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!
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:
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.
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.)
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?
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
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:
I understand thank you
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
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.
Can’t really tell you about the shonen jump version, but this is that same frame from the amazon version:
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.
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).
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
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?
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.
yes i noticed some mistakes
I like it because it separates correctly in Excel
I use quick mnemonics and I already study the full text
If I were to take it word for word it would be complicated
your spreadsheet is very organized
Is there a way or a setting within discourse to automatically unblur text and expand all the dropdowns in all posts in a topic?
TBH, I don’t think it’s necessary to blur every word or sentence fragment and yet that’s what I see being done by default. I really enjoy the discussion and learn a lot from it, but it becomes overly click happy to expand everything to read the posts. This hinders accessibility.
I don’t want to spoil people’s experience with spoilers, but can we perhaps have some stronger guidance on what exactly needs to be blurred or hidden in a dropdown?
I hide most things, mainly because in my mind, if I were to look for the explanation of a grammar point, I might not want to see anything else to see if I can figure it out on my own.
Unfortunately not, no.
Apart from avoiding spoilers, the dropdowns also have another purpose: Making it easier to quickly find things that are interesting to you. Basically, any question or answer that applies to specific pages is best put into a [details=“Page xy”][/details] dropdown - if not, it’s very hard to follow discussions for certain pages.
I understand that this is inconvenient for somebody who wants to read the whole thread, and in the beginning I was occasionally annoyed by it too, but it’s very useful for other people.
It might be something scriptable (or there even might be one), though, for those who like to play around with that kind of thing.
