And that should make for some fun jokes!
Looks good to me. I’m not back home until next week (so excited to finally be able to start doing lessons again after a month), but I’ll try to add one every few nights after that.
@MoonKitty668 I’m reading the novel right now because it’s what I took with me on my trip (coastal Mexico warps books badly, by the way). It’s not overly difficult (around fifteen pages per hour), but I’m only able to comprehend about 75% of it while reading at a comfortable pace (trying not to look anything up and powering through to see if context backfills gaps), so it’s probably not a great choice for the beginner club. I’m making a number of assumptions that might lead to massive confusion later.
I think one per chapter would be nice, see who is actually still reading along =)
Maybe have an option for those reading it later? (catching up is more for those reading late but while we are still active, there might be people joining in after we are done) And to avoid people voting without actually being part a “I just like to click things” option 
I think there might be some reading along without commenting, I mostly do, so a once per chapter will make it feel a little less lonely =)
And yeah, polls is <3 =D
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A necro option!
I think your last point is good too - if there seems to be low activity nearer the end I’m sure it’s easy to feel like hardly anyone is still reading, but there may be more than you think.
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Joining in! I just ordered ARIA, should be with me in a couple of weeks!
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i think I should order the new book soon. But Amazon japan is delivering pretty fast. So did you only boughgt volume 1? or more?
I only bought volume 1 of Aria the Masterpiece, which is all you need for the book club. If I enjoy the manga I plan on buying the rest of the series.
I bought the first volume of the Masterpiece edition as well, since I’d already bought the whole of Aria earlier but didn’t have Aqua. I kind of wish I’d looked into it a bit more before hand, as I wasn’t quite prepared for how big this edition is!
It certainly beats squinting at some of the text in the original version, but yeah, I opened my package and it was a huge surprise!
plus it doesn’t line up nicely with my other ones T_T
But it’s so beautiful that clearly the solution here is to buy the entire Masterpiece edition and sell your old ones
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What level would you recommend me reading this or Kiki’s delivery service at? (Considering I have N4 grammar)
I don’t even know all the N4 grammar and I just finished reading Kiki. You could always just give it a shot. Keep in mind that the first chapter is much harder than the rest of the book. There’s a version that has furigana if that’s your concern.
As for Aria the Masterpiece, you should be fine.
Ahh, it’s good to hear that! My copy hasn’t arrived yet, but I started reading the example pages in advance and some of the characters and even some of the furigana were a little hard to make out and could take me awhile to figure out what to search for. So far I’ve gotten them all eventually, but it slowed me down quite a bit a couple times, trying to look up words I didn’t know and couldn’t quite make out. 極冠 (きょっかん) for example on page 7 – kept searching for きょつ and had no luck and the first kanji was just a mush. So yeah, hearing the new books are easier to read is a relief!
Aye, there’s some pretty complex kanji on the first handful of pages.
On a similar note, I bought a volume of Weekly Shonen Jump a few years ago for reading practice, and some of the more detailed kanji are literally just black blobs. It’s like, can even native Japanese people read what’s written here?
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how do i join?
Get a copy of the book and join in! 
It sounds like the plan is to have polls to indicate that you’re participating at the beginning of each chapter, but seriously, the only requirement to join in is to get the book, start reading it, and join in the discussion (starting 23rd of June).
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A real beginner’s book…
So, I’ve struggled through three and a half volumes of Yotsuba with the Yotsuba Reading Club here (which is amazing and full of the most wonderful, most kind, most patient people you could imagine) but it is a struggle… Yotsuba is still far too difficult for me (and full of slang that I should not be learning) and so really I need something easier.
I do not want to learn from a text book, I couldn’t think of anything worse, but finding a good book for low levels is tough… but I think I’ve found one! I started reading it today and it is brilliant! Just the right level for me, with just the right amount of challenge and a lot, a lot, of fun!
Here’s the book: にゃんにゃん探偵団
I know it will be far too easy for most people in this group, and for most people on WK, but for true beginners, it is perfect. And it’s a mystery… with cats!
Could we set up a new group, the “Just getting started with Japanese reading group” or something like that, and read this book? It’s perfect for those of us for whom Yotsuba is too difficult but who desperately want to read real Japanese.
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I recommend just starting a club for that specific book or series. That’s what was done with Kawabata and it seems to be working fine. I think it might get complicated having a third regular book club group that votes on different books.
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Looks kinda cute, aside from any intent to form a reading club for it - are there any sample pages available anywhere?
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The link they gave has the first 10 pages or so.
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Brilliant! Can I just go ahead and do that then? I’ll take a look at that other thread you mentioned and see how it worked there. Thank you!
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