霧のむこうのふしぎな町 ・ Mysterious Town Beyond the Mist (BBC) 🌬 🏘

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

image

check the box :wink:

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

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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.

Here’s the link for week 1.

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 =)

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You are always welcome to ask questions. :relaxed:
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. :relaxed:

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Thank you very much for your help and kindness!

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don’t worry too much about posting this in the wrong thread…

no one ever does that anyway, not at all…nope…never…zenzen :smirk:

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We’re starting the second chapter this week:

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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 :slight_smile:

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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 :sweat_smile:

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 :upside_down_face:
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.

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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 :sob: 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 :snail: 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… ]

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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:

  1. Read the material and understand what (little) I can. (There are so many vocabulary works I have yet to learn!)

  2. Read comments here and realize so many things I missed.

  3. Analyze random sentences and really understand them.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

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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)

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Didn’t 時をかける少女 have the same lack of kanji?

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It only lacked (some) high-school kanji, this book is also lacking junior high kanji as far as I can tell.

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Huh, I didn’t even notice. That’s unfortunate.

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Looking it up, aoitori bunko is aimed at primary and junior high school students, so the content is adapted to their target audience :woman_shrugging:
Not the best for learners with a focus on kanji, but at least that also removes all the weird expressions, metaphors and poetic stuff you may find in literature aimed at an older audience.

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Well said!!!

…one option would be using the polls that are generated at the beginning of the weekly read and if too many people fall behind by some percentage (taking into account how many people give up)…instead of changing the pace you could easily “postpone 1 week” and people could use that as catch up if it’s really needed. My engineering mindset at work…

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

We started with 30 then 26 then 20 readers… I don’t know the “typical” drop rates, but it that tells you anything … it is still early… Then looking at who’s behind 14, 19 to 45% … so it’ may be too early to tell if it’s too fast, but using the polls might be a good way to capture this and make “postpone a week or two for catchup” decision as needed. Just my engineering way of thinking :wink:

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Drop rates are fairly typical, I would say. Flying witch went 56 → 37 → 33 → 26 then stabilized at 23-24.
I tried the postpone strategy with Haruhi, but it didn’t have much effect :thinking: Could try that if the numbers do not get better soon…

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I usually look at the reading along numbers, not the total numbers, to see the drop rate. Either way, week 4 just started so you can’t judge that quite yet.

Haruhi was particularly difficult though, even for intermediate book club. So maybe that’s why. Not that I’m suggesting postponing for this book. I don’t care either way.

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I will rudely butt in and say this out of nowhere: I love you. :sob:

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