大海原と大海原 ・Wadanohara and the Great Blue Sea (Absolute Beginners Book Club Starting in September)

I havent bought a whole lot of Japanese manga (just this one so far,) but, I grabbed a whole bunch of “future goal” books for free thanks to Bookwalker Freebies Thread. Getting those free books earned me Bookwalker coins, enough to get 100¥ off. I dont know about formatting issues but free and discounted things rank higher in my concerns.

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Amazon might actually be one of the more tricky options for buying digitally. I’ve not done it myself but I see people on here talking about needing to set up the device specifically to be linked to amazon JP and not to your own countries amazon.

Book Walker and Kobo linked in the opening post are both straightforward options where you just create an account, buy the book and then download it to the app on the iPad. I gave some tips on buying in Book Walker earlier in this thread.

From what I’ve seen on these forums neither site are particularly better than the other in terms of image quality, ease of use etc.

Some people like to do clever things with the file where they strip the DRM and turn the file into other formats - if you’re interested in doing that sort of thing you might want to look into the differences a bit more.

If you just want a simple way to get up and running you shouldn’t go wrong with Book Walker or Kobo for the iPad. Just make sure you buy the Japanese language version, sometimes people buy the English translation by mistake! If you follow the links in the opening post you’ll be on the right version.

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For anyone considering Kobo, the two “issues” I’ve had with it for the use of buying Japanese material are:

  1. You need to have a Japanese address set. (Likewise, for my separate US Kobo account, I need to have a US address set.) This is due to most books/manga being restricted to certain countries. There are web sites out there with the sole purpose of creating a real-looking fake Japanese address.

  2. There was this one time where the login captcha never ended for me. It keeped asking to click more and more images of cars and mountains and crosswalks. After running out of workarounds to try (different browsers, different devices), I finally tried using a VPN so the captcha would see me on a Japanese IP, and the captcha let me right through. This may have happened a second time, but otherwise no more than that in almost three years time.

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I personally use bookwalker and it works and formats very similarly to how kindle does on my Ipad. I do think it’s probably the easiest to set up out of the options since you do not need a Japanese address or a VPN.

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@bearytoast @ChristopherFritz @Micki @IzMantis

I ended up going the Bookwalker route based on your posts, it was easy enough! Thank you all for your help.

Looking forward to the discussions!

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Isn’t うな reading just when using for names? Why isn’t it おおうみばら?

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FWIW the furigana for the title is on the cover in small letter contained within a ribbon below the kanji

Screen Shot 2021-09-06 at 10.06.54 am

We also get the furigana for the title and author name at the top of the table of contents

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According to Wiktionary’s entry on 海原:

Originally a compound of 海 (u, compounding form of umi, “sea, ocean”) +‎ な (na, Old Japanese possessive particle, apophonic form of の (no)) +‎ 原 (para, “plain, field”).

The shift to bara occurred in Middle Japanese, an instance of rendaku (連濁).

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Think I’ll give this a try (also first post here :smiley:) watched someone play the RPG Maker game, didn’t know there was a manga too.

I’m halfway through the N5 grammar points in Bunpro and know very little vocab (though I can cheat a little since I know some Chinese, and the vocab sheets are very helpful ofc), curious to see how this will go ^^

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Sounds like were in a similar spot…but I know less grammar! Welcome aboard, may we both have a sucessful first book club.

Was the game good? I was thinking about trying to play it after reading the manga but I hear it has no furigana.

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TBH I don’t remember too much about it, it was a while ago :sweat_smile: but I think the game gets pretty dark/horror-y by the end, so if you like that kind of genre, it wouldn’t hurt to try, given that it’s free.

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Oh, its free? Big plus.

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Hey there! This will be my first book club and I’m very excited. Thank you for hosting this @bearytoast, I’m looking forward to challenging myself :grin:

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Welcome to the club! This seems to be a lot of people’s first book club, so I’m really excited to see how much we all learn by the end!

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Me too! Ive been studying the vocab list for the prologue.

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Thank you for the warm welcome! :grin: This looks like a lot of fun, excited to get going too.

Hi there @IzCreature! :wave: I’ve be doing so too, I hope I won’t be reading jisho more than the actual book haha

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Double same! it’s my first book club as well, I hope it goes well for all of us :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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I probably still will!

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In case anyone hasn’t bought it yet, you can read vol. 1 for free until the 23d over on cmoa.jp. Unfortunately that only covers the first two chunks of the schedule but I figured I’d mention it. I get all my manga from cmoa nowadays and they run free promos like this all the time.

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I have a Japanese friend I frequently exchange grammar help with-

Would it be helpful (or would anyone be interested) if I ask her to translate each section/chapter after we’re done with it so we can compare our translations and understandings?

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