Welcome to Chapter One of 10 Minute Biographies!
A few quick points to get us started…
1. Ask Questions!!
This group works best when people ask questions - so please ask! No question is silly - this is the Absolute Beginner’s Book Club so people are expecting Absolute Beginner Questions. The questions drive the discussion, and there’s a good chance if you are wondering, there are several other people wondering the same thing.
When asking a question:
- Please include the page number for every question you ask
- Check whether your question has already been asked / answered before posting
- Remember to utilise the vocab spreadsheet
- If posting the complete translation of a sentence we generally use “blur spoiler” or “hide details” to help people avoid seeing translations before they’ve translated the sentence for themselves.
2. Useful Resources
- Jisho is a popular online Japanese-English dictionary, and the usual source for populating the spreadsheet
- ichi.moe is a popular tool for parsing out sentences. If you haven’t tried this yet trying typing in a sentence from the book to see it in action. It’s like magic! It’s not always going to be right but it can be very useful.
- Deepl will translate a sentence from Japanese to English. It’s impressively good, but of course not infallible.
3. Structure of Discussion
This isn’t for me to dictate, and the book club usually falls into its own rhythm. In past similar books it’s often worked well with one or several people typing out their translations for the sentences and sharing these in full on the threads (for an example see this old thread). But you can of course just post short questions on anything you are struggling with.
If you are not sure how to type in Japanese on your computer/phone - check out this Tofugu article.
4. Turning the Page
We usually start the next page discussion once it reaches midnight in Japan. For example, page 12 discussion starting November 8th will start in your time zone at: 2020-11-07T15:00:00Z.
That’s all from me. Enjoy reading the book!