Please read the guidelines on the first page before adding any words.
Discussion Guidelines
Everybody should feel free to post and ask questions–it’s what makes book clubs fun! But please do not post until you are familiar with Spoiler Courtesy!
Spoiler Courtesy
Please follow these rules to avoid inadvertent ネタバレ. If you’re unsure whether something should have a spoiler tag, err on the side of using one.
Any potential spoiler for the current week’s reading need only be covered by a spoiler tag. Predictions and conjecture made by somebody who has not read ahead still falls into this category.
Any potential spoilers for external sources need to be covered by a spoiler tag and include a label (outside of the spoiler tag) of what might be spoiled. These include but are not limited to: other book club picks, other books, games, movies, anime, etc. I recommend also tagging the severity of the spoiler (for example, I may still look at minor spoilers for something that I don’t intend to read soon).
Any information from later in the book than the current week’s reading (including trigger warnings that haven’t yet manifested) needs to be hidden by spoiler tags and labeled as coming from later sections.
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Click the cog above the text box and use either the “Hide Details” or “Blur Spoiler” options. The text which says “This text will be hidden” should be replaced with what you are wishing to write. In the case of “Hide Details”, the section in the brackets that is labelled “Summary” can be replaced with whatever you like also (i.e, [details=”Chapter 1, Pg. 1”]).
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Example
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This is an example of the “Blur Spoiler” option.
Posting Advice
When asking for help, please mention the page number, and check before posting that your question hasn’t already been asked. As the threads get longer, it becomes more convenient to use the Search function, which is located in the upper right corner of the forum. It is the magnifying glass which is near your profile picture! The best way to search is usually to type part of the sentence you are confused about, and select “in this topic”. This will show you all posts within the current thread which has that string of text.
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If necessary, include an explanation of any discrepancies in the Ebook page numbers from physical page numbers. If there is an easy shortcut for some ebook versions to relate back to physical page numbers, it would be worth it to include it as a third bullet here, or if you want to use chapter page numbers instead of volume page numbers, as is the case with some manga. For example:
Example
For the Kindle version of this manga, the page numbers and the location number are always 3 apart. If you subtract 3 from the location, this will give you the accurate page number!
OR
Please use the chapter page numbers, instead of the volume page numbers. These are located in between the panels!
Proper Nouns
Feel free to add to this as new characters / places get introduced throughout the book.
Name
Reading
Notes
山田
やまだ
Main character
田山
たやま
Main character
佐々木
ささき
Main character
Participation
Will you be reading along with us this week?
I’m reading along
I have finished this part
I’m reading this book after the club has finished
I’m still undecided if I will join
0voters
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Weirdly the first page was the hardest part of this week.
Pg ...27?
ありがとう佐々木さん そんなトコいないでこっちで吸いなよ
Can’t quite get what Tayama is saying here. “don’t come smoke here without giving me some of these”? " “I gotta have some of these here when I smoke”?
Yeah, I also needed a bit of help from DeepL-sensei here - this one was a bit confusing. I think it’s something like:
“Don’t stay ‘in such a place over there’, (come and) smoke here.”
I reread chapter 1 before reading this week’s assignment. Went much better, I feel like now I understood what’s going on.
This week’s reading went fine. Very curious to see how the story develops!
な is kind of annoying that way, and I’m glad to have Yomichan with the Kireicake dictionary to remind me:
…but as @MrGeneric once remarked, most of the time it’s just clear from the context whether it’s a command or a prohibition, i.e. whether the speaker wants the recipient to do something or not do something.
Also that’s probably clear to you, but just for others reading this: 吸えない is “can’t smoke” (potential + negative), so yeah, when somebody says it to you it can have the meaning of “don’t smoke”.
And afterwards we have the ジ that looks like a ご with a long extra line on the bottom
If not for @eagleflo’s vocab sheet, I’d have had to admit defeat too here. Thanks, @eagleflo!
Handwriting can definitely be a pain. It definitely takes practice. I’ve taken to actually starting to learn how to handwrite (very slowly and in no particular order; primarily words that I’ve looked up fifty times and decided to add an extra bit of memory reinforcement to, but still doing it nonetheless), and I’ve found that getting familiar with common stroke orders has really helped in identifying handwritten things, even if it’s a kanji I’ve yet to write. It just kinda unlocked a skill of identifying likely stroke order and that means that I can then sort of start to picture (for lack of a better word, since I don’t really see images in my head) what it would look like in my handwriting or on a screen, and I usually know the kanji from there.
Of course, that doesn’t help with particularly messy handwriting sometimes when it comes to kana, but context usually does the extra legwork there. (In this case, she’s picturing him as a コンビニ worker, so レジ makes sense, plus mixing katakana and hiragana in a single word isn’t terribly common, as an example of how I would think about it when looking at this panel, though it’s pretty well a subconscious process by now)
I’ve said this a couple of times to @TobiasW, but if nothing else, starting 五等分の花嫁 so early in my journey (probably when it was still a bit above my punching weight) really helped me get used to identifying things in weird fonts because the author really loved to use a variety of fonts throughout the manga. I really credit it with making me comfortable with non-standard fonts/handwriting and recommend it for that reason alone. Let alone the fact that the story is just fun anyway.
I still haven’t read it yet, but what sold me on 五等分の花嫁 being good for learning is when you mentioned that it has has a variety of fonts with furigana. (Before that, it just sounded like some kind of special hell to me.)
can confirm, lots of weird fonts in that one For the kind of story you might expect it to be going into it, it sure has a lot of stuff to keep you on your toes in terms of difficulty (An old study friend used to send me screenshots of fonts, and also complaining about it having a lot of literary allusions and stuff) Although, at natively level 24 it’s probably about on par with this overall. At least the scan quality looked pretty high and you could read furigana, unlike with ouran, which also has a love of fancy fonts but in about 144p
There also is/used to be a font-randomizer extension for wanikani if you wanted even more fun practice, and you could add more handwriting-y fonts if you really wanted to challenge yourself (not sure if it’s still around/maintained, that was on such an old set-up). Thinking about it gives me horrible flashbacks, but I’m sure it helped out in the long run
心理学
But anyway, it still took me a few seconds to parse that was レジ as well, so seems like we’re all in good company
I posted a couple of screenshots a year and a half-ish back that shows some of the fonts you would run into while reading it (nothing super spoilery)
And if you scroll up from that post, you’ll see me talking about similar things I noticed that @javerend is pointing out regarding some literary language and the like.
Yep! I have! I finished it in May of last year, so about 3 months after I wrote that post. It was actually the first manga series I read to completion (though admittedly most things I am reading are ongoing series, so it’s not as though it had stiff competition )
I’m still definitely a fan of the series though, so my comment that if a book club formed, I would come back and engage stands.
This made me ask myself, if I even finished a single manga series in Japanese, and no. Everything is either on hold, or it’s a long running series, and probably nowhere near the end.
Book Club!
For the kind of story you might expect it to be going into it, it sure has a lot of stuff to keep you on your toes in terms of difficulty (An old study friend used to send me screenshots of fonts, and also complaining about it having a lot of literary allusions and stuff) Although, at natively level 24 it’s probably about on par with this overall. At least the scan quality looked pretty high and you could read furigana, unlike with ouran, which also has a love of fancy fonts but in about 144p 
