三ツ星カラーズ Volume 1 (Absolute Beginner Book Club)

Bad at teaching, he says…

I think that’s an excellent idea, especially for those just starting out!

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Excellent work on the vocab spreadsheet! The colored page numbers look nice and the word frequencies will be super useful. I love how the first ✭✭✭ frequency word is “poop”. I think I’m going to enjoy this manga. :laughing:

I’m going through the first chapter now a bit ahead of time. It looks like somebody beat me to populating the vocab sheet (thanks!), but I’ll try to fill in any gaps I find. I know it was super useful in my first book club, and honestly it’s still super useful now.

Question: What do we think about adding proper names to the vocab sheet when it’s unclear? Just for the first time they appear. I can’t remember how often I’ve seen this in past vocab sheets, but I feel like it’s come up before.

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Do you mean names and such?
I’m all for it. In my personal vocabulary sheets I usually add a sheet at the very beginning for that, because those names will come up again and again and I will forget them again and again.
But maybe that’s just me …

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I think I’ve seen in the past where a name or two has shown up in a vocabulary sheet. I think there’s no problem doing so. (I did exclude names from the frequency list, or else they kind of threw off the numbers due to being the most common words.)

I’m planning to include a “characters in this week’s reading” section in each weekly thread, as well.

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Not just you! My notes for Wadanohara (which just recently finished) have a bunch of character and kingdom names at the top, along with a reminder of who/what they actually are.

Sounds useful! Especially if there are a lot of characters that are different between chapters.

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Luckily it’ll be mostly the same characters. There are only eight characters total to get to know for volume one =)

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If you have time to (and haven’t done so already) try and at least skim over casual grammar, since there’s both a casual and formal form for a number of grammar topics.

I never got far in Genki I (I just found other things that held my attention better), but from what I can tell, it focuses on formal (or at least teaches that form first. I got far enough in the book to see that it starts with です instead of だ for expressing state of being, for instance.) I’m willing to bet that a manga with three young children as the main characters will feature a lot of casual speech, so it would be good to know how to recognize it.

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On that subject, as someone who went through Genki not all that long ago, what I think tripped me up (and, well, there are so many that they still trip me up at times) most were the contractions. For a basic overview, I think it might be helpful for new members to keep this thread on hand. This manga is new to me, but most of these seem to show up pretty much everywhere you look. Of course, all questions are still welcome too :slight_smile:

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One more day until we begin!

I don’t recall if I mentioned, but I expect to post the first week’s thread around 2021-11-12T23:00:00Z. I’ll target the same weekday and time for each week’s thread.

One of the core aspects for Mitsuboshi Colors is the main characters protecting the peace of their (まち).

Are you familiar with the word まち? WaniKani covers this kanji, but not as a vocabulary word on its own.

A (まち) is essentially a bustling commercial district lined with shops, malls, restaurants, and so on. Often there will be various transportation stations, such as a bus station and a train station. In western countries, we use terms such as “downtown” or “city centre” for something similar.

Be careful not to confuse it with (まち), which WaniKani teaches at level 4. Although the two are read the same, 町 refers to a town, a place where people live in dense clusters.

A 町 is a wider area that may contain 街.

Whether まち is written 街 or 町, it’s the same word with a different nuance. If you encounter this word in an audiovisual medium, you’ll need context to know how wide of an area the speaker is referring to. But for written media, we have the advantage of kanji to help us along.

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And here I was thinking they just wrote it funny in the manga :joy: thanks for the info!!

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As soon as I read まち, my brain just shut out the fact you used an unfamiliar kanji, and I spent a paragraph of that thinking: wow, my conception of what まち represents was really off, huh. The club hasn’t even started and I already learned something, but you had me really questioning myself for a moment.

Could say I made a real まちがい there.

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A まちガイ? :stuck_out_tongue:

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!!!

That makes my terrible joke even better; I didn’t know about those readings, thanks :sweat_smile:

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I kinda just glossed over it looking at the bookwalker copy on my phone assuming it was just fuzzy and low res and didn’t really notice :sweat_smile: :sweat_smile:

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This is the best thing ever =D

Aside from (まち), we’ll also be seeing 商店(しょうてんがい).

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@ChristopherFritz Can you add 「(さい)(とう)」, the police officer’s name, to the list of names ignored in the word frequency count? I could just remove the formula from that row, but I have a feeling it affects the relative frequency of other words.

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Done.

His name showing up is “uncommon” enough that it doesn’t throw off the rating stars any, but I went ahead and removed it for consistency, as well as a few other forms of names that come up.

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Ohhhh that’s cool!
I heard 商店街 a bunch but never broke it down, it always amused me it sounded a bit like “shopping”, maybe shopping-ten-guys.

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So I broke down and ordered a paper copy of the book - hopefully it will arrive before we are too far into things. Since I am really an ABSOLUTE beginner, one of the things I am hoping to get out of this club is to start to generally understand sentence structure and parts of speech a bit better. Why paper? - because I want to photo copy it for myself to write on the pages and take notes. I am finding it challenging to use the electronic version already. I’m a bit of a dinosaur age-wise so I am usually more comfortable with paper anyway. Looking forward to the first week!

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In the meantime, if you read along on Pixiv, from a desktop computer or laptop you should be able to:

  1. Right-click on a page image.
  2. Select “open image in new tab”.
  3. Print the single page image from there.

Japanese manga is typically a little smaller than what the US (and I imagine other western countries) is used to, but as long as you’re writing on photo copies, you’ll be able to enlarge the copy.

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