魔女の宅急便・Kiki's Delivery Service 🧧 Repeat Club

My book just came in and it’s the same format as this, so thanks for putting it together!

Really pleased with the hardcover and the illustrations. Looking forward to reading this book with a Ghibli playlist :y

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I bought the audiobook and I think it’s going to be very helpful. :slightly_smiling_face:
Thank you @kmurgs for mentioning the audiobook and @slither for providing the link. :pray:

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wow…this book is challenging … definitely way above my reading level now…annoying because I recognize more grammar and vocab, haha…at least ch1 is done for now…but when we reach the fast pace…probably not looking good for me …but who knows…maybe it will get easier :slight_smile:

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You’re not alone. I literally lost the plot right after あるところに…

Like those who read this story a couple of years back, it might be good to set a benchmark and revisit this in a couple of years to see how far we’ve come on our Japanese language journey.

Or, take the slightly saner option and choose something more suitable right now, thereby saving me from myself.

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I had a random thought in the midst of my insomnia last night. At the time it seemed like a good idea, but it probably isn’t!

Two things I’ve found frustrating reading through the previous chapter 1 thread are:

  1. unsurprisingly, the posts discuss the pages in variable order, so I had to search through to find the relevant posts (and there’s about 150)
  2. there’s fairly minimal blurring of what I would call spoilers, though maybe it’s just me, so when hunting through, I struggled not to see what was happening a few pages on

I was wondering if it may be worth making a post with a collation of the previous discussions by page number, essentially kicking off the official start of the reading, by quoting the previous posts.

Cons

  1. possibly quite difficult to do, though I’m happy to try having read through a few times
  2. the previous posters will presumably get loads of notifications about being quoted, which might be annoying

Thoughts?

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がんばってください :muscle:

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Did people not use page numbers? Cause I usually use the search function (‘Search this topic’) to find the posts I am looking for. Though I guess the different versions with different numbering throws that off :confused:

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They mostly did, but it’s roughly equally split between people reading two versions.

Hi

One thing thing that i love with reading book clubs are the vocabulary lists.

Yet one aspect that i find makes the experience difficult, is that the amount of discussion/answers in the thread for each chapter is hard to navigate, thus it is sometimes difficult to track specific sentences discussions and proposed translations. However, see some specific proposed/discussed sentence translations this is an important “task” that I try to fulfill when participating to it.

Wouldnt be a good idea to have also a spreadsheet of tentative/proposed/reviewed sentence translations ? That helps track and sum up the discussions ? Discussions could also focus on grammar points discussions and so on

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Hi! I noticed my japanese skills are probably too low for keeping up with this book. Nonetheless, I’ve started translating every sentence into german, so if you’re german too, this might help.

If you’re interested, you can help me out, too :slight_smile:

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The early chapters probably have the most comments, as there were more people reading at the start.
I think it was only the second bookclub pick on WK ever (hard to believe now, but there wasn’t even a Reading section on the forums, and @seanblue had to petition WK at length before they would create one) so the whole idea of blurring spoilers etc and all the other conventions of the various bookclubs hadn’t really been established. I’ve looked back at some of my old posts and thought 'oops, I wouldn’t do it like that now!". Sorry about that!

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Hmm, okay. It’s useful to get this feedback at this point. Going to think aloud a little here.

Original plan

A quick note to start that this was only the second book the club ever tackled, and thus some of the norms we now take for granted (blurring spoilers, including page numbers, etc) weren’t really established.

Then, if we look back at what I posted way back when:

… you can see I wasn’t really expecting people to trawl through the original threads, except where they happened to be able to find an answer through an easy search. At this point I didn’t realise that some people would be starting early and thus entirely dependent on those answers.

I was thinking even then though that it would probably be useful for new club members to do some summarising / collating, similar to what you suggest but a little less systematic and without the burden falling all on one person.

I hadn’t anticipated the spoilers issue.


I wrote a whole thing about new vs old threads here but it was a bit irrelevant. I might come back to this later :stuck_out_tongue:


New plan…??? :joy:

I think the headstart schedule is exacerbating what I was originally imagining would only be a small problem. I would hope that once we start ‘properly’ and people feel more comfortable asking questions / there is more support available, we will naturally err on the side of asking our own new questions, and hopefully people will step up to do some ‘natural’ summarising of the old discussion - I was certainly planning to do a little of this myself.

In the meantime though, if you are genuinely willing to put in what sounds like an enormous amount of work to me for these first couple weeks, I think it sounds like a great idea. Posts being out of order is an enormous headache for people to navigate, if nothing else.

We / you could then see how much work this is and whether it’s something we could all contribute to collectively for future weeks.

This doesn’t really solve the spoilers issue, unless the collating is completed right away by somebody who doesn’t mind spoilers / has already read through.


As a slight aside, I don’t have any experience running a club where people have different page numbers (aside from eBook readers not having page numbers) - any good ideas?

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I would be ready to contribute summarizing the most significant questions and answers/translations found in the original thread. Btw, I don’t mind spoilers.

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I think if everybody adds their book version to the page numbers, then somebody who reads the other book could probably find out the correct page numbers via the vocab spreadsheet? That would imply two searches though… but I think it is not viable to have people add both page numbers to each question tbh.

Also, one can always search for the Japanese text in question. I think this only works if the text is not in spoilers, but I don’t see a point in blurring the text in this book club anyway (as I guess that nobody in this book club is able to read and understand a Japanese sentence at a glance - I am certainly not able to do that).

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I think this is a good idea. Not that old discussion is bad, it’s certainly useful, but new questions are where we would most likely get the most benefit (I think there is benefit in asking a question and formulating an answer for yourself). At the very least, I don’t think anyone should be shy about asking a new question even if it has already been addressed earlier, if they are still confused.

I’ve just been searching through by the sentence or a part of the sentence instead of by page numbers since they are all so different. I think that might be the best option for searching.

Either that or if there were a large effort, we could make a table to convert page numbers between all the editions. In some ways, the vocab sheet already does some of this. Still, the person searching would have to search multiple times for each possible page number. So, I’m not sure this idea is ideal.

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Thanks @NicoleIsEnough and @slither - regarding page numbers, I totally agree that asking people to add all the page numbers to their question is unreasonable.

Yes, okay, I guess this will be the best thing to advise. I agree it’s not necessary to blur text - certainly I’m not personally at the stage where my brain naturally reads Japanese text without deliberate effort!

Yes - and while I don’t want to entirely duplicate existing effort, I also worry that the discussion won’t be particularly lively if people feel like they shouldn’t be asking too many questions or anything.

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I second that last point especially! I certainly hope that we can freely discuss everything without feeling like we have to be absolutely sure that it can’t be extracted from the old threads…

If someone wants to summarise the old threads in advance, I don’t think anyone would complain :wink: but I’m not sure if this is really necessary either. If someone asks a question, and I have already found the answer in the old thread, then I would certainly summarise the discussion then (and I would expect that others would too).

Someone more experienced with the book clubs is very welcome to correct me, but I plan to just use the old threads as another resource (very focussed on our book) for information to search and link to.

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I’m working on making myself a little “study page” for this in Notion. Should help me stay organized and keep track of vocab and such. I’m eager to get started! :smile:

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This is so pretty! What is Notion?

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Thanks!

It’s like a note-taking/spreadsheet/wiki creation tool. You can make your own personal pages with sub pages that link together. Sorry for not explaining it well. :sweat_smile: It’s got a bit of a learning curve, but it’s completely free.

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