I was trying to do it on my phone…and failing miserably
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Done!
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It won’t let me add myself to the ping list because “you can only mention 10 users” 
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Write the name without the @ 
As you noticed there’s a limitation of 10 @ so everybody after the first 10 will have to do it without the @
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Thanks for hosting this book club! It was a blast re-reading and joining in the discussions when I could I’d already read the whole volume before starting the book club but I learned some new things all the same and found out some of my interpretations from before had been wrong, so that was good too!
Will definitely be joining in if/when a new volume will be released! Can’t wait for more Ruri adorableness - and more deadpan mom of course 
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I dropped the manga in week 4 or 5 or something because it was way too hard for me. I am participating in the next absolute beginners one ちいさな森のオオカミちゃん and although I still struggle, it is way easier. It feels like Ruri should’ve belonged more in the Beginner Club than the Absolute Beginner one. Although I of course never participated in that, so it kind of makes me afraid of how much harder that one is tbh.
Having said all that, I really appreciate all the work that is being put into this, from organizing, to helping others out to just participating and trying to learn. Thanks everyone <3
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I don’t feel like that’s the case. At the very least, the BBC would have read the book at a faster pace. The two most common differences between ABBC and BBC is that BBC is a bit faster and furigana might not be present. Otherwise all manga will have more complex parts, especially the first few chapters. On natively it has a rating of Lvl19 (out of 174 ratings, so pretty believable), which is smack dab in the middle of the usual ABBC book, definitely not the easiest, but definitely ABBC material. Especially over 12 weeks. BBC tends to start above 20-22, and even then it reads those a bit faster.
As a comparison, while we were reading Ruri, the BBC was reading Komi can’t communicate, which is Lvl 23 on natively.
Anyways, don’t worry much about the BBC, once you’ve read a few books and you have the reading experience down, and the grammar more firmly engrained into your brain, you will be easily able to handle those as well.
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I think it’s fine in the ABBC personally - I’d say it’s roughly on par with some of the other absolute beginner book clubs like からかい上手の高木さん, maybe a little bit harder but not much. In comparison the beginner book clubs I’ve been a part of were やがて君になる and 極主婦道 which were both noticeably harder than Ruri Dragon, especially the latter.
In the end even something like “absolute beginner” is a spectrum and one absolute beginner book club may not be on the same level as another.
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Oh, I absolutely believe that BBC is harder than Ruri, that’s what I meant of being afraid. All I meant was that I feel that Ruri is a significant step above ちいさな森のオオカミちゃん. So personally I would need a Even More Beginner Than Absolute Beginner Book Club.
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I’ll add to this, that what gets picked is rarely about what the people feel appropriate for their levels, and more about what interests them, which is incredbily easy to see from the two cute fests that were picked at the same time… and god, am I glad they did
Because of this, the difficulty jumps around a ton, and only really drops back down, when there’s a decent push towards getting an easier book into the reading list.
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The other cute fest being the current ABBC? I may have to join in
The artstyle reminds me somewhat of このはな綺譚 or maybe 狼の皮をかぶった羊姫 which are both diabetes-inducingly adorable so I’m interested already 
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Absolutely. This one is so sweet, that I felt my heart give out in the middle from sugar overdose.
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For what it’s worth, I think this is pretty normal and I’m not sure I heard of anyone approaching native content for the first time with ease, in a way that didn’t feel it was incredibly tough at first. For me, I had a few false starts with the ABBC and a lot of things helped me. Here are some ideas for the Even More Beginner Than Absolute Beginner Book Club.
- getting better at basic grammar (Genki I level grammar, if not breaking into Genki II and above)
- graded readers
- going through an ABBC pick in retrospect at a much slower pace
- getting through 1-2 series on Satori.
I’m not saying you have to do all of that. These are just things that helped me finally get there.
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For what it’s worth, I’m totally with you on that one. I picked up Happiness on my own in parallel, another ABBC read, and felt it was way easier than Ruri. There are only about 3k chars in a whole volume of Happiness. I felt like in one week of Ruri, I had more longer sentences than in the whole book of Happiness. So Happiness feel way easier for me and if I compare the two, I would put Ruri at a way higher level.
On the other hand, because of the voice acting video, I was happy that Ruri was in the ABBC and my first read, helped a lot identifying things what are characteristic of speech and such.
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Oh wow, that was quite informative and very interesting. Did you write a web crawler that fetches all the thread replies and poll answers? Thanks for the effort!
Regarding the week 5/6 mystery:
Just my guess, but I suppose what the graph is not showing is the answer to “I finished this part already”. Looking back at the weekly polls, there was a sharp drop from week 5 to 6, which leads me to assume that “people just continued on reading Chapter 1, and then waited until Chapter 2 begins”? Your guess about the correlation between happiness of people versus thread replies might also have an effect here… After all, week 4 and 6 were the interesting fire-spitting weeks, while week 5 only featured the long car discussion that was a bit hard to follow as a beginner.
Oh, and I noticed that in the ABBC Home Thread Ruri Dragon is not listed under “previous picks”.
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I did actually buy all Happiness volumes already and will dive into that one in a few weeks probably
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Ah, that’s my bad, I forgot to update that while editing that post. I’ll get that corrected.
Which reminds me, I should probably check if the Master List is up to date.
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I wish I could write a web crawler faster than doing it by hand 
Glad you like it!
I guess, maybe? But I think the bulk of most threads are questions and answers, and those would have to go in the respective threads anyway. I’m not sure there’s any actual reason behind the drop.
Looking at the levels on Natively (L15 vs L19) I’m not surprised. The ABBC usually reads from L14 to L22, so Ruri is slightly above the middle there, while Happiness is one of the easiest books we ever read.
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Yes, I think it’s too bad that the Master List of Book clubs doesn’t include the Natively level / link, I went on and looked them all up manually so now I will start reading them all starting from the lowest one.
I’m away from home at the moment but when I’m back I will ask on the thread over there if it’s okay that I edit the list and add the Natively levels and links in, I feel like it’s a big help when trying to choose what to read next.
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And here I am wondering how はたらく細胞 with L28 got picked for ABBC
I need to continue on that one. Put it on hold when I had to prioritise real-life things (and decided to do my WK queue and Ruri Dragon only which started at that time). But now things are done, and I learned a lot of useful vocab and body-kanji around WK level 30s. Should be much easier now.
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