Welcome to week one! We technically don’t get started until this coming friday but I had some time and threw the thread up early. Feel free to get started on any discussion or questions you may have. Remember to mark any major points from this week’s reading (or any info from future chapters) with a spoiler tag!
Really so excited to be reading with all of you!! I went ahead and populated the vocab sheet with a few of the more difficult words I found and put up some discussion questions for people as well!
I won’t start reading until the 19th, but I can answer #1 right now: yes, I’ve played the games for the last ~20 years, including Ranger and Mystery Dungeon games, watched the anime and collected cards in elementary school, and have already read the Kanto and Johto sagas of the manga. So I’ve already read this part in English. That was around 10 years ago, so although I still remember the gist of what happened, the details have been lost to my old lady brain.
Fun bit of history for me on this one. A few months after Pocket Monsters Red and Green released in Japan, Nintendo Power magazine here in the US had a feature on games released only in Japan, including this duo. I wrote to Nintendo of America asking if the games would be getting an English release. (You can read the reply I received in this interview.)
I credit playing Pocket Monsters Yellow in my early Japanese-learning days for my strong ability to read カタカナ.
I grew up playing Pokemon and it was one of my biggest exposures to Japanese as a kid and reasons I probably ended up learning Japanese in the first place. I’ve played most of the games (my favorite is Explorers of Sky!) and watched the show, but never read the manga so excited to see what this different take on the Pokemon world has in store!!
Strangely my first exposure was actually Pocket Monsters Green on GameBoy, in Japanese, which I basically played by trial and error. I was young enough that I didn’t care, and me and my
level 100 Dewgong had a great time. I learnt to recognise what different things meant in the menus (often by position as much as the characters), but had no idea how to pronounce anything. Nothing retained since then I don’t think! And I don’t know a lot about the franchise beyond the original 151.
I’m going to try and follow along with this but in a more extensive reading approach to reduce frustration with lookups and furigana quality.
this chapter
Bold start! I don’t think my Dewgong would have done much better than Red’s ニョロゾ. I wonder how Red’s character will compare to Ash in the originals.
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to commit to joining this club yet, but I’ve stayed interested this whole time and I found out I could get a physical copy delivered tomorrow, so I’m going to go for it
I really loved Pokemon as a kid – I have strong memories of Pokemon: The First Movie, as well as some early seasons of the dubbed anime, and I read a lot of the officially translated Pokemon Adventures. It took me quite a while to realize that the series came from Japan, after which I started reading more of Pokemon Special through scanlations.
In terms of the games, I was particularly fond of Heart Gold and Black 1/2, but I was always more interested in the stories and the side content than the core battling system, so I haven’t played any mainline games in a long time (I’m looking forward to Pokemon Legends: Z-A!).
While I did study some Japanese in high school, it didn’t occur to me to use that knowledge to play/watch/read Pokemon, since I grew up with the translated versions. But I’m excited to read the original for the first time!
I’m excited for this book club! This weeks reading was very light and breezy.
Have you been exposed to the Pokemon franchise before? What effect do you think this has had on your reading? Were you surprised by anything?
I grew up on the video games, played a lot of Yellow and Crystal and then stopped at Sapphire/Emerald. But I played some of that open world Arceus switch game and have recently been trying make my way through Mystery Dungeon DX in Japanese. Didn’t really care for the anime much as a kid but remember seeing the movie.
It’ll be fun learning all the Japanese names for the Pokemon!
VS ミュウ
Red keeps referring to Professor Oak as a へんくつじじい. Theres a couple of translations of that adjective へんくつ (偏屈) but they all seem pretty negative. Maybe my memory is tainted by the video games, but did the anime treat him as a kooky old guy? Maybe something lost in translation?
Also this seems hilariously melodramatic for a kid to say to another kid:
This was fun. I’ve read some of this series before in English when I was a kid so I vaguely remember some things. And while I don’t much care for Pokemon these days, I’ve heard Adventures can get quite dark for the series. Looking forward to it.
Honestly Red seems like a bit of a brat, but I imagine he’ll become a lot more humble real soon
I’m debating whether it’s worth Anki’ing the names of these Pokémon… The realistic part of me says I could probably get by fine without it, but the nostalgic part of me says it might be fun?
I think mining a sentence from an article/wiki about a pokemon can be both fun and useful. I liked this one, for example:
ニョロゾを飼っている家ではこの渦巻き模様で子守唄代わりに子供を寝かしつけるのに使われることがある。
In homes where Poliwhirls are kept, this spiral pattern is sometimes used to lull children to sleep as a lullaby.
Oh that’s a fun idea! I also thought I could use them as mnemonics for learning words like ニョロニョロ and トカゲ, which are precisely the kind of words I’d otherwise have trouble memorising.
I had heard from a few places that this manga was good! It was described as a little different to some of the other media, like other Pokemon manga and anime. I heard it has more of a story and progression, so I always thought I would like it more than some other Pokémon stuff! Because of that it’s always been on my to read list, and now with this club, I used my Bookwalker coin to get the first volume!!
