君の名は - Your Name (Intermediate Book Club)

Fuel cells sound really interesting! Please let us know when it comes out!

It sounds like a lot. But you must be trying to level up really fast, with 2 hours of reviews a day. You could slow down on that and maybe still have time to read.

2 Likes

Well, yeah kind of. I paused learning JP (or at least WK) for about three quarter of a year. Now I want to get back to this status asap, so I’m actually repeating 1-2 levels a week and resurrect everything I didn’t instantly recognize (which is roughly 50%).

Why do I want to get back to level ~40 so fast? Because I am too lazy to look up so many kanji while reading 君の名は. It’s strange, but this is how I work. I also started learning JP because I’m too lazy to read subtitles in anime… :man_facepalming:

Sounds like a good plan. Even if it feels wrong to neglect WK reviews for any reason (which is a fact, I kind of engraved in my subconsciousness).

~T :lion:

2 Likes

Picking up the pace a bit this week!

10 Likes

Hi I am very late to this, but I loved the movie so much and got very excited when I discovered you are reading this book. I just finished battle with amazon.jp and now have the book downloaded. I got the furigana version, which feels a bit like cheating, but I think it’s the only way I can get through it fast enough. I hope I can catch up to where you are now!

9 Likes

I think of it like training wheels on a bycicle. They help you get used to the feel of riding a two-wheeled vehicle, and sure, they don’t let you fall, but you still have to ride the bycicle, right? And then once you don’t need them anymore you drop them easily and say goodbye forever. So with furigana, they give you the reading, but you still have to know the meaning and make sense of the sentence, so considering you still have to put in the work, I wouldn’t say it’s cheating.

頑張って . :muscle:

10 Likes

This week finishing up the first proper chapter!

5 Likes

I’m kicking myself because I just found out that on a random run in Shinjuku a few years back, I could have gone a few blocks over and seen the stairwell.

8 Likes

Ah, there’s so many times I’ve discovered after returning home from Japan that I passed within a block of some famous or scenic location without having the foggiest idea it was there.

Lemme see how close I’ve ever come to those stairs…

Ah, Shinjuku Gyoen is the closest I got. I went to see the place from The Garden of Words. :slightly_smiling_face:

5 Likes

Here the thread for Week 4:

よろしくね!
~T :lion:

5 Likes

Thanks, forgot to post it here too :sweat_smile:

1 Like

@morteASD Would you mind editing the OP to include links to each week?

3 Likes

One month in.

5 Likes

Heyy ! 3x

Just hopping in to ask a slightly off topic question!
We’re a smol group of people that want to read our first novel in a few weeks after having finished some Manga and we’re a little indecisive between Kiki’s Delivery Service and Your Name.

To those of you that have read a little of both, would you say one is significantly harder than the other?
Thanks for your help image

2 Likes

While you wait for responses, have look in the discussion threads, where some questions have been posed and answered. Is that about the level of difficulty you’re looking for?

2 Likes

Your Name has almost double the unique vocabulary, and I feel like the writing is a lot more abstract, too. I’d probably not start with it as a first novel, since it also has a lot of slang/dialect.

6 Likes

This. Also, the book contains a fair amount of dialect which makes certain parts of it an extra chore to read.

Kiki’s Delivery Service is quite a bit easier I think.

5 Likes

A big advantage to Kiki as a first novel is the already-existing vocabulary lists created by previous book clubs.

5 Likes

Just a FYI, both have readymade vocab lists at koohi.cafe (previously at floflo).

8 Likes

I haven’t read Your Name beyond a couple a page, but I would say go with Kiki’s. Because the narrator’s voice is in “fairy-tale” mode, it mostly uses polite language, with little slang, and things are generally fairly explicit/non ambiguous language wise.

As has been previously mentioned, Kiki’s also has a fully populated vocab spread sheet AND because it has been read by two separate book clubs, the threads (especially for the first half) are extremely extensive, with pretty much any possible tough bit addressed. The first chapter was a challenge (largely because I hadn’t read a novel before and wasn’t used to longer sentences), but after that, it is very manageable with perhaps low to mid N4 grammar profiency with the helps of the spreadsheet and threads.

11 Likes

Aww nice! That is encouraging to someone currently at low to mid N4 grammar level haha. Looking forward to giving Kiki a shot!

8 Likes