魔女の宅急便 (Kiki's Delivery Service) Home Thread - Beginner's Book Club

That’s awesome! Thanks so much for sharing :grin: I’ll include it in the OP

That is super useful! Thanks!

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I am really excited for this! I have never read a Japanese book with a group! I ordered it, so hopefully it comes soon!~

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Welcome! ^^ we’re reading chapter 1 this week, so if you’d like to read along in the meantime while you wait for your book, you can request a free sample from Amazon that’ll give you access to the first 2 chapters :slight_smile:

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Thank you! I will be sure to do that!

Eh, 26 weeks?!
So we don’t do よつばと!vol 2 until, what, June 2018?!
:anguished:

You could give it a shot on your own if you want. I read half of it when I was on vacation a couple weeks ago and have just one chapter left now. It’s not too bad and there’s a free vocab sheet for volume 2 as well.

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Yes, of course, you can read any book on your own, but it is so much better with the group. That’s why this group exists. Reading vol.1 together was brilliant.

We had no idea when we were discussing which book to read next, that よつばと!would get a month, but other books would get six months.

But yes, June will soon come around. Although, to be fair, I think we ought to read both vols 2 AND 3 in order to redress the balance a litle! :wink:

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Are you sure you don’t want to give Kiki a try?

Since you’ve successfully completed よつばと!, you should have enough knowledge and skills to start it.

Of course, the material is more complex and text density is much higher. But this is exactly the reason why we are taking six months, as compared to one for Yotsuba.

Decided I will join too. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep up with this and the other book club…

First impressions are: this is really not all that easy! I’m impressed people can make the jump from Yotsuba straight to this. I’ve finished the first chapter but a reread is definitely in order.

Edit: @Raionus: Thanks so much for that vocab list. I’m using your suggested method and it makes reading so much more convenient!

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Well, that makes me feel a little bit better about the fact that I’m looking up pretty much everything and it takes me about an hour to read a page. xD Definitely above my grammar level, but…I like to suffer, apparently. :upside_down_face:

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Correction: people are trying to jump right from Yotsuba to Kiki. :sweat_smile:

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Thank you, but I struggled through よつばと!vol.1, it was tough work (although also great fun)!
There’s no way I could do Kiki right now (though I’d love to!). I’m better off using the next six months to study and to do a bit of preparatory reading of vols 2 and 3.
Thanks though! :smile:

When you realize you’ve spent ten minutes trying to figure out what the first line says, and it turns out to be a simple ‘story starts’ :no_mouth:

Thanks for the collaborative vocab stuff everyone!! It’s been really helpful. Having said that - it is expected that people around my level will have to use something like google translate? I’m having trouble with knowing where the words end since it’s a lot of hiragana… any advice would be really appreciated!

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I hope you don’t need to fall back to google translate… :hushed:
Anyways, I totally agree that it is hard to figure out the individual words. I usually try to use some heuristics for this, like:

  • a kanji usually marks the start of a word
  • if you find は、が、に、で、etc. after a kanji, that’s often a particle and does not belong to the next word. Sometimes there are two particles in a row, e.g. には.
  • When you find a verb ending, like ます、て、etc. then you can work your way backwards from there.
  • From what’s left, I try to enter some hiragana into jisho.org and see if something can be found - then I try to extend or shorten the word I am searching for.

Sorry if this sounds overly simplistic, this is just my way of trying to make some sense from a text when I don’t know the vocabulary.
I am aware that many of these suggestions can be totally wrong and misleading in some situations - please take them with a grain of salt :wink:

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A good trick that I use some times when I am unsure, is to just type in a whole sentence or the chunk you are unsure about into Jisho.org. and search. It usually ends up separating the words pretty well for you.

Oh crap…just noticed NicoleRauch mentioned this in her more comprehensive and useful answer…

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I’ve really fallen behind with this one. With よつばと! I raced ahead, but with this one I’m about half way through the second page. Grammar and vocab are a big problem, but the main problem is just lack of time. Over Christmas I’ve just gotten more and more busy (working, studying for exams, etc.) so I’ve only managed around a sentence everyday. Hopefully after this next week, I’ll be able to put an afternoon aside to catch up.

Great idea. Please add me to the member list!

(First post on the boards. Hello everyone!)

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Can you add me? I’ve had the book for years, now’s a great time to start reading it.

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Added :slight_smile: