i dont mind, plus already bought the manga, plus i feel like thats gonna be a fun read, plus plsuplus
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I fell behind too. Gonna finish up Ruri and get in on this.
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A few days ago the ルリドラゴン book club ended. I’m a bit sad because that means that it’s time to say goodbye to Ruri for now, but it’s also time to celebrate your success! A lot of you have finished their first manga, and I’m sure a lot will follow. I hope you learned a lot, and I also hope you had fun reading with us.
Well… let’s find out, shall we?
Polls
Did you finish the first volume?
- I finished it
- I’m still reading and I plan on finishing it
- I don’t plan to finish it
- I never even started
0 voters
How would you rate the volume? (1: hated it, 5: loved it) (anonymous poll)
- ★★★★★
- ★★★★☆
- ★★★☆☆
- ★★☆☆☆
- ★☆☆☆☆
- Unsure
0 voters
For our new readers, if you read the manga: How would you rate its difficulty?
- No effort at all
- Minimal effort
- Moderate effort
- Significant effort
- So much effort my head might explode
- I don’t know
- I have read harder manga/books than this one but I still need to click a poll option
0 voters
If you finished this manga: Did you join book clubs before?
- This was my first book club
- I had joined the Absolute Beginner Book Club before
- I had joined the Beginner Book Club before
- I had joined the Intermediate Book Club before
- I had joined the Advanced Book Club before
0 voters
(Select the highest that applies.)
If you finished this manga: What was your reading experience?
- This was my first manga
- I had read other manga, but only easier ones than this
- I had read other manga or books around this level
- I had read other manga or books that are harder than this one
0 voters
If you dropped the book club: Why? (anonymous poll)
- I didn’t like the manga after all
- The manga is still too hard for me
- Reading took longer than I thought
- I fell behind
- I didn’t like how book club works
- I didn’t understand how the book club works
- The threads were too hard to follow
- I didn’t feel like I was part of the book club
- Other problems with the manga
- Other problems with the book club
- Personal problems that have nothing to do with the manga / book club
0 voters
Stats
Participation
First, let’s look at the participantion in general. The X-axis are the weeks:
As you can see, it’s the usual pattern: A sharp drop in the beginning, and then we’re continuing to lose participants and participation, but less and less rapidly. You can also see that all those values follow the same trend.
I have no idea what happened in week 5 and 6 (the last 2 weeks of chapter 1), to be honest.
Mood
Next, let’s see what the mood was like. First in total answer numbers per category, then in percentages:
That looks pretty good to me. Between “It’s going well” and “I’m struggling, but I manage”, just where you want an ABBC. Reading your first manga is never easy, and from those results it seems that people are challenging themselves, which is fantastic!
It’s interesting that “It’s going really well” is dropping in the beginning and never recovers, despite the expectation that reading the manga would be much harder in the beginning and then gradually getting easier. I guess the beginning had especially easy dialogue?
I assume that a decent amount of people dropped the book due to difficulty without clicking the red/purple options, so we can’t see them here, but well…
(Also I can’t help but notice that the “It’s going well” line is following that mysterious thread replies drop/spike in week 5 and 6. I wonder if happy people are more likely to post? It might just be a coincidence though.)
Also note something that you can’t see in those graphs: People dropping the club more rapidly because the reading volume got bigger! Until week 9 we read a steady 10/11 pages per week, and from week 10 onwards it was suddenly 17 pages, which is a lot more. And yes, we get a few more “I’m struggling so much”, but also a lot more “It’s going well”, and the participation trend (“Reading along + Already finished chapter + Planning to catch up”) just continues on.
New vs experienced participants
And lastly, “new participants” vs “experienced participants”. This one is completely based on who participates in my “For our new readers: How are you doing so far?” polls, and who clicks “I have read harder manga/books than this one but I still need to click a poll option”, so it’s probably wildly inaccurate.
We can see that the trend points a bit towards “New participants drop the book club more likely than experienced readers”, but that’s no surprise I guess.
Offshoot Bookclub
Currently the manga is on hiatus, but when the author gets better and writes more:
Would you like to continue reading this manga in an offshoot club?
- Yes
- Maybe
- No
0 voters
Also, feel free to leave your user name in this post (it’s a wiki, you can edit it) - I’ll ping you when there’s news regarding the manga!
So, you finished your first manga… what now?
First things first: Congratulations! That was probably not easy, but you did it! There are a few things you I can recommend now if you continue reading:
- Register on Natively! It’s a fantastic website that compares the difficulty of different mangas/books for learners, and lately it even has TV series. Don’t forget to add Ruri Dragon to your collection!
- Read another book with the Absolute Beginner Book Club - for example the freshly started ちいさな森のオオカミちゃん ・ The Wolf of the Small Forest book club!
. - Level up with the Beginner Book Club. My club there has is in its second week already, but if you want to try and catch up you’re very welcome: ロジカとラッカセイ ・ Rojica and Rakkasei
.
And that’s it from me. Thanks for participating, all of you! It was a joy to host a book club for you.
21 Likes
Regulars can only make their own comments a wiki, so you would have to ping the mods (or else I can just make this comment the wiki instead). 
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Can you copy my post and make your post a Wiki? 
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If you want to be notified when there’s news about a new volume and the offshoot bookclub, please leave your name here so I can ping you:
@TobiasW @MrGeneric @Kaysea01 @lucylavelle @HaseebYousfani @2OC3aOdKgwSGlxfz @fyrember @MaraVos @electric @Ashurino GunPingu DIO-Berry Lupo_Mikti prath AuoraMorgan hiukan yamitenshi psyleft proenix marciska aamunoz Pitapi Wildstern
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Ideally this post there, so it’s not too far down. I’ll delete my post then.
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I just created a new comment because I misunderstood what you were getting at, but gets us to the same place. You might also want to mark it as a solution so it is pinned to the main post.
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Finally Wanikani can stop bugging me with “Don’t forget to mark the solution if the thread is solved.”
Thanks!
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Please Include me in your ping: @Kaysea01
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Are you not able to edit the post yourself?
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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 
5 Likes
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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