ルリドラゴン ・ Ruri Dragon 🐲 (Absolute Beginner Book Club)

Totally get that, but for example the last 6 pages of chapter 4 for example are REALLY light on text

Case in point

I feel like IF it still is too challenging a pace for many people, we could reconsider, but when reading through a volume of a book over the course of weeks you get used to the grammar and vocab, I don’t think too many people who made it to page 112 will still experience too much of a problem at a 17 page / week pace. And there is never anything wrong with taking a few days longer if that’s the case, people still do answer questions and the like after the week is over!

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to be honest, one week more or less dosen’t make a real difference, isn’t it? :sweat_smile:

I lack experiance with reading mangas though. Only read graded readers and This:

so if ya’ll say it’s fine. Well, I will see

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I haven’t read that specific one, but have read others of the series and I would definitely classify that one as generally harder personally than this manga (which I’m somewhat ashamed to admit I’ve already read quite a lot of because I couldn’t wait :sweat_smile: ), the main things you’ll encounter in manga that might make things difficult in the beginning are casual and colloquial language and things like dropped particles, but I think you should be able to manage just fine!

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i tried to read あたしンち
image
by myself before and failed horribly, becuase there’s so much casual language stuff in it I simply couldn’t figure out on my own. I still hope this manga will be voted one day in the abbc. the storys are short but usualy super fun XD I did watch the anime (and did the german translation of it at crunchyroll XD)

Edit: maybe I should start an book club for this one unrelated to the abbc :upside_down_face:

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If it were a standalone club, no, but since it’s part of the ABBC, where other schedules have to shift and adjust based on it, one week more or less starts to add up across multiple books.

Pacing is always something that we have to find the right balance. If we go too fast, too early, we risk losing members. If we go too slow, it means the people who are waiting for the next club because they aren’t interested in this pick would have to wait even longer. 12 weeks is definitely on the upper end of length for the club to run when we do manga picks. The usual amount tends to be between 8-9 weeks and would require a faster reading pace right out of the gate. The previous 2 picks ran longer because they were more difficult. The one before that was a book, and that was why it ran for 15 (it was a single selection in the poll, instead of 2, so it had more room it could take up).

I have no problems with the schedule as it stands, by the way! I do think it will be worth discussing in the main thread, however, whether we start having manga have only a single selection as well, instead of a double, since the schedules have stretched out to be longer.

Either way, what I will say is, for those whom the pace is too slow, reading ahead is definitely okay! A lot of people do so, and those are the ones who usually end up filling up the vocabulary sheet and answering questions. Similarly, reading behind pace is also totally acceptable. People will still be around to answer questions, and it’s better to be slow and steady than to burn yourself out trying to meet an arbitrary pace.

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i think it would make sense to discuss two manga selections at once. I don’t realy see why this was put in place. I didn’t visit wanikani for quite some kind because of covid an personal stuff happening, but if I’m not mistaken a few years ago this was not the case (back in 2019 XD) at least I would favour to only vote for one book/manga to read at a time :man_shrugging: but, yeah. that’s probably a discussion for the abbc main thread

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I’d love to go slightly faster, but we’d either have a weird flow (like doing chapter 2 and 3 over 3 weeks total) or we’d have to go really fast (21 pages for chapter 2 and 3 each).

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While I would like to go faster too, I think the pace is appropriate considering the amount of people for whom this will be the first manga, we risk discouraging quite a few of them if we speed up. Your proposed schedule is quite suitable in my eyes.

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Agreed with @anon3564849. I think your schedule is great, and I trust your judgement entirely. It was essentially a stray thought of, “Hm. We have had a number of manga take a bit longer. Maybe we should consider the change.”

Not intended as a criticism of your chosen schedule/pace at all!

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Soooo, it turns out that there are decent split points in chapter 2/3 after all. We could do:

Chapter Pages No. of pages with text
Chapter 2 61-78 14 pages
Chapter 2/3 79-97 15 pages
Chapter 3 98-110 13 pages

It’s not horrible, really, and there would only be one week where we have to cross chapter borders.


I also have looked into an alternative faster schedule for chapter 1. I don’t really like it.

Chapter Pages No. of pages with text
Chapter 1 5-17 9 pages
Chapter 1 17-30 13 pages
Chapter 1 31-48 15 pages
Chapter 1 49-60 11 pages

Unfortunately there is no better way to distribute those last two sections. (Pages 40-47 belong together, and since page 47 is a bit of a cliffhanger I would like to include page 48 too. Also including page 49 would even be more ideal, but alas, we only have 11 pages left anyway, and making it 10 would be even worse pacing-wise.)


My suggestion:

  • Leave chapter 1 as-is over 5 weeks.
  • Either decide on one of the two schedule suggestions for chapter 2 and 3 now, or leave it up as a vote (for our absolute beginner participants) when we’re near the end of chapter 1.

Opinions?

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Putting it up for a vote near the end of chapter 1 might indeed be a good idea, while we can still somewhat imagine how it was with our first books / manga, it is always hard to gauge exactly. I’d be fine with any situation, but this way we can check-in properly with people after a few weeks of reading!

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Agreed, leaving it to a vote should work well. It leaves Ookami-chan’s start date a little in the air, but it’s nothing we’ve not done before, and it would still leave plenty of time for @ChristopherFritz to have the thread up and drumming up interest regardless of which way the votes fall.

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i like the split variant with chapter 2 and 3. But a vote would be probably the best at that particular moment. :thinking:

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I could be wrong, but it may have been done specifically for when the top pick is a short one that second place is picked as well.

(Or is that only the case for BBC?)

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That is the phrasing in the BBC, for sure, and would be a good tactic to adopt for the ABBC. Up till the past couple of polls, we have exclusively had short manga in the ABBC, so always having two picks if the top 2 were manga made sense, but maybe we should just pay more mind in the initial stages to length and go from there since the length requirements have relaxed slightly to allow for more options.

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i still don’t get why not simply doing two votes with some time in between :sweat_smile:

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Non-dragon related talk continues over here: Absolute Beginners Book Club // Now reading: Cells at Work! // Next: Ruri Dragon - #1610 by MrGeneric

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I’d also like a faster pace, basing it off how the manga is full furigana, it should be no issue to search things up. Though I’d probably like to hear from actual beginners, their experience on searching things up, and what is their limit on how fatiguing it gets since the club is for them, after all.

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Yeah, that must always be the deciding factor! I remember my first manga tripping SO hard over colloquial language and the like, the kanji wasn’t THAT big of a problem, so purely anecdotal the furigana helps a lot, but I don’t think that will be the main challenge for many absolute beginners, but it’s always hard to tell for sure :person_shrugging:

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The target audience of this club has no idea about any of these things at the moment, since it’s their first book :wink:

Also: I wouldn’t even dare to suggest a non-furigana manga for the ABBC, so “this has furigana so it’s easier” is not really a factor. Like @anon3564849 says - kanji are not the prime concern here. And the first manga/book is always a weird puzzle were nothing seems to fit together.

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