Please blur/hide any major events in the current week’s pages (however early they occur), like so:
(that’s [spoiler]text here[/spoiler]).
If you have a question about grammar, vocab, the story, cultural things or anything else related to the book — ask! There’s no need to be shy. If it’s something you are wondering about, chances are someone else will be thankful you asked first, lots of people enjoy answering questions, you learn something new, and the thread gets more lively. It’s a win-win on all fronts!
Cute! This is a nice introduction to the magic world and the characters. Looking forward to seeing what trouble Nicola gets into and if she ever figures out how to consciously do magic.
In this chapter I learned that in Japanese, you are brave/fearless if “your liver remains in place”. Amusing when a figure of speech you have never encountered before suddenly occurs in rapid succession. From pages 19 and 30 respectively:
Nice, I noticed those phrases and figured they meant something to the effect but didn’t actually look them up. One I already knew was 肝試し which is like test of courage.
It’s not a difficult read per se (so far), but quite a few times I was not sure how to read a kanji. Like I know the meaning, but the reading doesn’t come to me. This is a rather new situation for me as this is pretty much my first book without furigana. What do people usually do in this case? Do you look it up, even if you know the meaning? Or just leave it, unless it pops up a lot?
Welcome to the wonderful world of no-furigana reading!
For me this kind of depends on my mood. If I’m really tired and understood the word but can’t recall the reading, I might just move on. If I’m feeling like I have that extra bandwidth, I’ll look it up and check. It also gets easier the more you get used to reading without furigana, kind of like the extra work activates your brain to pull up the reading faster.
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