@Ditto20 I remember you nominated ポーション頼みで生き延びます！for the intermediate book club.
I noticed that the first 6 volumes are discounted until tomorrow on BookLive (probably other places as well). Have you by any chance read it? (I’m not planning to scroll through your ~250 read books on Bookmeter to find out by myself 
)
If so, what did you think of it?
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I just bought it myself a few days ago because of the sale, so not yet 
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Well, I just finished one book (雪国, finally), time to celebrate by buying 6 more.
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The real question is: how was it?
Based off the time it took you to complete it I have a guess, but maybe your other books were just that interesting.
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On the one hand, I’d say it was indeed a masterpiece (not that I have the expertise to really judge that myself). In particular, the work has a very surreal feel, almost like a dream sequence, brought from the very beginning through the scene with the window and maintained by the ruthless time skips. Those time skips also felt like they removed the existence of the “real” world, Tokyo, where the protagonist’s wife and kids are, thus making it feel like only the “snow country” mattered.
In terms of difficulty, the book is full of outdated kanji (坐る, 辷る, …) and elements (山袴, 内湯, 自在鍵, … I had to google image search that last one), which, well, were not (so) outdated at the time of writing. It’s really an interesting peak into the past, but it does make it much harder to read than most of the things I’m used to.
Honestly, the only problem I had with the book was the plot. From week 1 of the book club, I felt the main character was garbage and I hated his guts. Well, that feeling didn’t go away.
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Finished 魔女の宅急便 
Usual stats 📊
Total time spent = 12.2 hours
Audiobook length (for comparison) = 5.6 hours
Speed vs audiobook = 0.46
Speed for last book read (コンビニ人間) = 0.24
This is the first book that I’ve felt fairly comfortable reading. I’m tempted to get the other books in the series for that reason. But it doesn’t look like many people continue after the first one. Anyone here read past the first book? Is it worth doing so?
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I haven’t, mostly because the end of the first book was satisfying. There’s also the fact that it’s targeted at a younger audience, so it did not exactly match my interests. I actually liked the book, but I don’t need more of it.
In terms of language learning, though, if you like it and find it a comfortable read, there’s no reason not to keep going!
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I got the impression there was a number of people who want to continue the series, just not immediately. Maybe it’s worth asking in the home thread in case you are interested in continuing?
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Better late than never… I’ve finally set some (hopefully realistic) reading goals for this year and set myself up on BookMeter - davids68 - 読書メーター.
My current/soon-to-be-started list:
君の名は will be my first book, so I’m kind of simultaneously excited/terrified.
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What kind of fields do you have in those cards? I go by minimum effort with just vocab JP-EN as I find quantity to be more important than precision, but I’m maybe a bit worried I’ll forget a lot of them as they get mature 
. Although I may just suspend cards after a certain threshold. And adding a context sentence to leeches will also help.
Pretty sure we didn’t talk about this last time Anki came up 
, but sorry if I’m repeating myself :P.
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I got all of them but have only read about 100 pages of the second one and then stopped… But I want to pick it up again when my exams are over to give it another chance
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I read the second one, there are some cute stories in there. I would say keep going if you enjoyed it and want to keep reading it, but there are a lot of other books out there.
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@Naphthalene @NicoleRauch @TheMunichMunch @EmmaGoto
Thanks all! This thread is great, so many helpful and encouraging people. I think I will stay for a while. 
You’re right, if I enjoy it and it’s good for my learning, I might as well continue. I will try and give an actual book review once I’m done with the series (in addition to the dry stats).
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Anki talk
Maybe we have different goals and/or different usage styles for anki, so I apologize if I’m making assumptions here, but isn’t the point of SRS that it helps you not forget them as they get mature? I agree that having better cards to help you remember would aid the efficiency of that, but either way you’ll keep seeing the cards you forget until you stop forgetting them, no?
Anyway, fields! Mine are simple:
Expression, reading, definition (in Japanese with pitch accent), example sentences. Not all of my older cards are complete (mostly in terms of Japanese definition), but for the last few years I’ve been consistent about it, and all my to-learn cards are in this format. Not all cards have example sentences, depending where I learned them from. Some of them have pictures (plants, animals, etc). Some of them I add English under the Japanese definition because it is more logical to me to do so (more obscure plants and animals, diseases, etc). Ones I’m struggling with get spruced up, and if I’m really struggling I’ll add English. I used to try to have audio, but I found that I got irritated while reviewing and muted it, so I stopped bothering a long time ago.
In terms of quantity vs precision, that’s a personal decision. I have had regrets at times in my anki journey about not making more quality cards. Making decisions earlier on about how I wanted my cards to be would have saved me a lot of editing. With a lot of cards to edit, making a ton of changes later isn’t fun. I don’t know how you add your cards, but if you think you might want them to be different later, it might be worth looking into how to make that happen now (via tools/automation or premade decks or blunt force input or whatever).
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I did the math today and realized that even if I stay on my current pace I still won’t finish 本好きの下剋上 vol. 3 until the 19th or 20th, which will only give me about a week to read another novel in order to remain caught-up…which will likely lead to me falling behind on my manga goal 
I’m going to try and add another novel to my daily reading for a little while so I’m at least a little bit ahead of the game.
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Caught up on what?
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On yearly goals, I assume.
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I mean, sure. I checked the list and saw 0/12, so I got confused how not finishing a book and instead picking up another book would help, which is why I thought maybe it meant something else. But I got it now.
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Anki talk
Yeah. I guess my dilemma is the following. Most of my cards are exports from floflo or my dictionary app, so I don’t give them much thought and they simply look like this:
(The number is the words zipf frequency)
I like my cards this way, since I can flip them through relatively quickly (and often don’t even look at the English definition). I guess my worry is just that since I will probably forget the context with mature cards, my chances of failing them gets a lot higher. So in the end I’m testing myself on contextless cards, while I actually only care if I know those cards in context! So maybe I’ll create just a lot of work for nothing by having bad accuracy, which can lead to unbearable review counts. Currently my mature vocab card accuracy is 73%, however Anki defines that. My saving grace is having a low leech suspend count (4, after which I can create a context sentence and re-add it. so far I haven’t bothered), or ‘burning’ the cards after a certain interval. Or maybe this won’t be a problem (only a handful of cards will be difficult without context) and I’m overblowing it 
. incoming all cards become leeches in the end Still, seeing you have 22k mature cards with just the word on front, gives me some reassurance, though. Even if I don’t have the sentence in the back. And tend to occasionally add 50 cards a day 
.
In the end, my Anki usage does seem to contradict itself a bit, since my goal isn’t to remember the cards forever as they are 
. Maybe that’s ok since a lot of the benefit is just exposing myself to the words (and makes reading more comfortable), and probably I don’t plan to use Anki for the rest of my life.
Phew, that became longer than I thought .
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Yeah I meant to have one book finished by the end of the first month, but I’m fast coming up on the end of the second month with only one book (projected to be) finished, so I’m planning to read two books in parallel in order to close the gap.
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