キノの旅 Home Thread (Intermediate Book Club)

I believe it’s due to some of the content being deemed unsuitable for younger readers.
I could post the information I read about it, but I think it would be deemed a spoiler…

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Maybe I’ll switch to bookwalker for any new purchases. I haven’t switched my ebookjapan account over to Yahoo whatever yet, I should probably do that before my books are deleted or something.

If you don’t know the site / app yet, you can always give it a dry run with an arbitrary free book. So you know what it is like before you give them real money.

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About pacing: how are you guys doing this, are you actively trying to stop reading when you reach the point until we are supposed to read in a single week?

I read the prologue a while ago and it is not as fresh in my memory anymore so I think for the next chapters I don’t want to read ahead anymore because it somehow beats the purpose of reading this at the same time with others.
On the other hand, it also feels weird stopping in the middle of a chapter just to stay exactly with the book club timing.

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I stopped exactly at the end of this week’s schedule. It doesn’t feel too weird to me, I stop reading whenever, wherever when reading stuff outside of bookclubs too.

Might be weird coming back to keep reading (especially after a week without reading), but then I just eye over the past few pages to remind myself of what’s going on, if necessary.

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Yeah, I stop exactly when I’m told to. I’m a good bean.

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In my case it’ll probably take the whole week to read up to the stopping point, so it’ll only be a day or two without reading. :joy:

So yes, @irrelephant, I plan to stop when I’m told because I don’t think I could read faster anyway.

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Stop looking everything up, you’ll kill yourself! : p

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Hey, I skipped a word yesterday. <_<

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As an example of how much I skip, I had no real idea what word はじかれる was until someone asked for breakdown : p I was just like, “eh I get what’s happening, whatever that word is”

Me not looking something up until someone asks for help actually happens a lot.

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I’m with you on that one! :smiley: While I’m on page 24/25 and theoretically only have 5 pages to go, I feel like our reading ‘strategy’ is different, which is interesting. Like, I haven’t looked up anything yet. I’ll read through (*over the course of several days… :sweat_smile:) until the stopping point and then go through it again while looking up unknown words / kanji readings.

You look up everything as you read? I imagine it’s quite taxing! :open_mouth:

How much do you need to look up at a high WK level? Do you encounter a lot of unknown Kanji, or is it mostly vocab/grammar?

Sorry for the 20 questions! :sweat_smile:

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If I read straight through without looking anything up I’d basically have no clue what’s going on. And I wouldn’t be learning anything. Usually I’ll read anywhere from a sentence to a page (depending on my understanding) without looking anything up, and then I’ll reread that part looking up all the words I didn’t know. And yes, it’s quite taxing.

I don’t think I’ve had to look up any kanji yet (I’m on page 18). But I’ve had to look up a ton of words.

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Yeah I get that… Though I feel like I’m getting a basic understanding, I might revise that opinion after looking up, like, everything. :joy:

Though looking up unknown words only after every chapter works fine in 時をかける少女 and 少女終末旅行, those are a lot shorter. Might make sense to adjust for that…

Thanks for sharing your strategy! :slight_smile:

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At the risk of revealing just how much of a giant nerd I am, I finally unboxed Nendo Kino & Hermes!

I’ve had them for a while, but told myself that I’d save unboxing them as a treat when I finally got onto reading the books in ernest. Trying to figure out what pose I want for them, but for now, how they are out of the box seems pretty nice. Thanks, book club for finally getting me started on these books, and helping to finally set Kino and Hermes free!

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Like @seanblue, I’m actually looking up everything I don’t know as I read and making notes in the book so I’m only getting through a couple of pages a day and will probably take about a week to read that week’s assigned pages anyway. And either at the end of the week or at the end of the chapter, I’ll read through the entire chapter in one sitting so that it’s more “reading” and less “studying”.

With 時をかける少女, I didn’t look up anything past Chapter 2 and I didn’t want to read ahead so that I could be involved in the discussion, but that kind of had the opposite effect because it would take me 10-20 minutes to do the week’s reading and it just wasn’t enough for me to really get into the book. I would start to get into it, then force myself to stop when I finished the chapter and by the time the next week rolled around my interest would have died. Speaking of which, I still need to read the last 4 chapters of that book…

@Belerith I did the looking up unknown words after approach for the first few chapters of 時をかける少女 but I got less motivated to actually go back and do that as time went on, especially once I was much further ahead in what I had just read than what I had looked up. So I’m trying the opposite right now, and it’s working because I’m kind of in a studying mood these days (finally got my 1400 reviews down to 0 yesterday yaaaaaaaaayy) but I’ll see how long that lasts. If I get tired of looking things up I’ll probably just read and only look up stuff that gets brought up in the threads.

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I did that once for two pages of another novel and it took forever and although I liked the idea of doing this, it was also so exhausting and I’m not planning of doing this again. Is this still enjoyable for you, or really just “studying”? Maybe I just don’t enjoy “study mode” and for someone else, study mode in itself is something enjoyable too.

I also look up all the words but I converted my ebook to a text file and now I’m reading it with japanese.io. This way, it is sufficiently fast so that I can still consider it reading and enjoyable but I can still understand what is going on (because without looking up the words, I would be missing too much).

I also don’t want to pre-study with floflo or anything like that. I already have so much SRS in my life, it would be nice to have this one little thing that feels a bit less structured and fun (while still making progress, I hope; but even just finishing my first light novel would be a huge milestone and progress in itself).

Today, I was in a Book Off and thought of buying a physical copy to read again later but they only had the volumes V and up. Maybe our book club will get to those one day :wink:

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I very very rarely have to lookup kanji. And when there’s a hard one, it usually has furigana due to it being uncommon. Seriously… I’ve always thought kanji would be the hardest part, but right now my capping point is comprehension (vocabs + grammar), in particular, the familiarity with the structure of sentences, especially particles/certain conjugations and how they can flip/direct the meaning (I’m finding this a recurring point, I’m thinking about focusing on this at some point)

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Yes, it takes forever :slight_smile: For me it’s even one more step: First I look up the unknown vocab (right when I encounter them), and after I’ve read a sentence, I often need to step back and figure out what it actually means (i.e. I’m looking at the grammar level of the sentence). Sometimes this takes up much more time than the vocab lookup!
When we read 時をかける少女 I discovered time and again that I completely misinterpreted sentences and “invented” stuff or did not understand how to properly interpret a given grammar point in a specific situation. I want to get better at actually reading what’s written in the text and not what would fit my imagination. So for the time being I’m trying to really focus on that. And yes, sometimes it might even take me an hour or so to read a page of Kino… Which is really fine for me right now because I feel I’m learning a lot.

I don’t think I can continue like that throughout the whole book, though. So maybe either my understanding will improve over time, or I will get fed up so that I will revert to less intense reading, or both. Let’s see how it turns out :wink:

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For other ebook users. I’ve tried both ebookjapan and bookwalker by getting Kino (this is my first ebook, I usually prefer physical), and since I’ve seen some people in this thread thinking about whether they’ll try one or the other. Bookwalker is by far the superior one, it has selectable text/markers/mobile app/notes/and just all around better, so I’m gonna stick with it (but anyone knows how to remove a marked sentence? :sweat_smile:)

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That sounds so familiar! Even with the super quick japanese.io lookup I feel like I forget the words within seconds and have to take a step back at the end of a long sentence and figure out what it means if I put it all together.

And I can very much relate to the “imagination” part, I think I’m also painting my own pictures in my head that might not exactly match what is going on. This was less of a problem with Graded Readers since they had pictures and with the other book I am reading which is “Finding Nemo” as a novel for kids and I know what is supposed to be going on. But with Kino and this fantasy world I might just settle for my imagination running wild and seeing stuff that might not be there. It feels a bit like being a kid again and trying to figure out the meaning of English songs or television series before you were really able to understand what is going on. I decided that I’m going to enjoy that phase while it lasts and just roll with it :slight_smile:

That’s at least what I’m thinking now since there is not much action going on. Maybe I will have to change my approach when there is a chapter that picks up the pace and things get more confusing.

Exactly :grinning:

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