夜カフェ ☕ Home Thread (Beginner Book Club)

Manga: Every page has illustrated panels. Most, if not all, of the writing is dialogue (internal or external) with little to no framing devices like you would see in a novel, besides maybe some world-building blurbs in some manga.

Light novel: Pretty much what it says on the tin. A fairly short written work that is fully in prose. Illustrations are often included, but as inserts in the chapters, and rarely do much besides add flavor (meaning you could skip the image, because it’s just showing a scene which is being described in the writing). They tend to be easier and significantly shorter than a full blown novel, if you are wondering what the difference is there.

This book is firmly in the light novel territory. Checking out the preview of the digital version will give you a decent idea of what you’re getting yourself into.

The difference is essentially the same as between a comic and a short novel (edit: or a novella, which was the word I was originally searching for but forgot) for terms that are more commonly used in English.

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Thank you very much for the thorough explanation. Well, this will be the first Japanese light novel I read. I’m both excited and a little nervous, but it feels like a good step in the right direction.

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When it comes to reading a light novel, it may feel like all your manga reading experience goes out the window. While a light novel may be a bit heavy on dialogue, you still have a lot of descriptive text (scenes and actions) that manga conveys through images.

Be forgiving with yourself, but also pace yourself and keep up a consistent reading schedule. (I’m hoping to take my advance on consistency this time around…)

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Ah I see, it certainly seems like this will be a different experience. But hey, we all need to move forward at some point, eh. I’ll certainly try my best to maintain consistency, and yeah, I’ll try not to get upset at every word or grammar point I miss XD

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Speaking of grammar, novels and light novels definitely do make heavy use of some kinds of grammar that rarely show up in manga.

In manga, I just sort of vaguely glossed over 「ように」 when it would come up (some series such as Flying Witch use it a bit more than others), then I attempted novel reading and it seems like ように is half the text on the page (I’m exaggerating, but just a little). I definitely had to learn it for real.

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I’m up to do it, I want to try LN reading with a book club for the first time.

I tried to read a WN I really like and it was too hard for me :frowning:
But well, maybe I find it harder to read because it’s the “unpolished version”. Anyways, I’m looking forward to reading this, I heard it was good for beginners since the language used wasn’t too hard

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I found a N1 grammar, this always makes me a bit happy because they are rare out there.

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Would someone with a physical copy be so kind and post the last full sentence on page 25? (or if there’s another seemingly good breakpoint on that page, maybe the last sentence there?) :smiley: Just so we can kinda set a goal for the end of week 2 :slight_smile:

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The last full sentence is それからダッシュで玄関から飛び出した。

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Thanks a bunch :heart:

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I think I’ll actually take a shot and try to participate in this book club. I’ve only done one full ABBC and am in the current one. I’ve read almost 10 volumes of manga now though so I’m not entirely new anymore. I expect it to be very difficult none the less though.

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So, when I come across some grammar points I don’t know, what is the best resource to look them up and read about them?

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In this comment in the Mitsuboshi Colors ABBC, I listed some resources that I personally use while reading in the dropdown! :grin:

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Ah, so searching “grammar-point + grammar” should suffice then. I bookmarked the comment, lots of useful resources I’ll hopefully put to use. Thanks :smiley:

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Yep, that usually gets me there! Usually the top results tend to include at least one of those sites.

Also, I was only barely learning about ichi.moe at that point, and so it was included almost as an afterthought, but I would say that it’s actually one of the most useful tools in the list after having used it for a bit more time. If you aren’t positive how a sentence breaks down, or don’t know where to begin parsing a sentence, it does an excellent (but not infallible!) job of breaking a sentence into distinct parts to give you an idea of what you should be searching in the first place. :grin:

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I’ll definitely keep that in mind :+1:

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I’m still in the process of trying to convince myself to join this book club by slowly struggling through the whole first chapter to prove to myself I’m up for it. But I want to, it’s been a while!

(Oh, and in case that wasn’t clear, I’m in way over my head. I’ll heavily use jisho.org and I’ll ask all the questions. よろしくお願いします!)

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I just got the book. I was curious and started to read the 3 first sentences. Seems to be a little bit difficult for me(it’s my first novel in Japanese) but in the meantime I can’t wait to start.
:smile:

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Don’t feel too intimidated.
The start is always the hardest with every new book in Japanese. You get used to the writing over time and combinied with the threads and vocab sheet everyone will surely be getting a lot out of reading when we stick to it!

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Just making sure here… do you mean the three sentences on the first page after the cover? The ones without furigana? If so, try the first sentences of the first chapter instead and see if that’s more your speed.

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