To all our members, and especially for those for whom this is their very first club, welcome! Please feel free to ask any and all questions about this book you want. It’s an early shot of slang and kid talk straight to the gut, but it’s relatively easy and we’re here to help ya’ll out.
PS if you get confused doing dictionary lookups, don’t forget to use the vocab sheet.
Hi! This was definitely a step up in terms of difficulty from the ABBC’s I’ve done, but I was mostly looking up kanji instead of trying to figure out grammar (which was pretty simple for the most part). I had success looking up kanji in WaniKani’s search engine (i.e. searching “tree” to find kanji with the “tree” radical and matching it to the text). It didn’t have everything but it was a good way to get started.
Reading handwritten script is still very difficult for me so I’m hoping to improve as the story goes on.
some words I looked up:
面白 - omoshiroi (not having the い at the end made this super hard to figure out lol)
運動神経 - coordination
並ぶ - rivalling, lined up
I love Fujino seeing someone better at art than her one time and being like, “I will level up,” it’s such a good and silly motivation.
I’m definitely going to re-read this section again to try and get used to the slang a bit more. What an intriguing start, though! I’m excited to see where this goes!
The art is so nice to look at! 藤野’s shocked expression really takes the cake! And I like how her 4koma art is rendered, so cute…!
Good stuff. I was a little unsure seeing a few pictures out of context what I thought about the art style, but it’s cool. I had a couple quick lookups in the background stuff, words like 隕石 (いんせき, meteorite) and I didn’t know パース from the art tutorial was perspective.
When we finish this I’ll probably give the movie a try.
It’s tough – even without really focusing on that you do get better over time; I honestly don’t read too much manga or anything that would give me exposure to handwriting style and I still did much better than I remember doing in the past. I think half of it is getting better at anticipating what it might be and being able to work backwards from that to see if it looks like what I expect when it’s too messy to easily recognize.
Oh by the way, I’ve never touched a vocab sheet so I’m like way more hesitant feeling than I should be lol, but I took a glance at it (really nice work, pointing out the slang forms and stuff should help people a ton) and noticed an entry for こる as, like, muscle stiffening on page 4 and deleted that. It’s 学校にゃこれない which is just the negative potential くる, to come – technically that would be こられない but people sometimes drop the ら.
Thanks - the sheet is auto generated so there’s a lot of false positives and dupes. I thought I went through them for the first few sections but haven’t had time to go through the whole thing (going to keep ahead section by section like laying down track ahead of the train)
I highly recommend a handwriting based dictionary for your phone like akebi for kanji lookups. It helps you practice writing as well, so it’s a good use of time. Especially if it has a radical look up engine as well
To be clear, the い isn’t missing, it’s been conjugated. 面白かった. When you get the hang of what conjugations look like, you’ll be able to run them backwards to get the dictionary form again, even if you can’t read the kanji.
Super excited to finally be reading this one with everyone. I watched one season of chainsaw man but it really wasn’t for me, and I just happened to see the anime film adaptation for this on a whim when it was in theatres near me and I loved it, so I’m pretty excited to dig into this. I definitely think having seen the movie is helping, but that was a fun first reading with some good new vocab for me. I’ll also echo what other’s have said regarding the handwriting parts. This is for sure the worst handwriting I’ve encountered in a manga and the kanji totally left me guessing haha. The art style is odd, but it fits the themes really well, at least so far.
Is this displaying with Chinese encoding for anyone else? I.e. is it my browser, or is it a Discourse thing? It looks fine for me in Jisho, or Notepad, but it’s wrong here.
Ok, turns out it might have been me. Google came up with the answer: add Japanese to the list of “preferred languages” in Firefox settings. That did the trick.
