Our first week of the Intermediate volume is here:
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Week #2 is here!
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Week 3 is now live! We finish the introduction this week. The grammar entries are so close, I can taste them. Mmmmm, delicious.
Also posting week 4 here because the forums yelled at me. :<
Without further adieu ado, this week we start grammar entries!
English is hard.
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Aah oops. Combo breaker so you can post next week!
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@helloorange You’re doing a great job. Thanks so much for taking over! 
If you want to reduce the weekly load a bit, you can look at what I did with the main entries for the basic volume. Basically I grouped them up in letter threads, like A-D, E-G, I, J-K, etc. And if you look at the main post here, you’ll see I’d already charted those groups out for the intermediate volume. (It is right below the intermediate volume schedule.)
You don’t have to do that, I just thought I’d mention it. And if you want to do that, you can just adapt the first main entries thread to the first letter thread instead.
I personally liked it when I got busy because it meant most weeks the switch to a new week went a lot quicker.
Anyway, definitely feel free to not change what you’re doing now. Weekly threads will work just as well. 
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@MissDagger Ah, thank you! Love this idea for organizational purposes and for me posting. I’ll convert this week.
Folks, please find the adjusted thread here:
[aDoIJG] A – J 💮 A Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar
We’ll group the entries this way from now on. Please discuss any entries from A - J in this thread. The schedule for this section is posted here in addition to the main thread. Thanks for reading along!
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I finally finished the basic volume!
Firstly, I want to say thank you to @MissDagger for coming up with the idea in the first place, organizing the whole club, and then running everything for the entire first volume. You put a lot of work into this, and it is greatly appreciated!
I wasn’t sure how much I’d get out of this experiment when we started, but it ended up being hugely beneficial for me, I feel, and I’m so glad that I participated! Despite being pretty comfortably past the beginner stage at this point, there were still plenty of tidbits in this book that I didn’t know, or which I’d only had a vague understanding of, and even the stuff that I did feel like I knew very well, it was still helpful to consolidate my knowledge.
The number one thing that I personally benefited from by far was going back through my Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling translations and looking examples for most of the grammar points! It was neat getting to see the nuance of the grammar points in action like that, especially when looking for examples for related expressions and comparing them. I have no idea if the examples I posted helped anyone else, haha, but they helped me!
I’d encourage anyone participating in the club to look for examples of the grammar points in your own media that you’re reading/watching/listening to (though this can be hard if you are a print reader and can’t easily do a ctrl+f search). It was also the most time-consuming part, which is part of why I had a harder time catching up when I got so behind. But the pace of the club being so slow really helped encourage me to take just a little more time to go that extra mile with individual grammar points.
During the actual reading in Japanese/translation process, I often end up going pretty fast and can’t always give everything the time it really deserves in order to understand it in depth, so this sort of intense deep dive into one grammar point is a helpful activity.
I also ended up trying to sum up points that seemed worth remembering in the entries, which was another exercise that was mostly for my benefit, haha. Sometimes the dictionary uses grammar language that I’m not super familiar with, so it was a useful exercise to look up the terms I didn’t know and attempt to explain the points in more common language.
There are definitely some things that have changed over time and some of the dictionary’s information might not be as true in 2024 as it was when the book was originally published, but that ended up being honestly kind of interesting to discuss, and it got me to think about the Japanese that I have personally experienced, and how that matches up (or doesn’t) with the Japanese in the dictionary.
Whenever the dictionary made sweeping statements about how you’ll never see something, it often made me go looking for a counterexample, haha.
I would say the entire exercise as a whole (of reading a grammar dictionary cover to cover) is probably best paired with a habit of reading/listening to native media alongside it. If I’d just gone from learning from a textbook to reading this dictionary without that native media middle step, I don’t think I would have gotten nearly as much out of it.
I also agree with our judgment in the beginning that this likely wouldn’t be as useful for early beginners, and if this is your first exposure to most of these grammar points, you’d probably be better off following a more traditional teaching model (like a textbook) or learning through immersion, first. Alphabetical order is probably not the best way to learn grammar for the first time, hahaha!
One benefit of doing this club is that I feel like I have a general familiarity of the book’s contents (as well as the language it uses) and can navigate to the information I need when looking stuff up. Some of the quirks of the dictionary were confusing to me as an early beginner, and there were things I tried to look up, but was unable to find (the passive, potential, and causative forms, for example). Of course, now I no longer need this dictionary as much, haha, but it’s still useful if I’m ever trying to help explain something to someone else, or am trying to produce a sentence in Japanese and want to make sure I’m getting the nuance of some grammar right, or I just want to check my memory!
I’m planning on continuing onto the intermediate volume pretty much immediately, and I think I’ll be able to catch up soon! Thanks again, @helloorange, for taking over!
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big congrats, especially with as much effort as you put into every entry, finishing the entire first volume is no simple feat 
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I noticed that the book club tracker userscript automatically pulls the schedule for the basic volume rather than the intermediate one, presumably because the basic schedule is listed first?
Would it be possible to move the old schedule for the basic volume beneath the current schedule for the intermediate one so that the script can (hopefully) automatically auto-fill the club’s schedule? Thank you!
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@fallynleaf I think your thinking was spot on. The current schedule is now the first one that the page should read. I tested out the book club tracker script you pointed to, and it appears to be working on my end.
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Thank you so much!! I just added the club to my homepage and it looks beautiful! I use that script to track how far behind I am, so I’m delighted to have it working for this next volume as well!
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Honestly, I wish knew about it earlier. What a great idea!
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This might be a radical idea, but why not use the script to keep up? 
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I’m hoping to be caught up within the next few weeks, but by the time the script was released last year, I was already behind on the basic volume because I was trying to write a 50,000 word novel in one month, do a professional translator’s job entirely in my free time without pay, and keep up with my Japanese studies. Something had to go, and unfortunately it was book club participation 
. December and January were both tough months for me because I was trying to play catch-up after all of that, all while trying to keep up with a pretty punishing translation workload. So the book club had to stay backburnered.
I’ve made some big strides in time management in the past month, though, so even though February is also busy for me, I think I’ll be able to get caught up fairly soon! But I likely will fall behind at some other point, too, just because the translation workload can be kind of unpredictable. So the script is helpful for making calculations and figuring out how to get back on pace when I’m trying to catch up again because I can see a visual representation of the club’s pace vs my own.
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It’s that time again…
Week 8 begins, and we start a new thread!
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@helloorange I saw you undid my edit from yesterday, which is fine. I should perhaps have mentioned why I did it in the first place since you’re running things now. 
Changing links so they don’t have the title in them anymore like below (aka changing the title to x), future proofs the links (or so I’ve been told), and it also make them shorter so it is easier to edit tables and such (at least when not using the table editor, I’ve never used that).
https://community.wanikani.com/t/x/64377
Additionally, I think it would be good to link the letter threads below the table, like I’d added, because if someone is reading later, they can easily find the right thread from the letter, rather than scanning through the schedule to find it there. (I used those a lot when I’d gotten behind with the basic volume to easily get to the right thread.)
If you had a specific reason for not wanting the letter threads separately linked, fair enough, but if not, I hope you don’t mind if I edit them back later.
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Ah! I am literally so sorry! I was checking my phone first thing this morning and half asleep mashing buttons. I know this probably sounds very silly. But I was trying to see the “diff” doc, cycled through it, then fat fingered the “save” button. At first I thought, oh, maybe it didn’t do anything?
But clearly I reverted back. I apologize! Completely an accident on my part. I appreciate your input and agree with your suggestions! I am working right now, but will follow back up later, and adjust anthing else as necessary.
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Absolutely no worries! I was a bit confused, but that makes total sense. Mornings, for realz, if I could delete them by jumping past the first 1-2 hours of the day and then add the deleted morning hours at the end of my day, that would be perfect. 
I’ll restore things, no problem.
EDIT: Hopefully I didn’t break anything. I checked all the links, so they should be good.
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Thank you, @MissDagger ! You’re our book club guardian angel. (I didn’t know you could replace the title name with “x” in a link. 
It’s so much tidier!)
Annnnnd just a friendly reminder that week 9 has begun for everyone following along.
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I splurged and bought a book stand after getting tired of trying to hold Japanese books open and also type at the same time, and I really wish I’d bought one earlier! They’re especially great for reference books like this dictionary (though the clamps on the stand that I bought can’t quite handle a book this thick 
. Might need to buy some snake weights to use with the really big books…)!
I thought I’d share this in this thread because other folks in the club might find a tool like this to be useful!
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