My copy just arrived!
Gonna use the time until the book club starts to learn some more vocab and kanji 
Luckily, I am currently on vacation so I can learn a lot more 
Hello Fellow UK resident :). I bought a full set from Japan on ebay, but I bought it a few weeks back before I even joined the book club, so it didn’t matter that it took a couple of weeks to get here. I wanted the full set (well, turns out it’s missing number 16, but hey) and couldn’t find a Japanese language set here.
Thanks for the recommendation! They seem to be a lot easier to order from when ebooks aren’t an option
Impressive!
That’s really helpful. 
This is already linked in the first post, but for anyone who’s fairly new to learning Japanese, I highly recommend you take the time to read my post here, to help temper your reading expectations:
If you haven’t started learning grammar yet, then this part is important:
We’re closer to the three-week mark, but that’s still enough time to cover the basics.
Most importantly: you don’t need to learn the grammar as you go. The goal is to pre-expose yourself to it. That will make some of it easier to recall and understand later, when it comes up in reading during the club.
Listen to everything Christopher says here. Trust me, the first time I read Yotsuba, I couldn’t recognize many words for a couple of reasons:
- Many words, especially when Yotsuba is speaking, are only written in Kana
- I would often look up words, only to find that I already knew them. I just didn’t recognize them because they were in a different form (past tense, polite form, etc.).
- WaniKani by itself does not cover some of the most common words you’ll see, which are typically written only in kana.
To help prepare for all this, I’d recommend reading the first couple of pages right now just to see what you’re getting into. Everybody knows they should spend more time studying grammar, but seeing it in action and realizing what you don’t know is a key part of studying.
When I started studying grammar, it felt really abstract and didn’t stick with me. However, the things I did retain were the grammar points I recognized from my short time reading just before that, and that made it a lot easier.
If you haven’t already, you could also look up some of the most common kana-only words in Japanese and familiarize yourself with those. I honestly wish WaniKani would include more of them because it already has some, but there are still lots more it could include without clogging up the vocabulary list too much.
Being somewhat familiar with Yotsubato vocab lists helps keep the deciphering Japanese aspect to the slang and grammar stuff a bit.
Yotsubato is in a bit of a weird spot I think. It gets recommended as being great beginner material all the time, but it has a fair bit of stuff that completely new people will have issues with: Yotsuba has some childish speech / slang, her kana only talk, the adults have some slang and older Japanese, and then just the varying difficulty in spots and general new reading issues. It results in pretty much anyone new to reading needing to figure something out eventually.
That said, while looking stuff up before I found out that the adults in general, and especially the women, have very natural speech and are a good source to learn from. The main thing to learn from Yotsuba is how to terrorize a neighborhood.
Honestly, you’re absolutely right. I would hesitate to say Yotsuba is easy for Absolute Beginners to read. I think it gets recommended so much because it’s one of the best slice-of-life manga out there, and there isn’t much native material that’s easier to read, besides manga made for little kids.
True. There just isn’t as much below about the natively 20 rank for actual reading material, and the Absolute Beginner clubs are about reading actual material rather than graded readers.. idk, I just found I had an easier time with Teasing Master Takagi-san due to the stuff I listed about Yotsubato, even though Takagi is technically a harder rank. Once you start learning those slang type things and such it does get easier, though.
The clubs do make it much easier to read things, too. There are vocab lists, help with the odd things, general help for grammar and such, and just that there are more people thinking about it rather than one person doing all that work themselves. It’s just still going to be a bit of work for new people, but nothing wrong with that if they are up for it.
Grammar is still my weakest spot (I need to fix that.. lol) and I fully expect I’ll hit stuff I need to figure out.
I agree with everything said above.
The spoken language and contracted verbal forms are something you’ll have to deal with.. 
While I’ve alread read through this one myself, I think I’ll join anyway to get a better understanding of it. I’ve been thinking of re-reading it anyway now that I know a bit more than when I initially read it anyway, so this is a brilliant excuse to do that!
Will be my first book club too, so.. よろしくおねがいします！
For anyone who uses BunPro, I just discovered there are several community vocab decks for this book. I just bookmarked the one by Asher - so thank you if you are here! I am not quite as computer savvy as some here - so I appreciate the decks that others make. With BunPro, I like the feature that lets you mark vocab as known. I have not really been able to make Anki work the way I want it, but I haven’t given up yet.
I guess you can count me in 
The current ABBC book is starting its second-to-last chapter today, meaning they’ll finish their last week of reading on July 4th.
The Saturday two weeks after that will be July 18th. How does that sound for the start date for Yotsuba? It feels pretty far away since I’m ready to start reading it now haha, but we’ll get there eventually.
I personally would looove to start sooner, as I am off work from the end of June until 21st of July so it would have been a great vacation add on - but だいじょうぶ (ó﹏ò｡) but yeah - its not like I got nothing else to study to fill my time with 
I would also looooove to start sooner.
I’m not against starting sooner. My only concern is that physical copies might not get delivered to people in time, but I guess they can read chapters 1 and 2 online legally using the link in the main post.
If we’re okay with starting on July 11th, I’m good with that. I’ll put out a poll here, just to see what people are leaning toward.
Which day should the book club start?
- July 11th
- July 18th
- I’m okay with either
0
voters
I could see the wait from the end of the current manga also being so that people doing that one can join in here and not get overloaded with too many reading projects. I won’t mind either date
I just finished Chapter 24 (Volume 4) so excited to review what I’ve already read and sync with you in the near future. Yotsuba is so endearing.