Sleep science compares effect of different wake-up times on weekdays vs weekend to jet lag though,
pushing the idea of “same time every day” 
But that probably doesn’t account for me not getting enough sleep on weekdays.
It’s time for another Read Aloud session! See you in the Discord channel in 30 minutes
Keeping up with the club and reading the same pages while others do so too at roughly the same time is one of the main reasons that keep me motivated. But it’s no good if trying to keep up causes too much frustration and headache. It needs to have a reasonable difficulty for me.
For now, I’ll just read something that I’m more interested in to read on my own until なぜ？どうして？科学のお話 starts.
It definitely is, but imho it feels more like a jump to intermediatey book club or something compared to Flying Witch. But I guess I’m still closer to an ‘absolute beginner’ than I’m to a ‘beginner’ 
, which is totally fine.
I thought about doing that, too. But I don’t see why I should do that if I can just read something easier where I have enough to look up, too. And I don’t really want to jump over lots of sentences, because I think that would just make eveything more confusing.
As someone who’s read novels from both beginner and intermediate book clubs, this definitely feels more on the beginner side (dialect aside). This shouldn’t be too surprising since this book is targeted toward native elementary school kids while the intermediate book club books have been targeted toward teens and adults.
My first real Japanese book was with the Beginner Book Club two years ago (魔女の宅急便) and it was also quite difficult for me. At that point, I’d only read two volumes of manga. I felt a lot of what I suspect you’re feeling right now, where you feel lost half the time and everything is overwhelming. For me, sticking through the book was absolutely worth it and I learned a ton, though it took almost half the book for things to really click.
Whether or not it’s worth continuing for you, I obviously can’t say. It’s highly dependent on your current abilities, your tolerance for pain, and how much free time you have. If you have any questions let me know and I’ll help if I can.
If you haven’t decided to give up yet… you should join the reading channel… there are all sorts of various reading levels… some are fast and slowing down and some are somewhere in the middle and some folks are brand new…but afterwards of if anyone is stuck the helpful durtles can answer questions 
Thanks @NicoleIsEnough and everyone…those might have been silly questions, but broke the log jam and I’m progressing again with this weeks reading.
want a nodding head gif… this is the same thing for me… I’ve only read Girls Last Tour and Flying witch… and yeah this (3rd book) is definitely painful… but I figure if I can just force myself to get through this I’ll learn a lot! Couldn’t do it though without the bookclubs moral support!
that and your purple level 60 circle…
haha… now I know for certain you are in cahoots with the crabigator
After girls last tour I did stop and realized I was in the deep end and couldn’t manage it, but this time I feel like it’s really pushing my abilities, but that’s the only way to learn… no pain no gain and all those clichés…but I was also level 10/11 in WK at the time and still lacked a lot of grammar.
This book, overall isn’t as bad as it appears…the challenges aren’t really grammar for me personally (which tells me it’s geared towards younger readers)… it’s new vocab, the lack of kanji (parsing) and the long sentences…with a dash of dialect thrown in just to torture us…
If it’s truly that difficult then postpone and read something that you’ll enjoy…there is no need to push yourself if you are just going to get discouraged and demotivated…I think the whole group just wants you to do well and succeed! (at least I think they do… )
They key for me here is the discussion here covers everything I don’t catch with the dialect. I do read the dialogue, but don’t worry if I don’t understand the dialect. I’m probably only hurting myself for not learning how to parse out the dialect, but if the dialect (mostly) goes away after chapter one, it won’t be an issue after that.
Worst case scenario for me, if no one asks about a specific sentence of dialogue, I ask about it here, and it’s pointed out to me that all the dialect bits were covered in discussions on prior quotes
Hello everyone, I am a bit late in the reading. Apparently the gap between the main reading group and me will increase in the future. That’s ok for me but maybe not very good for you because, for instance, now I would like to ask you about a sentence in page 8. Maybe it has been covered in previous answers but there are many messages and I couldn’t go through all of them.
So I have tow question:
1- in page 8: うまわりさん。まいごらしのす。–> I’ve read in the Google shared sheet that まいごmeans "lost child. However I haven’t get the meaning of the remaining part (らしのす). Could you help me?
2-this question is related to how to use properly this “forum” and it’s tools. For instance the question 1 could have been already asked, however as I was saying above, I could not find it because if I press ctrl+f It goes searching through the entire WaniKani community forum. Any hint?
Thank you in advance!
I can answer this one really fast…
I haven’t looked at your first sentence yet but it may already have been answered…but this is the quick way to search ONLY this thread… click the magnifying glass
check the box
then you can search just this thread…sometimes I find the box disappears for whatever reason… if I restart the computer it eventually comes back…might be some script I’m running or something
=======Edit : To answer your first question… see the post @ChristopherFritz mentioned below… moved this answer to week 1
For this book club, each week’s material is given its own thread. The home thread (this one you’re reading right now) has links in the first post leading to each week’s thread.
Using the search method @shuly outlines above on that thread should make it easy to find any already-discussed items for the first portion of chapter 1 =)
You are always welcome to ask questions. 
If they relate specifically to the text, it really helps everyone if you can ask them in the thread for that particular section of the book, rather than in the home thread.
Thank you very much for your help and kindness!
don’t worry too much about posting this in the wrong thread…
no one ever does that anyway, not at all…nope…never…zenzen 
We’re starting the second chapter this week:
Having followed this book for a few weeks now, and having listened to many of the fresh beginners who start to get behind or are already are behind, I’d like to ask the question whether maybe the pace of this book club is too high?
I compared the page numbers with Time Girl and Zenitendou and while we tried to stick with 10 pages max. there for both (only occasionally going to 11 pages), for the Mysterious Town we are happy to be above 10 pages most of the weeks. Now my impression is that Time Girl was more complicated language-wise, and I don’t know about the respective amount of text on the two books’ pages, so the larger amount of pages might be justified, but on the other hand we seem to have quite an amount of fresh beginner readers…
How do y’all think about it? Do the beginners who struggle think they might benefit from a slower pace? Or are you just way too overwhelmed to be able to keep up even with less pages per week?
Do the more seasoned readers think that this is just the way it is, and the beginners need to learn to read faster by doing more “muddling through”? Or should we try to improve the situation somehow? (What do you think would be a good improvement?)
Curious to hear your thoughts
As one of those fresh beginners, I’m currently catching up (in page 24 atm), but I think this is only possible because I’m still on holidays. Once I reach again the bookclub pace, I think I could do with ~10 pages per week, but I’m a bit scared of those weeks that go over 12. I’ve planned to dedicate about 1.5h daily to reading, and that should be enough at my current pace, but life always gets in the way somehow 
I remember there being a poll to decide whether week 12 should be divided or not, so maybe it could be split.
However, in the few weeks that I’ve been reading I’ve already felt an improvement both in understanding and speed, and I’m really into the story now. By that I mean that it now takes me about 40min-1h to read a page instead of 2h 
Having a completed spreadsheet also helps a lot and week’s 3 was very empty and I’m now adding most of the words that I look up but please don’t behead me if there are things wrong.
my 2c if anyone cares… my lessons start with my sensei this week so I hope to be able to keep up again, but this is quite honestly fast for me…that said, it’s not fast for those smarter than me and heck I see folks saying they read it 2 or 3 times…so clearly I’m slow 
but that’s ok…
I’d say see how the next 2 weeks goes and then maybe adjust the pace, or as long as people continue to support those of us that are 
pace it may not really be a problem … (I still see people appear to be reading flying witch long after we are done)… so as long as the thread is open and people are willing to help??? what’s the harm ??
[…my personal bias is slow down… haha but not necessarily fair to everyone else… ]
As a beginner to books, I’m one of the ones struggling to keep pace. I’ve considered commenting on weekly page count, but at the same time I know I’d be able to put more into the book if I wasn’t leaning more heavily in quantity of manga reading this year.
Currently, I’m keeping myself satisfied with:
-
Read the material and understand what (little) I can. (There are so many vocabulary works I have yet to learn!)
-
Read comments here and realize so many things I missed.
-
Analyze random sentences and really understand them.
-
Re-read material and look up any word I don’t know that comes up more than once, or that I feel wholly prohibits even partially understanding a sentence.
-
Plan to re-read the whole book again in the future.
I think I’d benefit from a lower page count (better understanding of the material by spending more time on fewer pages), but following my plan above, I feel I’ll at least keep my head above water with the current pace.
I do feel I was able to better follow what I’ve read of this week’s material, compared to prior weeks. (Since I’m on e-book and haven’t yet checked the final line for this week’s reading, I don’t know how far in I am.) But there’s still a lot of room for improvement on my part.
My first read through (of two whole read-throughs) is focused on reading speed over understanding. Naturally the more I understand, the better, of course. But I focus on being able to quickly read without having issues on what’s a particle and what’s part of a word. This is, naturally, a lot harder without kanji. Having so many words I don’t know doesn’t help, either. It may even be a bad strategy, but it’s what I’m trying out.
Hello,
I am a fresh reader and I am really late with the reading of this book. I am still at the beginning pages. The point is that I am writing on a workbook the book senteces one by one and then I am translating them with the help of the shared google sheet.
Likely with a slower pace I would fall behind anyway, but maybe not so much like now. I am considering anyway to move myself to the lower level absolute beginner.
However, do you think is too much to write the book senteces one by one in a separete workbook and then translating it?
Full disclosure: I’m not a beginner (not even close) so I know that this discussion isn’t directed at me but:
I feel it’s not possible to compare directly to 時をかける少女少女 because of (1) the lack of kanji here, making many words much longer in terms of characters, and (2) the font size, which allows for less characters per page.
Even at the same page count, we are effectively reading less content.
Now, that’s not a fair thing to say either; the lack of kanji makes it harder to parse a sentence, so the total amount of effort may be higher. When you factor in the dialect that came up in the first three weeks, I guess the entry cost is pretty steep for beginners.
The good news is that it should get better from here onward. I do not know the plot, but I assume most of it will take place in the town beyond the mist, so no dialect until a possible cameo of the policeman at the very end when Rina goes back home. (Again, that’s a complete guess).
At the end of the day, I think it’s “the way it is”. No matter the pace, it will be too fast for some and too slow for others. It’s perfectly fine to fall behind and keep asking questions in previous threads. And if even asking questions/checking answers isn’t enough, then yes, giving up for now and going for easier material is probably the saner thing to do. Trying to force your way through content that is too hard for you is the best way to get overwhelmed and burn out.
(Still, to whoever is on the fence about it, wait until you are past chapter 1)