Hello, everyone. This will be my first time diving seriously into manga; I’ve read a little of ちいさな森のオオカミちゃん. I struggled quite a bit with the grammar, but it was enjoyable. I’m excited to start Yotsuba&. Decided if I was going to read one volume, Ima read all of them. Box set coming in soon! Looking forward to learning and reading with you all.
Hello! 
I’m new to WaniKani and fairly new to Japanese, so this is my first book club! It’s also my first time reading a non-English manga, and so far I just want to keep reading (well… deciphering lol). I’ve been using Todaii articles to learn for a few months, but よつばと! seems quite intimidating in comparison. I’m excited to be reading with a group!
I also use Todai. I don’t hear it mentioned that often, but it has really helped me, especially since the sentence analysis tool was added.
I remember reading the English translation of よつばと！and liking it. I recently thought about restarting reading it, so starting my Native Japanese reading journey with it feels fitting. As someone who just recently started learning Japanese I figure this will be a struggle, but I hope to enjoy that struggle with all of you! Here is to a fun time for us all!
It will be a steep learning curve for most of us, i expect!
If this is your first time reading manga in Japanese, I’d recommend you take a look at the first page or two and take a few moments to think about what each sentence means. If there are any parts you don’t understand, see if you can find any articles online about that grammar point. Don’t worry about having to look up words, that’s to be expected, but any grammar you can learn about now will help you later when you see it again.
I know it’s a little late to bring this up since the club starts on the 11th, but that’s why the first few weeks of the book club go a little slower. It’s to give people time to get used to reading manga for the first time, since those people will have a lot of opportunities to study something new.
Thank you for the suggestion. That is exactly why I want to join the book club, even though I barely have any knowledge about Japanese grammar. I’ve always been a learner by doing and I feel by seeing these things in their native place I understand them better. Besides, I always had a better time learning languages while reading stuff.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who sniffs used books….I want a candle with the scent of a used book shop.
I would be interested in hearing what you think about using AI in helping with reading native content. I still make a first pass reading the material on my own. My second pass is if there are individual words I am stuck on. But as a new tool - I am finding ChatGPT to be very helpful in parsing sentences. I usually type in the sentence I am having trouble with and it will give me back info on kanji, vocab and grammar as well as nuances. It will also accept a photo and read from the photo - though there are likely copyright issues with this. It often returns whole paragraphs of material to consider.
Anyone else do this?
I think it is totally fine if you don’t start to rely on it too much. The process of struggling to understand is a big part of the learning process. If you feel like you stop putting in as much effort as you would otherwise, because the machine will tell you exactly what the sentence means in a minute when you put the question in, then you are overusing it. Be very cognizant of your own behavior with it. As an example not AI related: some people are nearly addicted to add-ons like Yomitan and don’t realize how dependent they become of it. They feel it is nearly impossible to read anything not in the browser. I think that is a bad place to be in.
Using it here or there for harder sentences, or trying to understand what an ん in this specific sentence adds as a nuance I’m all for it. The hallucinations in these cases also don’t matter that much since over time you will iron out slight misunderstandings naturally.
One thing I would say: If you participate in the club I’d prioritize the community and engaging/asking questions in the thread instead. The community aspect can become a big encouraging factor in your learning as well, and struggling on understanding sentences together, finding people to learn with etc. is a very rewarding process in itself.
I use AI with my own reading efforts, though typically only when I don’t know the words in a sentence. So it used to be nearly every single sentence and now I can occasionally go a whole page without using it. My goal is to eventually read it as naturally as I do English though of course.
I’ve already picked a nice little spot for my initial read through of tomorrows first few pages! Excited to tackle this with everyone!
Yeah I like to use it especially when I know all the words in a sentence but still can’t make sense of it. I’m sure AI doesn’t always get nuance right but I still find it really helpful
I totally agree with this. When you are using AI, I’d be careful that you aren’t robbing yourself of chances to learn by finding information yourself. Sometimes the process of looking something up on your own can aid in creating a lasting memory of whatever you’re looking for.
When I was starting out, I used a lot of OCR tools to look up words, and I do think that it is a useful feature when you have a ton of words to learn. But as I’ve gotten better at learning Japanese, I’ve found that forcing myself to use the handwriting input in a dictionary, and actually writing the word I’m looking up, has helped me remember the words more.
There are so many times when I used yomitan where I would look up a word, and then when I run into it again 3 sentences later I’ve completely forgotten it. But having to look it up manually every time is like a little punishment that kept me from forgetting things as much.
Quite. The real, actual intelligences are all sitting right here.
I think AI is a pretty useful tool for parsing sentences. In the main post, I recommended ichi.moe for that, but I don’t think it’s as good as your average LLM these days.
One of the benefits of AI is that you can ask it follow-up questions and it can point you in the right direction for further reading. For example, you could ask it what a certain kana is doing in a sentence and it’ll obviously tell you, but the most important bit is that it’ll tell you what that function is actually called, then link to various articles explaining exactly how it’s used. When used properly as a learning tool, it’s basically like a better version of google search. However, I’d still recommend doing more research on top of that because AI has been known to hallucinate, and sometimes it doesn’t understand exactly what you’re trying to ask, so be careful about that.
That being said, the discussion threads here will serve basically the same purpose. There are tons of people here that are happy to answer any questions you may have, since they’ve probably hit the same roadblocks at some point in the past.
One thing I’d love is a way to look up words and find videos of characters in anime or Japanese drama actually using those specific words. For whatever reason, I’ve found that words stick better for me when I hear them, as opposed to reading them, even if it’s from a show I’ve never seen before. I’m not even that big into anime, but I guess seeing something entertaining helps me remember things better than random context sentences in online dictionaries. Maybe the real answer is to just watch a ton of anime, since I feel like I can burn a word instantly if I can link it to a scene in Azumanga Daioh.
Edit: The reason I brought up that last point is that I look up a lot of words, but I usually don’t remember them after the fact unless I go through them a bunch of times in Anki. However, hearing those words being used in context in a TV show helps me remember them more easily. Audio in online dictionaries helps a little, but I find that linking those words to characters I recognize helps more than anything else.
This is why I only use a physical dictionary that is infested with fire ants.
It exists!
Looking forward to this! Been learning for a few months now. I’m sure this will be a struggle, but I’m looking forward to being pushed forward by this!