This x100. This happened to me with my first Absolute Beginner Book Club, and again with my first Beginner Book Club. Both times I felt ill-prepared and like I’m not even reading because I had to do oh-so many look-ups, and like I should give it up for now and try again once I’m better because there’s no point continuing right now.
I actually did give up that ABBC, but I did power through that feeling and stick around for that BBC, and I’m so glad I did. I learnt so much, and once I was done I went back to try that ABBC book again, and this time I could do it in a few days!
I’ve the first two (full) pages of ルリ done, pages 9 and 10! I definitely won’t be able to keep up with 15 pages a week, but even if I got ~5 done and really worked on them, I’d be happy. I’m making lots of notes as I go and they’re all properly formatted now in the way you just showed me, looking forward to discussing with y’all!
You’ll probably pick up speed pretty quickly as you go along - you’ll pick up some vocab and grammar that’ll help you along the way and just get used to reading in general. It’s always a struggle at first.
Well, at the moment I’m trying to keep the speed moderate. As in, make a conscious effort to understand each sentence, but don’t overdo it either. Just work towards getting a general gist and move on.
Normally if I was trying to decipher a sentence I’d go straight to ichi.moe for the breakdown, google translate for partial translations, and then deepl for a more thorough translation. However, for the purpose of this reading club, I’m trying to limit it to kanshudo as much as possible for individual vocab/grammar points and then try to infer the rest of the meaning for myself.
FYI, my grammar background is N5. I’ve the first 80 items on BunPro covered, so the bare basics are definitely there.
And we won’t be starting with 15 pages per week anyway
We had been talking about pacing a bit much earlier over in the ABBC main thread. The latest suggestion (that I still want to double-check by looking for good split points) is:
A speed-up after a few weeks might look scary now, but… it’s usually surprisingly doable. By then, we’ll have gotten all the basic questions for grammar that the author keeps using out of the way, and people have gotten used to the style and gathered some reading experience.
I see, I think you’ll be fine. Personally, I couldn’t tell you my grammar level, never touched Genki, BunPro or anything of the sort. Most of my grammar knowledge is picked up from years of watching anime (as stupid as it sounds), I wasn’t even learning Japanese back then, so just imagine how much you can pick up from actually trying to learn from reading. The most actual study I’ve done was watch a few CureDolly videos, which I should really continue…
Anyway, point is, for me, a lot of my reading is educated guesses. And sometimes that’s fine to just leave it as is, no need to search it up, unless I feel like my guess isn’t good enough.
Just to clarify, for chapters that have a +, that means they are being split into more than 1 week? Like 4 weeks for chapter 1?
Somehow I feel like I’ll mess up with that type of counting. So while it’s 8 pages, it’s technically the first 11, right? With the first 3 not being counted because of the lack of words.
That type of counting is just for now while talking about the pace. The actual schedule will have proper page count/numbers, like “pages 5-17, ending on the panel that starts with いつもの靴”.
Update: I picked up my copy at Kinokinuya today (I’m glad they had it in stock)! I skimmed through it a bit and the difficulty looks manageable. I’m excited for the book club to start, thank you to those who encouraged me to participate
(Also … I asked the Kinokinuya cashier if the store had this volume and she found it for me. When I told her I would buy it, she said “You know this is in Japanese, right?” LOL, maybe I don’t come across as a person who can read Japanese? But it was kind of satisfying to see how surprised she was )
But it was kind of satisfying to see how surprised she was 
)