キノの旅 Week 1 Discussion

Well, I will say this for week one’s reading…

You certainly get exposed to the various ways that there’s nobody there is written. :joy:

Also, I don’t know if it’s the 多読 challenge or I’ve just gotten more used to reading in general and novels especially, but I found I got through this relatively quickly. This is huge for me, since the last time I tried to read it I didn’t make it much further than the prologue and the first few pages of the first chapter. I even made it through the prologue this time with minimal confusion between what character was saying what.

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You are definitely doing a more thorough job of going through this than me it seems :smiley:
I either don’t realize that something is a grammar point that I could look up or I’m fine with just taking a guess. My Dictionary of Basic Grammar is still in pristine, unopened condition… I’ll just call what I’m doing “extensive reading” :wink:

For the vocabulary however, I had had to look up a lot. I’m reading this on japanese.io (I bought the book for the Kindle and after some swearing & experimenting managed to extract the text) on my phone and I’m really glad about this because it is super convenient to look stuff up this way and it doesn’t slow me down too much. I also mark all N5-N3 words that I looked up so that I see when I come across them again and know that I’m already supposed to know that word. I’d love to be able to read without such a crutch but I’m just not there yet.

Thank you so much for starting this book club. I managed to finish this week’s reading and although I had to split it up into 3 reading sessions and had to look up a lot of words, it was enjoyable. This was the longest Japanese text I’ve read so far and I would not have done this without having this book club as motivation! I hope I can continue reading along with all of you and actually finish reading this book. That thought is really exciting!

About the content, so far I guess one can say: talking bike, lots of talking about weapons, lots of machines, no people. Got it. :smiley:

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Current progress (ebook in largish font): 7 pages into chapter 1, 11 to go before the stopping point. Probably won’t be able to finish today, so I guess I’ll be doing at least a couple evening reading sessions this week.

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Towards the end of page 18, Hermes’ dialogue:

What does this sentence mean?

キノともあろうお方が立ちゴケをするとは。

ともあろうお方 - “Of all people”
Just looked up ともあろう and the only thing that comes up on jisho has もの at the end. Is お方 replacing もの here?

立ちゴケ I don’t know what this is, nothing came up in my searches

I think the general meaning of this sentence is Hermes acting surprised that キノ of all people would let him fall, but I’d like to nail down the specifics.

Thanks!

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Seems reasonable to me. Assuming もの is 者, replacing it with お方 makes sense to me. At the very least, it makes sense in the context.

Maybe it’s related to コケ? Meaning “fool” or “folly”. No idea if that’s relevant though.
See answer below.

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I had to search it in Japanese to get results, since it seems to be a very specific word.

It’s exactly what キノ did, that is, failing to sustain the bike and letting it fall.

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I guess this is where google images is our friend.

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Yeah :joy:

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For vocab, I recommend the Kitsun deck for Kino. It’s also on FloFlo.

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That pic is hilarious, straight into the Anki deck lol. Also I love how this one word has a whole wiki entry. Thanks for sharing!

@seanblue I thought the same thing with fool or folly but was ultimately unsure. Thanks for answering!

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I was also confused, but luckily went to google right away :rofl:

Thank you everyone - that was the one sentence I had no idea about, and I was planning to ask about, but you’ve saved me the trouble. :smile:

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I somehow finished this week’s reading today! It feels like doing longer reading sessions is more efficient, since I remember more vocabulary, but it’s harder to set aside the time. The reading felt like it got smoother for me after they went to the residential area, probably because there was more dialogue after that point. I’m looking forward to next week’s reading!

Edit: having the support of this book club really helps with getting through challenging (for me) readings!

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I also felt like this line was saying that the hammer was biting into the cord that came from the holster. I happen to have the 1st manga from this series and found this image, which does show the hammer on top of the strap (lower right part of the image).

I can’t find any pictures of actual holsters that look like they work this way though. It seems like a weird way of holstering a gun from a practical point of view.

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A littlr hard to tell what’s going on in that picture, but huh, yeah, it does look like what I was trying to describe. Huh.

Maybe I’m just overthinking this, but could it be that the strap works as a primitive safety mechanism? Maybe the gun doesn’t have one built in, so the strap physically stops random bumps causing the hammer from striking the loaded bullets. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

どうせ考えすぎですね。In the book it only says 「抜け落ちないように、」 so it seems to really only be about the gun not falling out of the holster.

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I’m almost done with the chapter and marked some sentences where I encountered a grammar point I didnt understand, I might post about them later if I still don’t understand them after taking another look :slight_smile:

So far it’s a very enjoyable read that seems to be right at my level! So happy about it :smiley:


Now I’m going to do some very shameless plugging (sorry!) since I absolutely love the way it sped up my process of looking up words and adding it to a SRS program:

On android I use an app called Moon+ Reader to read my ebooks, it’s very customizable and allows you to enter a custom url for your dictionaries. (I’m not sure if it exists for iOS?)

Combining this feature with Kitsun allows you to:

  1. Long press a word
  2. Tap the dict button
  3. Kitsun looks up the word in Jisho.org automatically and displays the results
  4. Click the button to automatically generate a flashcard from the jisho entry into your own deck.

So this takes away three very tiring parts:

  • looking up words in jisho.org by copy-pasting the vocab manually
  • having to manually create an srs flashcard for retaining the new vocab.
  • having to trash/hibernate words from existing parsed decks (or dealing with misparses)

The setting up takes maybe a few seconds but it really, really speeds up your “workflow”. If anyone is interested in trying it out, I’ll be happy to provide some details :smiley:

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I’m just lurking here but @neicul the Moon+ Reader you’ve mentioned might be exactly what I’m looking for in a reading app! But how were you able to load Kino (or any other Japanese ebook) in Moon+ Reader? I’m fairly new to buying Japanese ebooks but to me it seems like you usually have to use the readers from the site/vendor you bought the ebook at and can’t just use any reader like e.g. Moon+… So I’m wondering where you bought Kino to be able to read it on the Moon+ Reader…?

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Bascically any website that actually gives you the files in a common format. E.g. You could buy it from amazon and convert the .azw file to a pdf/epub with some online tools (or calibre) :slight_smile:

Hmmm… I googled for further information and came across this:

Please know, however, that most AZW files are copy protected by Amazon’s DRM, meaning that Calibre won’t be able to open or convert them.

What is your experience, do you often encounter DRM-protected books when buying them off of Amazon?