大海原と大海原 ・Wadanohara and the Great Blue Sea Absolute Beginners Book Club Prologue Thread

Yes this is the main reason why I need to edit the schedule :sweat_smile: :sweat_smile: :sweat_smile:

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I’m glad you found the reading enjoyable! (and yay for progress!) I know a lot of people usually like to start reading a little early for various reasons, so I figured it would be good to get the first thread up.

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The schedule has been updated! If the page count or starting page look slightly off it is because I excluded page breaks (they usually have two page breaks between chapters) and chapter title pages (so the chapter start page may be 1 page ahead of the table of contents) please let me know if you have any questions!

Also as @Micki said this is based of the number printed in the bottom of the page of the book as opposed to the bookwalker page count.

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You’re welcome, I’m delighted it’s helpful :grin:

A lot of my Anki vocab deck is made from me cross-comparing the vocab sheets for various manga (to try avoid learning rare words early on).

In terms of a vocab deck you might want to exclude a few of the words, particularly from the first page, as I haven’t seen them before and I’m not sure how likely they are to come up again in this book.

1st page words I'm not sure are worth SRS-ing

過ぎ去る, 幾度, 照らす

For 変わらぬ its probably more useful to learn the root / more-common form first - 変える to change

For 今宵 you might want to be careful as there are multiple ways of expressing tonight/this evening, I hadn’t encountered this one before, but I’m also new to this.

Also note that for 2 of the words (又 and 君) I added the Kanji in but they appear in the prologue as kana (the notes column says this).

If you’re SRS-ing vocab from it then it’d probably be very helpful to see those words used in context :wink:, so for at least the book seems quite approachable (again, if you ignore that scary 1st page).

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Youre probably right, but I was also thinking I wanted to cram on the vocab so I would recognize the words when I finally do see them and reading would be easier :thinking:

I do have my srs vocab decks set to sort by how common the word is, so I may not see those for a while anyways.

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These look great, thanks!

It might be useful to update the first post in this thread with a link back to the home thread.

Awesome! That should solve it then.

Are you primarily doing recognition (kanji/kana → English meaning)? or also reproduction (English meaning → kanji/kana) ?

If you are doing reproduction you might need to be careful with words with very similar meanings, I’ve had problems before with the various ways of saying night/tonight/evening :sweat_smile: (which is why I was worried about 今宵)

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Both. But it includes multiple meanings. I do often only memorize one, but at least Ive seen the others.

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My wife is giving me hell, because I bought this book and it’s just sitting around. I had to check that I hadn’t missed the start of this adventure! One more week, it looks like.

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I added a home thread link above the schedule!

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Just read through, with the aide of my trusty dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar. I think I got a good sense of the gist, butexcited to discuss when we start properly :slight_smile:

That first page was intense, but after that much plainer sailing (pardon the nautical pun…)

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I bought the book last night and read the first text box this morning…It probably took me half an hour.

I think this will be quite the adventure and I should probably continue reading ahead so I don’t fall too far behind haha.

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Do you mean the first text box on page 1 (the colored page before table of contents)?

If so see my comment above about the difficulty

The first text box on the start of the prologue (page 3) is

Summary

ここが魔女の国…

If you get stuck on a sentence then ichi.moe can breakdown a sentence into its parts, but it doesn’t give a full translation so you still have to do some work, which is probably ideal for a book club. Note that it isn’t 100% perfect, so far within this book for example it’s got confused 1-2 times, but it is generally pretty decent.

Here is ichi.moe breaking down that first text box from page 3.

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Nah, I’m talking about page 1, the colored one. The first text box doesnt have difficult grammar/words, I just spent a long time trying to turn 変わる into 変わらぬ before realizing jisho lists them as seperate words.

I miiight not read the rest of the colored page but I think Im going to at least try.

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Stoked for this to kick off!

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I believe they are actually both forms of the same word, ぬ can be used to create a negative form but it is more of an archaic way of doing so - gives sort of an old-timey feel. Jisho might list the latter since it’s a more common expression perhaps. Here’s a brief article on ぬ - not too detailed, but should give you enough to understand the general idea I think

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That’s the missing piece for me, thank you! I knew あ stem is used to add negative helper, but couldnt figure out where the ぬ was coming from.

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Usually the opposite is true. If you read ahead you can waste a lot of time because you don’t have the benefit of the club supporting you. If you are a bit behind it’s easier as the vocab sheet is complete, and your translation questions will generally already be asked and answered here.

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For what it’s worth, you sound a lot like I did at the start of the last book club, so I expect you’ll be feeling a lot better about reading some of this before you know it :slightly_smiling_face:

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How likely is it that ぬ as making negative will show up often? Bunpro lists it as N2 grammar, so Im guessing its rare enough not to study for now? (Im still working on N5 grammar.)

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I mean it’s listed as N2, but it’s a really simple point - just keep it in the back of your mind and you’ll see it pop up again. Maybe you will have forgotten by the next time you see it, but that’s ok, you just need to look it up again. Rinse and repeat, and after a point you won’t even blink twice when you come across it

N-level doesn’t really correspond to difficulty exactly - it’s not something I recommend worrying about too much unless you actually are studying for the JLPT. Reading native material is going to have you running into grammar at all levels, and so you’ll start picking up bits and pieces from all over

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