I am working through Bunpro at a slow pace. I’m half way through N4. I started with the head start schedule and I’m finding it manageable.
I think it would help if you also had a bit of reading experience with other books - I’ve also been doing a couple from the ABBC.
I’m around N4 level too, and it’s manageable! There are a lot of long sentences, and sometimes it can be confusing to follow along with the story – but the threads and vocab sheet help a lot 
There are chapter summaries that I find helpful to confirm my understanding. And reading the ebook version takes away some of the difficulty reading a book without furigana.
Thank you! I’ve been reading Doggy Detectives with the absolute beginner club, and it’s been going great, so I wanted to try something more difficult. I think I’ll give it a go!
Thank you! The vocab sheets are incredibly helpful aren’t they - I wouldn’t have imagined they would make such a difference. I’ve got an ebook, that’s a good point about the furigana.
Yes, that’s one of my other books. And I struggled with it at first. So if you’re ok with it, I’m sure you’ll be fine.
Main issue is volume as it’s more reading each day so I’d jump in soon!
That’s pretty much right where I am. I’m starting the final chapter of genki II this weekend. I’ve had only minor trouble with the grammar. It’s been pretty manageable overall. You may have some trouble with the vocabulary though. Having the extra time before starting to begin the Anki deck has been huge for my comprehension. But, if you can manage to catch up, you should be able to start preparing for future chapters.
Heads up to anyone who stumbled through audiobook.jp, I realised I accidentally signed up for a subscription rather than a one off purchase when I got charged again today 
So if you couldn’t read everything on the site like me, you might want to check!
Thanks for the info! I was afraid this might happen, but I didn’t see anywhere to control such option, so I was on a “wait and see” with the one-month point coming up in a few days.
Upon looking at it today, I found that I can view subscriptions here (when logged in):
Sure enough, I was signed up for the ¥1,100/month plan. There was a button next to it that I just now clicked and unsubscribed. (Green button = not subscribed; white button = subscribed.)
Edit: You can view your credit card informaiton here:
If you cannot remove your card, it means you have an active subscription. That’s what had me confused back when I signed up, that I couldn’t remove my credit card information. Now that I canceled the subscription, I was able to remove my credit card information.
Oh gosh, I’ll feel terrible if loads of people end up getting charged extra for this.
I hope you’re able to find another book to make the second month worth it at least 
Alternate view: This is motivation to increase our Japanese-learning efforts.
I managed to buy audiobook without creating subscription, so it is possible, but I don’t remember now which options I was choosing…
But thanks for the clear info how to check for sure, because I got paranoid after your posts anyway and I was happy for a way to confirm 
I just checked on another audiobook, and I think I clicked this tiny link-that-doesn’t-look-like-a-buy-button when I bought Kiki because I recognized “fixed price” in the text… But it’s so much smaller than the huge pink button!
If you click the pink one instead, you get a page with text where it talks about a monthly fee:
Ironically when buying the book club book I gave up reading too quickly 
I found reading the site difficult and stopped trying, I just ended up going mostly off the UI. But I’d already learnt how to read ‘fixed price’, ‘every month’, ‘member’ and ‘monthly amount’ on Wanikani. If I’d tried I would probably have worked it out.
I guess the book club’s taught me not to give up 
Yeah I wish I could skim read in Japanese 
Until then I try to be careful when buying on Japanese-only websites, because even in English I get tricked sometimes by UX anti-patterns
At least now we know for next time! Thank you for the heads up
Yay! For me there’s nothing that feels as great as being able to successfully identify and understand a known vocab word in the huge real-life-SRS that is out there 
Continuing the mega chapter!
I’m behind why do I always fall behind at the beginning literally every single time
LOL!!! “Real life SRS”. Honestly, crazy how little I can pick out on a random website page… 頑張って!! I’m not giving up!!
I’m grateful that you all brought this up about accidentally subscribing! I checked and I’m STILL not certain what I did!! But thanks to @ChristopherFritz, I believe that since I was able to delete my credit card info that I probably wasn’t only “subscribed” ?? I hope?? It at least I hope that it won’t suddenly cut off my ability to listen to the Kiki book that I think I “bought”!
Now onto related matters: if ANY if you can ACTUALLY LISTEN TO/COMPREHEND this audiobook, I am SUPER IMPRESSED!!
I’m listening to this rather often, sometimes trying to follow along as the narrator goes… And I am UNABLE to comprehend what is being said. Now…(I think I’m about 2/3 way through translating Chapter 3) when I listen to Chapters 1 and 2, it’s STILL VERY DIFFICULT to comprehend (mostly because I’m not 100% on memorizing the vocab used just because I had “successfully” {ahem} translated it once). As it plays on and I listen ahead, I can still only pick out a word here and there (and pathetically, those words are usually Kiki and Jiji, 男の子…) Of course by now I can practically recite the opening lines of chapter 1.
I’M SO GRATEFUL TO HAVE BOTH THE AUDIOBOOK AND THE PAPER COPY!! Thank you for bringing up the idea originally!!
I do understand some if I listen before reading (enough for some spoilers, so I stopped doing that) – but I understand much better after reading!
I don’t translate the book line by line (not using this specifically as study, but more for the pleasure of reading) – but I do read over harder passages multiple times and break down some longer sentences.
So when I listen to the audiobook I know what happens and can pick out most keywords in a sentence to follow along (if I’m concentrating enough of course). I’m used to listening to things at full speed and missing a lot anyway, so it doesn’t bother me that I don’t get every single word
(BTW I’m generally about N4 level, but I’ve been around this level for…a few lazy years now )
I expect a large part of the difficulty to be a lack of knowledge of vocabulary. When I listen to Studio Ghibli’s animated adaptation of the story, I can catch a lot of words. When I listen to the audio book, I’m lucky if I catch at least one word per sentence (and that’s after having carefully gone through each line of the chapter one by one and looked over each word’s meaning).
And that’s listening at about half speed.
I wonder if it has a lot to do with intonation patterns. My English hearing ear is confused by the patterns of intonation in Japanese-- I often have trouble hearing where words start and stop. I do find that listening to the same audio over and over helps-- I pick out more words I know each time, so the remaining words become a little more discrete. Words like 男の子 are easy to pick out because the intonation is so distinctive. It’s hardest to understand when a word starts with a low tone and then ends high and flat, so that the first syllable gets lost, and the end of the word runs together with whatever comes after it.
FYI, to help with this, I love Japanesepod101.com-- they have a free Word of the Day. You get an e-mail every day. The valuable part is the audio of the example sentences, which are voiced by a native speaker, so you can hear how the word sounds in context. If you sign up for the word of the day, you will also get a crap load of marketing emails, but しょうがないね.
