夜の名前を呼んで Beginner Book Club // Starting June 28

[hotdogsuplex]

Join the Beginner Book Club here!

Welcome to the 夜の名前を呼んで Book Club!

Natively level 22

Introduction

Mira, the main character, is a girl with a disease that causes darkness to seep from her body when she gets anxious. In order to cure her disease, she lives secluded deep in the forest with Rei, a kind-hearted doctor. By making jam from the stars that fall from the sky, trying to get up early to gain confidence, and cherishing each small daily detail, Mira gradually regains her former self.

However, one day, Rei’s friend, who is interested in Mira’s darkness disease, appears before the two of them, making Mira anxious…!

A healing story of an anxious patient and a kind-hearted doctor who face the wall of a disease that cannot be cured immediately.

View the original nomination post here.

How it works

We create a reading schedule with a set number of pages to work through each week. Each week, we create a new discussion thread for that week’s reading. In those threads, we discuss everything from vocabulary and grammar to the characters and story. We try to help each other by contributing to the shared vocabulary list, answering each other’s questions, and keeping each other motivated.

How do I join in?

• Get yourself a copy of the book (see “Where to purchase” below)
• Click on the participation poll below to let us know you’re planning to join in
• Set this thread to “watching” so you get updates on the group (go just past the last post in this thread, click on the grey box that says “normal” or “tracking” and change this to “watching”)

Where to purchase

Physical: Amazon JP, CD Japan.
Digital: Rakuten, BookWalker.

Reading Schedule

Week	Start Date	Chapters
TBD

Vocabulary List

• Frequency List

Warning: May contain spoilers.

Resources and Links

• Jisho is a popular online Japanese-English dictionary.
• ichi.moe is a tool for parsing out sentences. You can type/paste in a whole sentence, and it will try to break it down into individual parts.
• Deepl will translate a sentence from Japanese to English. It’s not always right, so if you want to check your translation, it’s often better to ask in the thread.

Discussion Rules

• Please use spoiler tags for major events in the current chapter(s) and any content in future chapters.
• When asking for help, please mention the chapter and page number. Also, say what version of the book you are reading.
• Don’t be afraid to ask questions, even if they initially seem embarrassing. All of us are here to learn.
• To you lurkers out there: Join the conversation; it’s fun!

Membership

Will you be reading with us?

• Yes
• Yes, but I might start late
• Maybe
• No

Which version will you be reading?

• Digital
• Physical

[hotdogsuplex]

Before I start looking at the chapters and drafting some schedules, I’d like to get a feel for everyone’s reading ability with an anonymous poll. For reference, Pokemon is about the same level, Look Back and Yotsuba are easier. I will favor lower level readers, so don’t hesitate if this is your first book. Poll closes on Sunday.

Is this your first book?

• Yes
• I have read books that are easier than this
• I have read books that are about the same level as this
• I have read books that are harder than this

[ChristopherFritz]

Everyone approaches reading a bit differently, based on their knowledge of grammar, vocabulary, and kanji, as well as experience in reading.

Here is how I plan to go about this volume, as someone who reads a lot but struggles to learn new kanji.

Vocabulary

I’m going in with the following vocabulary stats:

I should recognize 77% of the total words, even without furigana. This is a little below 「ひとりぼっちの○○生活」 where I’m at 81% and am comfortable reading with few lookups, and even further below 「ハナヤマタ」, another no-furigana series where I know 83% of the words and lookups are fairly rare.

Another 2% of the words, I’ve created SRS flash cards for in Migaku, to add to my daily reviews. It’s a small number (11 cards, covering 31 occurrences of vocabulary words in the volume), but that’s what happens when your vocabulary reaches a certain point. It’s difficult to find worthwhile words to create cards for unless you don’t mind venturing into creating cards for words you’ll see once, then you may not see again for over a year, if not much longer.

Of course, those words that come up only once happen to account for over 20% of the volume’s words I don’t know. So I’m still going to be looking up one in five words.

I should be able to make it through 67% of sentences without any lookups, 26% looking up only one word, and 7% of sentences will have me looking up two or more words. Comparable with other series I’m reading, such as 「ホリミヤ」.

Kanji

I’ve been on a years-long journey to find a way of learning kanji that works for me. Not there yet, but still trying different things.

This volume has about 374 unique kanji. Of those, I have 145 kanji as “I can’t associate a meaning with this kanji” and 145 kanji readings that I don’t know. (It’s not the same 145 kanji; it’s just a coincidence that both numbers are the same. Or a bug in my software that’s hiding some entries from me.)

Kanji can be a bit interesting for me, because I don’t recognize 匠 in isolation, and I don’t recognize it if I see 巨匠 or 意匠 or 刀匠.

But I sure do recognize,

In the end, it really is best to recognize kanji a part of a word. But I am still looking for opportunities to learn a kanji in one word, then use that to help me recognize the same kanji in another word.

Reading

My current plan (subject to change) is to read some pages during my weekday bus commutes. This will be reading on an e-ink reader with no lookups.

One of my goals will be to take a good look at any unknown kanji. As I won’t be looking anything up, the only thing I’ll know about the kanji is the parts and arrangement of parts that compose the kanji.

Then maybe over the weekend, I’ll re-read the material with Mokuro + Migaku:

Will I reach the end of the volume having mastered a ton of kanji? Or having barely picked up one or two? Only time will tell. (But probably closer to the latter.)

[hotdogsuplex]

We have two people reading for the first time, and one that has only read easier books, so we’re going to start off slow. This is the schedule I’ve come up with:

Week	Page number	Page count
1	3-12	10
2	13-24	12
3	25-36	12
4	37-60	24
5	61-84	24
6	85-114	30
7	115-134	20
8	135-154	20
9	155-188	34

We’ll start slow and quickly ramp up to the standard BBC pace. Like ChristopherFritz said in the BBC home thread, there are only 1300 words total and 674 unique words, so the first few weeks will give new readers a chance to start to familiarize themselves with repeated vocabulary. Let me know what you think.

If you want to pre-learn some vocab, we still have three weeks until starting, which is plenty of time to make good use of the manga kotoba deck.