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

Yep, it would definitely be connected to this thread if that’s the route we go.

I just can’t process the pros and cons myself right now :sweat_smile: obviously I imagine we’d use the existing discussion threads, because many of our questions will already be answered and there’s no point duplicating effort.

And I guess I would at least edit this OP to point people towards the re-read thread.

Also @Momoiro just in case you’re still around anywhere :eyes: :cry:

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My prior post a couple of months ago covered the kanji across the whole Kiki series. With the amount of interest in a re-read, I ran the numbers for book one alone.

  • Unique Kanji: 681
  • Total Kanji: 10,264

Screenshot_20200324_151614

This chart says, for example, that at the end of level 20, one should recognize 68.72% of the unique kanji in book one, and 88.23% of the overall kanji. For anyone who (like me) has a copy of the book without furigana, it’s nice to know. (Maybe I should do a per-chapter breakdown?)

Edit: The four kanji not covered by WaniKani are:

  • 咳 (four times, in 咳ばらい)
  • 妖 (two times, in 妖精)
  • 竿 (one time)
  • 舵 (one time, in 操舵室)

These all include furigana in the no-furigana release.

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There wasn’t much consensus over whether or not to create a new home thread, but I went with the slight majority:

There are many polls for you to vote in! Vote and be merry!

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This is a super interesting chart! Mind if I ask how you put it together?

There are two aspects to it: 1) the spreadsheet that creates the chart from the book’s kanji, and 2) the process of getting the kanji into it.

For a book, I buy the ebook, remove DRM, extract the XHTML files, concatenate them into one single file, run a regular expression to remove all non-kanji characters, and place all kanji one per line. The removal regex is: ([一-龯])

Then, I drop it into a spreadsheet where I add formulas to a count of each kanji and do a lookup for the WaniKani level, then I remove duplicate lines,:

Kanji List

That feeds into another sheet where I have formulas doing lookups of kanji by level and calculating stats:

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@eainge hello! It looks like you haven’t been on the forums in quite some time, but if you do happen to see this message, would you be willing to open up editing access on the vocab spreadsheet for this club for us?

We’re doing a ‘repeat club’ and it would be really helpful if we could edit the spreadsheet to add more words, page numbers, etc.

Alternatively, if any of the other original club members happen to have administrative access to the spreadsheet…?

For anyone interested in picking up the new English translation, the release date is tomorrow!

  • Random House Children’s Books
  • Release Date: July 7, 2020
  • Imprint: Delacorte Books for Young Readers
  • ISBN: 9781984896674
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Look what came in the post today! :blush: they’re so pretty ~

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That’s a nice cover


Edit: Belerith’s are cuter!

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This may be a bit unrelated to this topic, but I read on the Beginner’s Book Club thread that @nienque and @Aislin maybe would be interested in reading Konbini ningen. As I already bought the book together with Kiki I would be interested too. Maybe we could do a re-read of Konbini ningen when we finish 魔女の宅急便. Since we could consider it a bridge book into Intermediate book club we could do a vocab spread sheet. Maybe some other people who are currently reading Kiki would be interested. What do you think about it?

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Yes! There’s no harm in making a thread to gauge interest. There may well be a whole new generation that wants to dip their toes into intermediate reading :smiley: Though I’d wait until October :slight_smile:

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Ooh! :astonished:
So, for starters, I already did read Konbini Ningen in Polish translation, and I was more interested in other, untranslated, Murata’s books. But I love her writing too much, so if you’re doing this, I very much will join you.
Secondly, I couldn’t resist and I did try her other book, 殺人出産 to be specific. It’s actually a short story collection, but title story is 60% of the overall length and that’s what I have finished for now. And… it was actually easier than Kiki for me. I did have to check more words, but I was lost less often. Murata seems to use this easier, let’s-get-to-the-point grammar. (And no hiragana strings! I can see clearly where words end! How nice! )
But I won’t contribute to the vocab spread sheet, because I won’t use it myself. I’m using an ebook to check words quickly, and I’m not learning them for now, because I’m not adding another SRS until I finish WK + Jalup (so 2 more years probably, lol).

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