Yeah, I can see that. I think it’s different for me cause I am definitely an absolute beginner and need translations for most sentences to even understand what’s going on. So currently I’m learning something with every sentence basically. But this will probably wane of when I’m a bit better at parsing the sentences.
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I understand why you feel that way, but I can assure you: Reading Japanese in the beginning is a ton of work by itself, so you’re not lazy, and you are learning!
Sure, if you want to do more and find the energy to do it, that might make it even more “efficent”, but just by reading the manga and letting the thread explain things, you are definitely getting better. The only way you’re not gonna learn anything is if you neither read the manga nor the thread, and drop the book club. (Which, by the way, 34% of readers of the first thread have already done by the second thread, so “Well done!” to you for continuing!)
So, if you want to learn even more, go for it, but just by continuing what you are doing you are already doing and learning a lot. The only way you’ll stop learning is by giving up.
It is indeed tiresome to look up things in the thread while reading. Here’s what I recommend:
- While reading, don’t open the thread at all, just Jisho/Vocab Sheet/Google/whatever else you like to look up things.
- If you cannot figure out a sentence, either take a picture/screenshot it, or write it down for later.
- After you’re done with a few pages (or the reading for the week), look at those sentences:
- If you want to, you can put in more energy and try to figure them out yourself.
- Look in the thread if somebody has already asked what you are wondering about. If yes, find the answer (or wait for it).
- If somebody has posted a translation…
- …but nobody has corrected that sentence (you can usually see “x replies” below a post), look at the translation. Does it sound good to you? (It’s made by a learner asking for help - it might be completely wrong!) Do you understand the sentence now? Are you satisfied? If not… ask a question!
- …and somebody has corrected that sentence, see if the correction helps. Do you understand the sentence now? Are you satisfied? If not… ask a question!
- If you can’t find it anywhere, ask a question!
So, tl;dr: Separate “reading” and “figuring things out with the thread”, but make notes of what you would like to understand better while reading.
Also, feel free to skip the whole “If somebody has posted a translation…” step if it’s still too tiresome. If it’s too tiresome for you, it’s probably too tiresome for other people too, and I’d rather have you sometimes ask duplicate questions by accident than not asking questions at all. 
(If anybody complains, tell them @TobiasW asked you to do to it! 
)
- sincerly, @TobiasW, who wishes the thread had more question posts about specific sentences too, because going through translation posts is too overwhelming for him.
(Thanks to those posting and those correcting/answering those translation posts though! It’s so much work!)
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I was exactly the same when I started participating more in the forums, I would read what I had written a tousand times and then post it, was nervous all the time… Now it’s much better. I don’t know if you’re new to the forums/book clubs, but if you’re new, I’d say just give it some time and do not worry too much! We’re all here to learn, you can only help others by asking questions! And I’m sure nobody will kill you if you ask a question that has already been answered!
What you’re doing is essentially not reading, you’re studying. I don’t know how you study, every person works differently obviously, but I don’t even bother looking up things while I read. I just read and if I don’t understand something, I just leave it to come back to it when I’ve got the time. Usually I read the weeks chapter all in one go and look at the questions in the forum. If there’s something I didn’t understand that hasn’t been asked already, I just ask. There are a lot of flaws with this approach I guess, mostly because I don’t read every day, but that is that…
Well, what I wanted to say with this, don’t try to understand everything at once. When you read a lot, your brain will eventually pick up the patterns through repeated exposure.
Thanks a lot for this, it’s nice to hear! I’m definitly learning, just wish I could motivate myself to actually read every day. I’ll do my best!
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My recommendation at this level of learning is to ensure you are reading the discussions of the grammar involved and ask about any you’re uncertain of or would like clarification on.
Aside from that, just exposing yourself to the manga is slowly building up pattern recognition that will cause you to recognize things later on down the line subconsciously.
The best way to build up confidence in asking questions is to ask questions.
This may not help you start asking questions, but know that once you do, it gets easier.
And if it has been asked before, don’t fret if someone replies, “That’s been answered here” with a link to the post it was answered in. Someone else may have had the same question and missed the answer but didn’t post asking about it, giving them another chance to see the answer.
It’s also an opportunity to figure out how you missed finding the question/answer before and to improve your thread-searching abilities, which is another benefit.
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This is extremely silly but I never realized that I could just… screenshot or write down the sentences lmaoo. I think I was too stressed out to do this right and just made things harder for myself (atleast I probably can’t get dumber than this) T_T
Thank you so much @TobiasW and @ChristopherFritz. It really does feel nice and helpful to hear your thoughts and advise!
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Glad it helps!
And yeah, writing down things for later while reading is great. With books you can also e.g. mark passages in Kindle, but sadly I don’t think that works with mangas.
My reading setup is usually like this:
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I see that too, in regards of asking questions. Usually my questions are already answered and my questions would be so particular I think they would be answered if I would finally finish Genki I 
As I don’t have much time in the next weeks, it is alright for me how I am currently doing it since my reading comprehension seems to be good. But often I do wonder about some grammatical stuff like the shortening which is usually happening in the manga as of right now.
But with the next book, and I do want to read the next one as well as of right now, I want to participate more actively when time hopefully allows.
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Feel free to ask them anyway. Other people might also be wondering about the specifics while being too shy to ask!
(Also I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of your more specific questions aren’t answered by Genki I, nor Genki II for that matter. Reading native material is often a different beast to textbook Japanese.)
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Hey, how’s it going? How do you create these sheets with words from the text? Do you have a program, or do you write word by word?
about manga
I’ve seen some manga, but it seems that they don’t have very good quality. It seems that the quality of the physical book is better. Or does the quality of the manga improve after purchase?
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Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised that not everything is covered by Genki or other grammar-related books. Will keep it in mind for the future
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Before this club it was done by hand, so at the start we would have an empty sheet, and as someone read it, if they were so inclined, they could add the words one by one to the spreadsheet. With this club a new tool is being trialed, that can be used to semi-automatically extract the words and produce a spreadsheet. You can read more about it here
Depends a bit on a few things, some manga have terrible quality in all digital forms. Especially if they were made quite a few years back. Other manga might have different qualities on different platforms, like amazon, kobo or bookwalker, though this is quite rare. It also depends somewhat on how you read the manga. If you are reading in the amazon web reader, they intentionally serve you a lower quality version, so you can’t just rip it there easily.
In general, this book has a pretty good quality. Here’s a screenshot of a zoomed in section of one of the early pages from a full quality amazon purchase, if you want something to compare against:
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I understand thank you
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I saw physical manga they have great quality, I took this print from app Shonen Jump +
on the ebookjapan site it’s the same thing
if i buy the spy x family manga the quality improves
or is it like that
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My experience has been previews/free versions tend to be lower quality so they aren’t as appealing for ripping.
Most things I’ve purchased from Amazon are very legible on the desktop app/on my Kindle, with some exceptions for older manga.
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Can’t really tell you about the shonen jump version, but this is that same frame from the amazon version:
It’s slightly better in my opinion.
In my experience it really depends on how much the publisher bothers to make it look good in the digital version and less on how old the manga actually is.
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Oh for sure. I just mean that it seems like the older manga I’ve picked up has had less effort put in (probably because it’s not expected to see high rates of purchase).
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so there really is a difference, thank you very much
so the physical manga has some advantage
but at least the digital one can understand it, I was afraid it would be very bad
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can i bother you some more?
I take texts and put them in the gpt chat, and ask him to separate them into words, then memorize them and study the complete text
Is there a better way to separate the words?
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Just for the sake of organization later on, I’d recommend asking these sorts of questions either as a separate thread, or it would probably fit better in the absolute beginner book club, since that’s about reading for beginners anyways.
I really don’t recommend using chatgpt for this. For one, it might not be reachable when you want to read, which is quite annoying, but besides that, it will tell you wrong information with the same confidence that it tells you correct information with. Instead you can try ichi.moe, which is a so called sentence reader. Basically it breaks down the sentence you give it into words and even tells you, what grammatical structures were applied on those words. But in general the short term goal should be a better recognition of word boundaries. You don’t need to be perfect at it, but seeing the words that make up a sentence helps a lot while reading.
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