Making up for last week and posting a bit early. Let’s go week 4!
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Ciao! I have decided to join this book club! As it is my first time, I have purchased the physical copy (like a milestone celebration of my Japanese learning journey). Looking forward to reading the manga with all of you!
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I’m a little late to the party but super excited to join and read along with everyone, this is my first book club ever
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As predicted, I’m definitely having some struggles, frustration with figuring out what was being said. However I’m also needing to look up nearly every word and I doubt I’m retaining much as a result. I have no clue if that’s a common feeling or occurance for ‘reading’ for the first time or not.
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Hey Dathmach - yes that is a very common feeling! Have you read this post here? It covers some of that in terms of how it will feel to begin with which you might find helpful.
Different people have different levels of patience for working their way through difficult material - I know the first couple of ABBC clubs I joined I gave up fairly early! When I had built up my vocab and general reading ability more I found it easier.
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My hope, is to keep circling back to earlier weeks to keep familiarizing myself with the new words/grammar/etc I’m learning. I’ve done it for Weeks 1&2 and it’s been a marginal success. I don’t know that I fully parse the sentences or the nuance, but I can I understand enough.
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Yeah, I’ve read that post (a couple of times, knowing that it’s supposed to be hard helps lol).
Mostly just wanting to make sure that I’m not missing something that I’m supposed to be doing or something like that.
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I’m sure everyone feels differently but for me it is always the vocab that is most annoying - I find endless lookups worse than puzzling over grammar. One tactic is to not try reading until you have a bigger base vocab - some people front-load this massively and relearn all new words in a book / show / whatever before they try consuming it. That’s a bit extreme for me!
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It’s fine to keep repeatedly looking up words. You won’t learn them if you don’t look them up 
Studying vocabulary with flashcards from another source is also helpful to improve retention. Since WK doesn’t really teach common words first, it might be worth it to study something like the Genki vocabulary as well just so you’re a bit more familiar with common words that are useful for beginners- this is a prebuilt deck for the Genki vocabulary that I used.
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I am constantly questioning whether or not I’m “doing it right” when I’m reading things that are difficult to me. It’s really only when I turn around and read something that’s not an issue that I can see the distance I’ve come. Right now you’re in very early stages, so there’s not a lot that you can look back on (yet!!), but if it helps, I remember having a manga, the translation, and a dictionary open for the first few books I read, and still not really getting that much out of it. That’s normal!
If you’re feeling that this is frustrating/draining and going to keep you from wanting to read more in the future, I’d suggest you take a break, and maybe come back in a few months and try again. But if you’re enjoying it to some extent, stick around! It’s not going to feel like much is happening, but your brain is learning to recognize words and patterns. The first time you see a word or a pattern, you can’t recognize it, so you’ll almost certainly be lost if you don’t understand enough to get the context. But most of the words in this book are quite common, and especially if you’re learning words on the side I think by the time we’re done with the club in a few months you’ll really be surprised at the improvement you’ll notice.
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I’m certainly determined enough to keep going! I know that pretty much the biggest thing needed for learning a language is the amount of time put into it. So long as I’m doing stuff right, I’ll keep going along, using the various dictionaries I’ve found lol
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It also depends a lot on your learning style and pace. In my case I’m super slow at learning things and it gets frustrating… but once I’m more at peace knowing that, with time I can notice some progress, like @shitsurei mentioned!
Sometimes I will learn a word reading a manga then forget it, but later i’ll hear it in an anime and still not remember what it meant, but my ears will pick it up. And later i’ll find that word again during my Japanese class, or reading a textbook, and it will finally stick. It’s like, I need to trip 5 times on the same stone before I finally learn how to avoid it, but I’ll learn eventually! When I recognized that this is how I learn, it helped being more comfortable with struggling 
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When I started out on reading native material, I (foolishly?) started out with a (slightly) text-dense manga that didn’t have furigana. It has a “four-panel” layout, and I tackled one four-panel strip per day.
Keeping in mind that:
- I already had a good bit of known vocabulary
- I had barely just extremely basic grammar knowledge
- I knew some of the most simple kanji
- I had to manually look up kanji one at a time
…I was spending about two hours a day to get through four panels when I started, and even through most of it. It took me something like 6-8 months to get through the whole volume.
My recommendations:
- Create flash cards for the most common vocabulary, either based on a frequency list for the manga volume (common to this series) or based on a general Japanese vocabulary frequency list).
- You have a lifetime WaniKani subscription, so it’s okay if you go a bit slower with WaniKani while also doing vocabulary flashcards on the side.
- You don’t have to do vocabulary flashcards, but if you do, feel free to put furigana on the front fo the card. It’s better to learn the word from its reading now, then learn the kanji with WaniKani later.
- Look up unknown grammar. Ask here if you’re uncertain. Over time, you’ll see the same grammar come up and you’ll start to recognize it. (Likewise the vocabulary.)
If you had time for only one of these things, make it be grammar.
The ABBC and BBC level book clubs tend to start at a slower pace, then speed up after a while. There’s no science behind when the speed-up occurs, but it’s meant to indicate when readers should be comfortable with a faster pace. However, not everyone will be ready for it. And it’s okay to go a bit slower than the club pace. What’s important is to keep going. (The speed-up transition point for Gal and Dino is this upcoming weekend.)
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I’ve been doing some flash card apps, but I’m not sure how well I’ve really been learning from them. The words just don’t stick in my head, not like when I’m studying WaniKani. I think it’s the lack of memnetics. If anyone has an anki card set that includes memnetics I would be very grateful!
I watched all of Andy’s Genki videos to prepare me for grammar, they definitely helped, though I do think that I’ll be looking up grammar in the (likely near) future.
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I did Anki for years and years before I read my first book. I had so many words that just didn’t stick and I kept on thinking I’d never learn them. Now I feel like when I read a book, new words just make sense. There are some words that I still struggle with, but usually within 3-8 repetitions of them, I realize one day they’ve suddenly stuck.
I personally don’t use SRS that much anymore, but I think I would still at the beginner level. From my experience, I feel like SRS does its best when it’s there for you to get enough vocabulary/grammar to get to the level where you can read or listen to the language. Context seems to be one of the most important things for retaining the language, and in my experience there’s just not enough of it, even when you’re using sentences and audio on cards.
… which is all a very long winded way of saying, I think you’re doing exactly what you should be doing, even if it doesn’t feel like it right now. 
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From someone who’s still not nearly as far along as some of the wise folks in this thread, this is very relatable to me from not so long ago. It seemed as though no matter how many times I drilled にぎやか or やわらかい I could never get them to stick. Not like with WK.
But then I found something odd began to happen. The more I learned, the easier learning words became. I had to let go of my perfectionist side, accept that I will frequently get things wrong, and just keep pushing forward. A lot of my earlier words have instant recall now, and sometimes words just… immediately click. Or, I encounter a word in the wild somewhere, and then when a new flashcard of some kind introduces it, it’s like magic. And sometimes the word is 欠ける and I just forget it every other time… 
And just last night, I encountered やわらかい in the manga I was reading, and I had to look it up. But then there was a practically audible click in my head as this word I’d drilled without useable context in my head was suddenly useful. Now it feels like I word I own.
One thing that has seemed to help for me is reading all of the WK example sentences for vocab. It’s helped with my reading speed and vocab retention, even when I don’t quite understand the grammar. It feels like a slog that’s slowing me down sometimes, and I’ve waffled on whether time is better spent elsewhere, but lately my reading has become so much quicker that it’s less of a concern. The benefit and satisfaction of reading sentences with kanji I have already learned is immense!
Hang in there!
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Week 5! A little early again this week.
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