The Absolute Beginner Book Club is NOW VOTING on what book we’ll read after this one. Click here to go to the poll.
There are 8 choices and you get three votes. Have a look through the nomination posts to see a brief description of the books, and some sample pages, and then cast your votes!
The poll will stay open for a few days.
(For those who want to carry on reading the other volumes of レンタルおにいちゃん there will likely be a spin off club for continuing this series - assuming there is an interest in this)
This is my first book/manga that I read and I didn’t really learn any grammar before. Without the discussion in the forums, I probably would have given up already. For now I slowed down WK lessons and started to learn grammar.
I didn’t think to reread but that is an excellent idea and I am curious how much I will remember
It’s a little easier than I thought it would be if only because the first thing I tried to read before was a children’s book and that felt very hard.
I haven’t chimed in with questions yet, but I’ve been finding the threads so through in going through the grammar.
I appreciate the time you all put into it!
Here’s the link to the week 5 reading thread posted a day in advance as I’m going to be busy tomorrow. Keep going everyone we are making steady progress through this book!
I don’t think I’m going to be getting any quieter on Fridays - I think I’m just going to keep putting up the new threads on a Thursday evening (UK time). Hope that’s ok for everyone. Week 6 thread is up!
By the way, I’ve just ordered volumes 2-4 from Amazon. I’m confident enough now that I’d like to read the rest! Hoping the spin-off book club continues with them!
This is my first book club. I’ve only been on WaniKani for about a week or so, but I’ve been studying Japanese on my own for about two years. I’m super excited to have a community to help me read my first Japanese book!! Thank you for setting this up. I’ll try to catch up with the group quickly.
If anyone fell behind on chapter 2 and wants to jump back in - you might want to skip ahead to chapter 3 which was a lot more straightforward. If you want to know what you missed in chapter 2…
Chapter 2 summary
Kanami is at school. Children’s families are invited for the day to hear the children’s presentations on recent family memories. Kanami brings rental big brother, and reads an essay about her day with him. He realises how important he’s become to her. A spiteful girl in class sets up Kanami to make it look like she stole something from her. Kanami feels bad but takes comfort in the fact that rental big brother believes she is innocent.
This is the first book in japanese I read. I will try to finish genki I in next 1 or 2 weeks and learn the vocabulary sheets. After that, I’ll push hard to catch with the team !
For anyone else reading physical, I’ve been really getting use out of these post-it markers I added to separate the weeks! It’s nice not worrying about where each week begins or ends, and being able to quickly open to a certain section when I see a new forum post on that week’s thread.
The dots are added when I’ve finished that week’s reading. That way I don’t even need to remember what week we’re on lol
Since I buy e-books from Kobo, they are in the EPUB format. EPUB format is basically a zip archive file with specific text files that allow an e-reader to know things like the book title, the cover image, the table of contents, etc.
Most EPUB books available for purchase will have a Digital Rights Management encryption applied to them. Programs that support this encryption method (such as Kobo’s e-reader application) are able to view the book.
My computer’s operating system doesn’t have any “DRM approved” e-readers, so I use a program to remove the DRM from the manga I buy. Removing this DRM encryption from a file is a legal gray area, so I won’t talk about how this is accomplished.
Without DRM, an EPUB file can be “unzipped” (because it’s just a zip archive), and all the pages of the manga are images in a folder.
And for Pixiv: Painstakingly downloaded them one by one by one by one!
That’s great! I only bought from BookWalker so far and, while the whole buying and cross-platform experience is very easy, I really hate their viewer. Don’t know if it’s me that doesn’t know how to use it properly, but it keeps logging me out, the zoom feature doesn’t work intuitively, I cannot mark it or do sane annotations, etc.
I’ll try to buy from Kobo next time and unlock the mysteries of EPUB by myself so I can use the tools that I’m already most comfortable with, thanks for the tip!