This here is especially important and might rub people with completionist tendencies wrong. Like me. Giving up to learn a word that I started learning felt like sacrilege. What about all the effort that I put into it? What if I need the word?!
Well, if I need the word I can just look it up in a dictionary. if I happen to need it a lot I’ll probably learn it naturally. And if I never need it it’s probably better that I stopped spending time SRSing it. That freed up time went into learning words that my brain was actually receptive for.
Luckily, Anki automatically suspends words (i.e. it doesn’t delete them, but you’ll never see them in review again) when you get them wrong a certain amount of times. So don’t be like past me who turned that setting off. Keep it on - it’s great!
Over time, “Oh no, it’s suspended, now I’ll never learn this word, should I unsuspend it?” will turn into “Finally I’ll never see that word again, about time!”
First book club for me here. I’ve been reading the first volume of Flying Witch, which is much easier than these first few pages! Hoping it settles down into more slice of life language soon.
I did recognize some of the kanji - 前 魔 風
For the story itself, I only got a very rough gist (use the card - I know - wind card!), lol.
Yay! Someone else who I can relate to. I am kind of 70% through Genki I and lvl 7 WK. Read about as many sentences as you so I wholeheartedly related to the vibe of your post.
Hello! Late joiner (“late” in the sense that I happened to stumble upon the thread when looking up something unrelated). Not my first time reading but I think this group could help me actually stick with a story for the long-term instead of getting discouraged fumbling my way through.
I know my scan is really low quality but holy smokes I was already having trouble with that incantation on the first page, especially because the furigana is hard to read.The wani guide seems to show “闇” in 闇の力, but my version looks more like two small 月s next to each other. What’s up with that? Bad quality or is it an alternate kanji? (pg 9)
Wow, yeah, that is rough. The bookwalker ebook is a liiitle better (at 200% zoom). Scans of the actual manga (at 300 and 600 dpi) are actually reasonably readable (and easier for me to read than the hardcopy pages themselves… the print is sharp but pretty small).
Ok wow I do have a really terrible scan. Thanks for the assistance, folks!
I back read through the thread and have seen some of the great suggestions people have for digital reading. Ichi.moe also seems like an amazing tool. I probably struggle the most with literally understanding where one word begins and another ends in a sentence, so ichi.moe will hopefully help me get the eye with practice!
im glad someone did vocab for me, im basically living in the document. i have 2 big questions, 1. even with the vocab i didn’t really understand either of the speech bubble in the panel talking about the power of darkness. and 2. what does changing the う form of the verb to the え form do in terms of meaning like せ instead of す and れ instead of る
Let’s break it down into parts by breaking on the を particle and the quotes.
闇の力
を
秘めし
「鍵」
よ
Let’s try translate those parts
闇の力 - Darkness’s power (power of darkness for more natural English)
を ( object marker, something is happening to the power of darkness)
秘めし (hidden - even if you just ignore the grammar of the archaic ending, you can see 秘める - to hide there)
「鍵」(key)
よ (assertive sentence ender)
Let’s apply some grammar rules to figure out how these things relate. We know verbs before nouns are modifying those nouns. We know 秘める takes an object (because our dictionary says it’s transitive), so we know the object marker is providing it’s object. So now we know the first part is “hiding the power of darkness”. Bringing the noun back, it’s “the key that is hiding the power of darkness”. Finally, よ makes this sentence sound kind of strong. So we know she’s just shouting out the key that hides the power of darkness.
This is the command/imperative form, linked in the grammer points in the top post. You can read more about it on Tofugu / Bunpro , but the short version is it’s a really strong/assertive way to tell someone to do something.
On page 8 I think? (3rd page of text) there are 2 verbs with りし at the end.
Is it a conjugation I’m not familar with or maybe a grammatical component? (like how と can be used in novels to indicate someone speaking)
FWIW I set up Mokuro with this thread’s guides and it works like 99% on picking up the text in the horrible scans. Highly recommend it for anyone else who is struggling along with bad jpegs. Integrating Mokuro with Yomitan has helped a ton.
Hilariously though, even Mokuro could not correctly decipher that one specific kanji.