48 WK and still had to look up a fair amount of these words 
It’s just a different muscle I think
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Week 1 done! Wow.
This was both easier than expected and also quite the struggle… if that makes sense? A whole bunch of words to look up (luckily y’all filled that vocabulary sheet FAST) and some complex grammatical constructions (for me) but it was so much fun!!!
I get easily frustrated, especially when I don’t understand something right away, but my friend and I got together today and we were able to patiently decipher what we were reading. Also, a lot of the answers to the questions posted here were super helpful!
Sorry, no questions from me (yet). Just wanted to share how my first experience reading manga in Japanese went 
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Page 9
Ahh! Emphasis ! i just learnt something! I thought 「」were brackets, but it makes so much more sense that it functions more like quotation marks.
This makes so much more sense with key as a noun in the sentence.
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It depends.
There will always be words you need to look up. The goal, then, is to minimize the frequency of look-ups. But if you consider the first native material you read as an extension of learning, a higher volume of look-ups should be tolerable. Within reason, of course.
What you want to watch out for is the idea that you should learn a lot of vocabulary, then try again. And if you still have too many lookups, go learn a lot more vocabulary, then try again.
That’s the route I went, and I ended up forgetting most of the vocabulary and still couldn’t read.
So what’s my recommendation?
1) Learn enough vocabulary that you know how you learn vocabulary.
There are various ways to get started with this, and each with pros and cons.
-
Grammar Book: Learn the vocabulary that comes up in whatever book (or web site) you are learning grammar from.
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WaniKani: Being a kanji-learning tool at its core, WaniKani’s main selection of vocabulary exists to reinforce the kanji. However, you can complete all 60 levels without forgetting a single word and still have a bunch of look-ups, depending on what you are reading, so WaniKani alone won’t be enough for vocabulary.
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Japanese 1K: These are decks, such as Refold’s USD $20 deck, that tend to be sourced from material such as slice-of-life anime that will be a bit more targetted to those learning Japanese for anime and manga.
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Core 2K: An Anki deck sorted by frequency of words which I believe was sourced from newspapers. A great deck to learn vocabulary from if you plan to read Japanese newspapers, but it won’t help you much for a manga.
Here's how well the popular Core 2,000 and 6,000 vocabulary decks prepare you for some past ABBC manga.
| Series | Core 2K | Core 6K |
|---|---|---|
| ちいさな森のオオカミちゃん | 62% | 75% |
| レンタルおにいちゃん | 57% | 73% |
| からかい上手の高木さん | 51% | 70% |
| 三ツ星カラーズ | 48% | 64% |
Even after learning 2,000 words, you’d still be looking up every other word in some of these!
Any of these methods is find to start with. I recommend following one of these at least until you know 200 words.
I would also recommend watching some Japanese media to get a feel for the sound of the language, even if your only goal for Japanese is reading.
2) Learn vocabulary from a frequency list.
Once you hit the 200 vocabulary point, you can continue using that system, but that is when I recommend introducing a frequency list for what you plan to read.
Here's how many words you need to learn for those ABBC manga using frequency lists.
| Series | 85% | 95% | 100% |
|---|---|---|---|
| ちいさな森のオオカミちゃん | 340 | 500 | 580 |
| レンタルおにいちゃん | 410 | 600 | 700 |
| からかい上手の高木さん | 480 | 720 | 840 |
| 三ツ星カラーズ | 510 | 765 | 890 |
Even for 100%, none of these even reached 1,000 words!
Looking at this frequency list for the volume, how many of the 100 words listed do you know?
Knowing about half of them means you’ll recognize about 15 to 20% of the total words in the volume (depending on which words you know). That’s still a lot of look-ups.
Knowing all 100 words gets you over 40%. You’re still looking up more than half the words, but it should be much more tolerable at this point.
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They are indeed quotation marks. As you can probably imagine, they’re used all over the place in novels, but not quite as much in comics.
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Hi!! I’m excited to be reading along with everyone! I am coming to this manga with absolutely no prior knowledge of Card Captor Sakura (other than just knowing the title). While reading this first part I tried to decipher everything on my own before reading the thread and let me tell you I STRUGGLED 
I’ve read a little bit of manga before (little as in maybe 10 pages) so I’m still very very beginner. I’m glad to hear things will probably get easier from here on out text-wise.
The thing I struggled with the most was definitely grammar. I’m still trying to solidify all the N5 grammar after finishing Genki I so I had to look up a lot and wasn’t even sure how to look up a lot of things. I found ichi.moe to be really helpful since it was able to identify the verb conjugations so then I could search how they’re used.
My attempt at translations
I tried to break things down in a table with as literal as I could and then tried to make it make sense in English but I started to give up a bit towards the bottom, and then didn’t even write anything for the last 3.5 pages
| Page | Text | Literal | English ? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | その封印が解かれるとき | That seal to be undone time | The time for that seal to become undone |
| 3 | この世に災いが 。。。 | This world in disaster | Will bring disaster into this world/time? |
| 8 | やっと追いついたわ | Finally caught up | I finally caught up |
| 8 | 闇の力を秘めし「鍵」よ！ | Darkness’s power to be hidden key | The key with the hidden power of darkness |
| 9 | 真の姿を我の前に示せ | Truth’s form (object) me’s front (location) show | Reveal your true form in front of me |
| 9 | 契約のもとさくらが命じる | Contract’s origin sakura is what orders | By the order of Sakura’s contract ? |
| 10 | 「クロウ」の創りしカードよ |
That last line is where I stopped writing things down because I got really frustrated trying to figure out what the heck 創りし meant, but it seems like it’s an old form of 作る ?
Looking forward to (hopefully) having an easier time of things next week! I took a sneak peek and it does look like more things that I know. I’m really excited to have this club as a way to help me start recognizing and getting comfortable with grammar points.
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These examples are fantastic, thank you for pointing them out to me!
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Just finished my reading for the week! First time trying something other than graded readers and can’t express how excited I am about it even if It’s a slow process for me. Really huge thanks to everyone contributing to this thread, it made it really simple and easy to identify what I misinterpreted in my first run through. Definitely doing lots of lookups, but the vocab list makes it quite easy/quick. This is my first exposure to CCS, and since most of the discussion has been surrounding language so far, I thought I’d talk about the opening pages.
I love how it comes out swinging - instantly capturing your attention in just a few short panels. さくら and ケルベロス are both so cute - I really am excited to see where the book goes! Knowing it’s such a well loved series has my hopes high as well
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Hi everyone!
Joining this one w/o any prior experience and just having a half of Genki 1 on my shoulders. Though struggled through the first 2 text pages using ichi.moe and learned a lot! Though a quick question.
Page 9
秘めし鍵 - not sure how this word is built. 秘めし is some kind of a verb, isn’t it? What form is it? How is it joined to the noun?
Thank you!
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It’s an old-fashioned form used for using verbs as a modifier used here to make the spell feel old-timey. @ookami_san discussed it here
When we’re not trying to sound old timey, we’d just use the base form, in another tense if appropriate, like 秘める鍵 or 秘めた鍵
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I wasn’t expecting the first few pages to be difficult. Archaic stuff makes my brain hurt. I like the thing where the kanji gives nuance to its furigana.
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Hello there!
I have read these pages just before the thread was created, so I am coming back now to see my fellow camarades reactions.
I had the same kind of feeling. Short but daunting. But as many of you said, this is only the introduction with strange incantations and new characters names. I don’t try too much to decipher everything as I roughly get the meaning.
I’m waiting for more usual conversations.
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Ho I forgot but I used Mokuro and this is amazing!
The fact that you see the normal text bubble drawing, then the OCR-styled text when hovering is so so good!
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I’ve made it to the end! Yayy. I think I’ll definitely remember the command form after this!
Grammar point of the day:
I learned today that the particle と can be used with なる (I usually see it with に). Apparently に is the more general particle here, while と implies something more dramatic and final. Certainly appropriate for the scene it’s in!
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This is my first book club and first try at reading native material - so these first few pages were definitely a tough way to start! But I’m trying to start with a spirit of adventure, being mindful of what @ChristopherFritz said in the home thread about joining “to learn Japanese grammar and vocabulary as you decipher cryptic messages found secretly embedded within pretty artwork.” Love that framing so much. I definitely feel like an investigator trying to discover clues and getting REALLY excited when there’s something small that I know/understand without looking it up!
Also really appreciated @TobiasW’s advice/FAQ in this thread, especially “how can I approach a sentence I don’t understand?” Super helpful and I’m experimenting more with the resources shared for looking things up.
I did get a physical copy of the manga but ended up getting a digital version on Bookwalker as well so I can zoom in/see both the kanji and hiragana more clearly. My approach so far since I’m looking up so much/taking so many notes is actually screenshotting each page to a powerpoint slide and then capturing my notes there as I work through the text, which is making it easier to refer back to.
I don’t have any questions of my own yet but I appreciate everyone else’s! And a million thank yous for the vocabulary list!!!
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When it comes to strategy for learning this stuff, do you guys try and real through the pages first and then come back and decipher them? How do you guys approach it? This is my first book club in English or Japanese so I’m definitely interested in how you guys approach this stuff.
And in terms of vocab, I assume its not something you one and done. Do you add it to an Anki list or how does that go?
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Back in the day of my first clubs I read while looking up stuff as a first pass, making notes of what I couldn’t decipher, and then as a second pass I looked at those notes, tried a bit harder to figure them out, and checked the thread and asked questions when I still didn’t get it.
That question also came up in the last ABBC. Here’s my answer:
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I definitely agree with your attitude towards reading. One of the reasons my first foray into the book club failed was because I wanted to feel like I knew all the vocab before I dove in, so I threw everything I didn’t recognize from the first week’s vocab list into anki and got to memorizing. It just wasn’t fun. I’m having a better time looking things up on the go, and if something sticks, great. I’ll build up my vocab eventually
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Book club one week one notes!
On my first pass, I read for the gist of the plot and tried to move along with just the general meaning. Upon review, I realized that being able to read Chinese and extrapolate meaning from kanji is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. I suppose this makes me a big cheater-McCheater-face.
An example of my process, for the first text page
Japanese:
その封印が解かれるとき
この世に災いが…
Components: (Chinese meanings of kanji in quotes)
This “seal” is “solved” (+unknown verb ending) moment
This “world” in “disaster” is…
Re-arranged for meaning:
The moment when this seal is released
Calamity will strike this world…
On the second pass, I asked ChatCPT to parse the grammar points of each sentence, comparing the notes to my existing knowledge and to notable answers I see in the bookclub thread to verify, and write down the new learnings in a notebook for myself.
Continued example of my process, for the first text page
Grammar point:
解かれる (とかれる):
passive form; to be broken, to be undone.
解く (とく):
dictionary form; to break, to undo.
Then I take care to memorize the furigana for the kanji, because the pronunciation is nowhere close to the Chinese pronunciation (cheating can only get you so far!).
This level of exploration feels good to me so far, as it’s letting me keep good pace and interest while still giving lots of opportunities to learn.
Major study/review points for me this week:
- Imperative form - general
- Passive form - general
- Gobi endings わ and よ
- Archaic/poetic form - we have this in Chinese too. Although it doesn’t help me with the specifics, at least the concept is familiar.
ピース！
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