9-nine- 9️⃣ (Visual Novel Book Club + offshoots)

Japanese Language Book Clubs
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Some comments on how it is for me

I’m glad someone else thinks about this as much as I do. :joy: Even if we come from different places (only participating in one club vs someone engaged in multiple (and liking it)).

For me, Loopers was/is a very high pace, depending on chapter to a degree. I logged probably 4+ hours per chapter of the ones I’ve read so far, and those are the shorter chapters on average. Without yomichan to make lookups instantaneous, it really takes me quite a bit longer to read 10k characters. And since I’ve still only read 40% of Loopers and now 1 chapter of Bustafellows, the domain vocabulary for VNs are still far from my grasp.

With the demand on my focus that VNs take to read, I really don’t want a high workload because I just don’t have that much focused time available. And when life got in the way, I got several weeks behind. :sweat_smile: (Ala Bustafellows. For Loopers, I just had a complete reading slump that lasted for almost two months, so that one doesn’t quite count.)

Bustafellows

Going by participation polls we started with 13 on chapter 1 and have 10 for both chapter 2 and chapter 3, we’re now starting week 6 (second half of chapter 3), so I think that is pretty amazing.

I have no idea of our pace though. Chapter 1 for me felt really long because I read it over 5 weeks and I was looking for the end so I kept finding good places it could have stopped, but didn’t. :joy:

So I don’t think it is that long, but one member reported 7,5 hours of reading while another said about half that, so range of reading speed is pretty big. (I’m guessing I’m at the high end of that bracket although I don’t time myself, but I put it 30-60 mins most sessions, I’d guess, and I had quite a few…)

I’m hoping to get a better sense with chapter 2. But I have no idea what the pace is without any character counts to compare with. And since I don’t ever time my reading (makes it feel too much like work and less like fun).

Maybe the timing is generous in just the right amount to allow slower readers to still go along, and our fast readers are willing to wait for the next part to begin so far. (As far as they’ve said, and while we have some other book club veterans, I don’t think all the faster ones are.) :woman_shrugging:

In any case, I’m glad.

As for engagement in the threads, chapter one had a lot extra, but then it also had a lot of logistics/settings/controls stuff, so no surprise. Chapter 3 that started last week is fairly quiet, but I’m finding that to be fairly common. Posting in threads seems to drop off even more than actual reading (aka people will still be reading, but not really posting). Also, there is one more week so… ^^

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I can’t speak to raw character counts, but in terms of days in the story world’s timeline we’re almost halfway to a mandatory bad end. Progressing from there is going to involve some shenanigans since the choices occur throughout the story, most of them in the prologue which I suspect will involve a lot of “skip to unread” or “skip to next choice”. We did consider either continuing with the episodes or possibly relegating them to a spinoff and I think that might be a time to consider implementing an Advanced VN Book Club that can cater more to the speedy members. I’m probably the slowest reader of the active posters and even now I’ve been considering digging into another WN on the side.

I was taking a look at the guide for running book clubs earlier to see if they might have advice on handling pacing (uneven chapters are normally pretty common in books too :-/), but it didn’t feel like there was anything else there. Details in the fold, but really yall handled it already. It just feels like a series of tough decisions that suck to make. At the least I know I’m too much of a scardey cat to do it.

running a book club tips we kind of already knew

Run the club by consensus

When a decision has to be made, typically it is the club organizer’s responsibility to run a majority-rules poll, and the group consensus wins. If the poll does not offer a clear solution it often falls upon the organizer to make a decision or to reframe the question. Stay open to suggestions, solicit feedback, and run the club by consensus wherever possible.

Be sure to familiarize yourself with Discourse polling tools. Some often overlooked points regarding polls:

  • Ensure that “show who voted” is enabled (unless there’s a specific reason not to)
  • Multi-selection vs single selection (decide which is appropriate for the situation)
  • Show results after voting (or always visible, depending on the situation)
  • Polls cannot be modified or deleted after 5 minutes (so they will live in your post forever)
  • Discourse limits poll options to 20.

Schedule

I recommend following these tips in order to create the most effective schedule for your club.

  • The schedule does not need to be fully-determined at the time of the home thread post. Consider soliciting feedback and running polls before finalizing the schedule.
  • Schedules can be fluid. If club members are finding the pace too fast or slow, consider altering the schedule accordingly.
  • Add columns to the schedule for alternate version page numbers. This can include e-book percentages and/or kindle locations. For versions of the book you don’t own, feel free to ask other club members to help you find corresponding breakpoint pages.
  • Keep the pace generally consistent week-to-week, but strive to end weekly sections at logical breakpoints (e.g. chapters, major paragraph breaks).
  • If your schedule does not stop at obvious chapter breaks, add a column for end phrases (i.e. the last few words of a week’s section). This can be especially helpful for e-book readers.
  • Consider starting at a slower pace to give people the chance to adjust to a new style or difficulty level. This can help people manage their time and build confidence, and may help prevent early drop-offs in participation.
  • As you create each weekly post, add a link to that post in the schedule on the home thread.

I think it helps a lot that Bustafellows has an episodic format. We call them chapters, but they even have a teaser for the next episode and are self-contained bits of plot like watching a weekly TV show. At least they were for the first two chapters. It’s very easy to treat as a side gig for me because of that.

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Off-topic

Yup, that seems to be looking pretty decent ^^ . We had 17 people who voted they would read with the club, but in the end we turned out to be much, much fewer than that so far. There’s always some drops along the way but I’ll be honest I didn’t expect so many just week 1 :sweat_smile: . Even Loopers felt like it had more participation. It’s still fun with the people we have, regardless.

At some point it might be useful to think why that was, if lack of interest, too much workload or something else. Hard to judge if we don’t have many people reading week 1, though, so it’s mostly accounts from us :joy: not a very wide and unbiased spectrum.

Yeah it will likely come to that with 9-nine- at least. Unless I suddenly stop liking it I will probably want to keep reading it. An advanced VN club would work if people from there also take part in the regular one. It could also allow, as you say, the ones of us who want to read more to do so. Not a bad shot, but not without its risks I suppose. I would still like for the regular one to keep moving at a pace that keeps everything engaging, though :joy: . If it takes too long it becomes at risk of becoming boring, like that (Loopers mild spoilers) full month of slice-of-life where nothing moved we had in Loopers.

It’s also curious to me how differently book clubs seem to be organised in this site. Most places I’ve seen doing book clubs (which I admit are not a lot) aim for a much more aggressive pace. If I’m not mistaken, TheMoeWay discord VN club goes for one VN a month, and also the Japan Foundation of my city goes for one whole book every month as well. Different places will have their own culture regarding how they do things, but I’m impressed about the massive difference from one place to another. There are many entry options to choose from, but on the other hand the higher ceiling seems rather lacking. Not saying it’s necessarily bad, each site has its particularities, and perhaps its a matter of outrunning the usefulness of the site at some point in our studies. No one place can cater for all, that’s for sure. But it would certainly be super nice if once you reach advanced you still had many options to choose from. Though once the culture of a place has established it’s very hard to change it (not that there’s any need to force it to change, either, if it works for its intended public). I’m also not in an advanced level yet, either, I still get a lot out of the WaniKani community. I just wish I could read more sometimes.

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Off-topic replies

An advanced VN club would be interesting but honestly not sure if it makes too much sense with our current participation numbers. Our participants fell a decent amount after the first month or two of Loopers and we’re already down to our core in 9-nine (not sure if I actually saw anyone new post in any of the 9-nine threads). Basically my fear is that we’d be running two VN clubs at the same time but with the same members in each, just one would be read at a faster pace.

They’re kind of intense. I think they have 3 different VNs each month (one for beginner, intermediate, and advanced). They do go through VNs quickly but they’re also reading well over 10k characters a day generally. I also never see them discuss the VN, just their final thoughts so its a bit boring in that aspect.

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More Off-topic replies

Yup, my thoughts exactly :joy: .

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Ah I see, thanks for the correction. I don’t participate in the discord but I’ve used it a couple times for resources, especially when clipboard inserter died on Firefox. I noticed they had several clubs, one of them the VN one, but nothing more. Still though it’s insane that they get so much reading done, the ones that do. Perhaps even too much, a middle ground would also be good :smile: .

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off topic

I took a glance at the moe way discord and while I do think what they do is admirable, it’s also kind of dependent on participating on that learning path. If I made a gross generalization, their emphasis on things is more like taking an extensive reading oriented approach. Get the basics and focus on mass immersion.

The strength (and weakness) of WK is that it’s a site catered for beginners with activities hosted by relative beginners as far as the process goes. So while some of the moe way discord discussion was present, the format itself was more of random thoughts and questions things which feels in contrast to how our weekly threads are more of a learning reinforcement. We can safely ask grammar questions and clarify/discuss plot events in smaller bits so it’s pretty hard to get lost here. At least in the threads I’ve looked at.

To be honest, I think the moe way is probably a more efficient way of doing things… but part of the popularity in things like WK is in making things easier at the expense of efficiency. I’m really just rambling here, but it’s interesting to see the different approaches to things. Nobody is really wrong from my point of view, it’s just different.

I’d agree the pace looks intense, though. I did some super jank napkin math and what they were tackling in a month would probably be a week of casual reading for me in my native language. Even if it’s kind of doable I’m not sure I’d want to for non-sequential works. At 20 words/day going into my SRS (a pace that would make durtling the scenic route upset) I’d only get around 600 cards before they switch to the next novel with a different author/writing style. At that point it seems counterproductive to move on to new material without even having the time to get new cards to WK master or equivalent. All of the reinforcement from reading would go out the drain.

As for the double club thing, I was thinking more that the regular side still has bustafellows to fall back on after we finish here, so our strangely active core could move on as the not-beginner-group. It would help more to know why participation on this side was lower to guide these kinds of decisions, but at the end of the day it seems kind of sad that the bulk of our participation seems to come from people who have read ahead/finished or actively outpace our current setup. As far as I’m concerned we really only committed ourselves to Episode 1 @ 10-12.5k/week or best attempt. If we’re lucky we’ll get some better feedback or more people will join by the end, but if we hit that ending and nothing changes I do think we should start prioritizing ourselves over unseen members (come say hi ya’ll, I’ll try not to bite)

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Off topic on advanced book clubs

Well, I disagree that there aren’t truly advanced book clubs here, they are just not part of any of the main organized book clubs, but instead those started spontaneously. Pretty sure some of those have a pretty high pace and/or set a “read at your own pace” but comment here style. I see them starting all the time in the Read Every Day thread. I think the latest one I noticed was a large group reading チュベローズで待ってる AGE22 and its sequel. No idea at what speed, but I saw several people finish the first book in a week or something like that. So the faster clubs exist, they just tend to happen when multiple people happen to say “I want to read that too”, and then decide to kinda read together. Very casual, and tends to be more with those people who can read a lot quicker than me (or have more time, probably a combination of both).

9-nine's lack of new members

As to 9-nine-, I can’t tell. I think starting right around the holidays (even if at the tail end) can be a curse and a blessing. For some, they’ll use it to get started; for others, it gets lost in the noise of everything else they want to start or all the things they need to catch up on after the holidays. But that is just what my brain suggested off the top of my head. Probably several more possible explanations.

In a way, that is kinda my own problem, holidays compounded by a long distance trip of almost 2 weeks which was preceded by a lot of extra time-sensitive work. So I lost something like 3-4 weeks where I didn’t have any concentration left by the time work finished.

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Off-topic replies

Yeah definitely! I’m just rambling as well :joy: . Just thought it was an interesting (and probably unnecessary for me to start) discussion to take part in ^^ .

Oh for sure, I didn’t mean to imply that there are no advanced clubs in WaniKani. People around here read way ahead of me and are much, much more proficient than I am in terms of difficulty and language knowledge. I only meant it in terms of pace, that the overall assigned weekly reading of the clubs is much lower than what I’ve seen in other places doing a similar thing, for what I’ve seen.

I guess it would be interesting to combine the pace that those spontaneous clubs seem to have with the weekly discussions. I think it’s just a matter of the general public of WK, which again is not a bad thing, as ccookf also mentioned, it’s configured in a way that’s more oriented to beginners and people who can’t (or don’t want to) dedicate a lot of time to language learning but still want to keep improving, so a slower but steady pace makes a lot of sense (it also makes sense when you’re doing WaniKani SRS at the same time, it’s very time-consuming). And regardless of that intended public, there are still many of us who go over that and join multiple book clubs in your case, or alternatively want to read more of one thing (and do individually) in mine. There’s a decent amount of more advanced users around, with many who don’t do WaniKani anymore. It just seems to me that one (regular, serialised) club alone is not enough for someone looking for a bigger challenge and looking to push their studies more, past the beginner phase, and I kinda would love a club that could be standalone for most of the reading you do in a single week, with a higher pace. Not as a replacement, but as an alternative option.

Again, no real complaints with the current status quo, it’s all just my preference in reading and in no way do I represent a significant part of WaniKani. Book clubs are still pretty nice, I just wish that if you wanted to read more you had some other option other than joining 4 clubs at the same time which I see many regulars do. Most of my reading is done by myself and posting in the read every day thread (though not currently, I’m not posting frequently as of right now), but it would be so nice if that reading would be shared, just like I enjoy doing it a lot with the VN club in this case. I can always read by myself, but it’s always more fun to join other people who want to read as much as you do. I’m just wondering if that could be achieved here in the WaniKani community or it’s just simply not the platform for it.

I’m not particularly bothered by this so all is just interesting conversation in good faith to me and will continue to use the community like I have until now, cause honestly the threads I frequent are pretty cool to me even if most of the study I do is alone, aside from this club. Hopefully nothing of what I mentioned gave you a bad impression of me wanting to force change things or anything, I just mention them as mere curiosity and also to see if any of it is shared by someone else :slight_smile: . I guess I just want more people who want to read at a higher pace to discuss with. I’m also not generally interested in reading actual books on a schedule, so that’s unfortunate, otherwise those spontaneous clubs sound very appealing. Perhaps the advanced VN club is actually not a bad shot, but I’m just really worried about what it would mean for the regular one, and I would rather not sacrifice this one in the process, participation being as low as it is right now for 9-nine-. If the participation is the same for the next VN, it’s also not a bad idea to see what the regulars want to do at that point, if no new faces appear. The pace can always be adjusted at any time.

On a second look the Advanced Club seems more aligned to what I’m mentioning with the higher pace, at least their current pick.

Last edit I swear: It also depends on what you expect to take out of the things you consume. For me in particular, I like to work diligently on the things I consume and let them be the guide of my study, and while being interested in them and finding them fun is certainly essential, the opportunity for them to make me grow is what I’m after. With that in mind, it makes sense that I’m looking to extend the time I spend with them as much as possible, as a way to focus my weekly study. I’m noticing serious improvements since I started diligently playing VNs almost everyday and pushing those new Anki words.

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Is that considered fast for VNs? Recently I counted characters for the first time, while reading Tsui no Stella, and it turned out to be around 9k per hour, but honestly I don’t feel “fast” :confused: When I googled “Japanese reading speed” the numbers given as “average” or “normal” were much higher - although those were for normal texts. I guess with VN it can be slower if not because of the reading speed itself, then because of things like listening to all voices.

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I meant it was comparatively fast compared to our club since we generally do that amount in a week instead of a day. There are a decent number of people on the Moe Server that read around 15-20k characters per hour though and I think that is basically native-level fluency at that point. If you’re reading that fast, you can’t stop and listen to all the voices (when I read in English, I tend to read fast as well and never stop for the voices). I think if you’re letting all the voices play out before advancing to the next line, you’d be around 10-12k characters an hour at high-level fluency (of course it’d depend on how many voice lines are in the VN etc but just a rough estimate based on people I’ve talked to. My speed is nowhere near that personally).

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Ah I see. Yeah, that would more or less line up with the numbers I saw.

However, for me the voices are great part of enjoyment - I always listen to them no matter whether I read in Japanese or in English :slight_smile:

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@rikaiwisdom Week 5 numbers and stuff

4/29 comes out to 10,220 characters. There were about 4,404 characters left in 4/28.

possible stopping points + end screens (spoilers)
Description Character Count (4/29) +4.4k (4/28) Ending Screenshot
School 4,066 8,470
8-end
8-end1381×827 238 KB
Cafe exterior 4,617 9,021
10-end
10-end1381×827 282 KB
Cafe flashback 7,190 11,594
12-end
12-end1381×827 80.4 KB
Cafe interior 8,765 13,169
13-end
13-end1381×827 225 KB
End of day 10,220 14,624
20-end
20-end1381×827 202 KB

I wasn’t super diligent about paying attention to the scene cuts this time, rather you could break up the whole day into four segments: morning walk, school, cafe, home. Which is more logical, but unfortunately the character counts won’t play super nice.

spoiler filled explanation

The day continues previous events of discussing the investigation of the artifact users. The group sets a meetup with one at the cafe after school (ends around the black screen labled ‘cafe flashback above’ and ends up meeting up with the other one after that (through the end of ‘cafe interior’). As you’ve probably noticed that’s essentially two scenes in one locale. Which makes it hard to split, but also runs over budget to finish the entire cafe section of the day. Stopping at the end of the school day ends up on the lower end of the budget, about 8.4k for the week. There’s a bit more that could be added up to the cafe exterior, but it’s just a minor preamble before they go in so I feel like it’s more logical to lump with the cafe segment. Unfortunately, the whole day is surprisingly plot packed which includes the bedroom scene in the end. There are moments where it feels ok to just pause, but it doesn’t exactly line up with the way I’ve been tracking scenes. Especially the cafe scenes, there’s a lull in the dialogue between the two interactions, but it wasn’t exactly on the breakpoint I set so I’m not particularly confident in that one.

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Thanks once again for all the help <3 . I was meaning to read ahead but didn’t organise my time properly this week either, ごめん :pray: . The formatting is also extra nice this time, ccookf is evolving, I’m scared
:eye: _ :eye: .

(Spoilers) Endpoint analysis

Hmm, I was thinking this could be a fitting point this week. If you mention the entire week being very plot packed I suppose every endpoint has its inconveniences, but the apparent stop between conversations in the cafe seems fitting enough unless it would create a massive cliffhanger. A bit of a cliffhanger is okay, IMO, it can create some anticipation and/or discussion about that second user, do you think this point would work? That point would also solve the character count chess and trying to keep it balanced as much as possible will probably be easier for us later on if we suddenly get a spike. Finishing the cafe scene would put us on 11,6k average, mid cafe is 11.2k. We can of course go above or below it anytime we want, but keeping it somewhat balanced would help avoid very short weeks.

We can put this one as tentative for now and if someone reaches the better point you mention we can update it :slight_smile: .

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More or less it should be fine, it’s just a bit awkward since the follow up probably a little later than that. Unfortunately, I overwrote my save already so I’m not exactly keen on getting back to position. However, since the black screen is super obvious it’s also an easy place to recognize so it’s got that going for it at least. In terms of central ideas I actually think it’s great since everything from the morning to that point is about a single topic.

Edit: Also, since I wiped my system and reinstalled everything I noticed that textractor no longer saves my hook codes. This time I went with the installer to the default path, so I’m thinking it might actually be an issue of the program files file path. Just a theory, but I’ll tinker with it some more later.

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Alrighty :slight_smile: . Let’s go with that one then and once we’re there if the general consensus is that it’s an awkward spot we can push it a bit to try to find a better one. Worst case scenario is we get another long week and a shorter one afterwards, but I’d like to avoid that, both for the ones wanting to read more and for the ones wanting to read less.

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Shortly after that spot Kujou points out that the Parfait Queen is in the cafe and that’s probably a good sign that the topic has shifted. I can’t really remember if what was past the black screen was important, but this might also be a case of what people don’t know won’t exactly hurt them.

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Week 5 thread is up!

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planning tangent + screenshots

It turns out when I stopped last week there was only bit left in 4/30 for a total 8,852 by my count. Either stop at the transition in that short end bit (3,030 + 7833) for a total of 10,863 or go all the way to the end for 11,882. Personally, I’d recommend going to the end. It’s a relatively easy conversation and adds a bit of comic relief to an otherwise serious reading section.

First point

3-end
3-end1381×827 91.3 KB

End of chapter

7-end
7-end1381×827 339 KB

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Week 6 planning

Yeah I think that sounds good! The end of a day is a good moment to wrap things up nicely and start fresh the following week, let’s go with that.

Thanks a lot as always, sadly I said I would read ahead this week but the two days I had free ended up being not so free after all :sob: .

The thread will be up in a bit (/・ω・)/ .

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Week 6 thread is up!

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