It’s easy to fall into the trap of reading in Japanese, being lost, reading in English, then saying, “Oh, I see how that’s what the Japanese means” and move on.
But you really want to force yourself to look back at the Japanese and really understand what it means and what led to that specific English translation.
Yep, that’s what I assumed. Sometimes a sentence just isn’t
parseable either due to some unknown words or grammar, so I do my best to untangle any mess I can and then confirm if I did it correctly. And I get it backwards sometimes
Thank you all for you answers! I’m glad it’s not some forbidden practice that’s detrimental to your learning.
Two reasons. First is that chapter one is very long, if you check the table, it’s 35 pages. The second is that we like to start slower, to get people that have never read a book before comfortably onboarded, and then the pace picks up a bit. Sometimes there’s even a faster sprint at the end, but not this time.
If there’s interest, there will be an offshoot book club continuing on with the series, but the main ABBC will choose a new manga and read that. Voting tends to happen 6(-ish) weeks before the current one ends, so in a couple of weeks hopefully. If you check the main ABBC thread and search back quite a bit, you might find the last vote.
If there’s anyone here who is N5 level in grammar (and about N4 in kanji) and has finished the Japanese The Manga Way book, how much did it help in reading real manga? I can’t recognize any learn N5 grammar apart from really simple one like です, etc
Haven’t used that book, but that sounds normal. The very first skill you will need to develop is recognizing word boundaries. Once you have that going, it will be much much easier to intuit if something is a word or some kind of grammar point.
Well, I haven’t finished it… but I’m halfway through and it’s already been a big help. Id recommend it as a reference, especially since you can get used copies cheap.
