Haven’t read it myself, sorry. The cover looks beautiful though, which is what I normally base my book purchasing decisions on if you do read it please let us know how you find it!
@Ditto20 - what would be a reasonable English title for your nomination?
While it’s not an actual translation of the Japanese title, the book itself has the subtitle “Love Me For What I Am” on the cover (and inside the book), so that would be one option.
Alternatively, maybe something like “fukaboku: love me for what I am” could work, keeping an abbreviation of the Japanese title (an abbreviation which the author also uses) and adding the English part of the title to it.
Either that, or I guess just going with a literal translation of the Japanese title could work too, but I feel like that easily could end up sounding really awkward.
Well, those are the possible alternatives, I’ll leave the actual choice to someone else
How much is some I wonder. I finally read the sample, and the dialect is super annoying. It didn’t make it much harder, but I’m sure it’ll trip me up a bit if it’s used for verbs and such. Anyone know if this is a real dialect and if so from where?
Also, I’ll never understand why children’s books don’t use more kanji. All the kanji have furigana anyway… no need to make it harder on us!
I’d be inclined to say Tohoku somewhere, given the preponderance of dakuten (and the mention of Sendai on the third sample page), but I’m not a big expert on dialects aside from Osaka and Hiroshima. It’s probably not full-on dialect in any case, so’s regular kids can still read it.
I have started reading this and the dialect is annoying but not impossible. I think if we can have a spreadsheet or some other place where we can write out the dialect sentences with their equivalent in standard Japanese, then it should be quite straightforward. Also, I have a suspicion that once we get past the first chapter, there may be less of it.
I definitely agree. If I have time this evening I’ll try to flick through dialogue in later chapters to see whether all the townspeople talk like that, or whether it’s restricted to a select few.
I like @Kyasurin’s idea of having a comparative spreadsheet. I got the impression from the short bit I read that it was at least quite a consistent and easy-to-understand dialect, once you understand what’s going on.
In all seriousness, though, I’m fairly sure I’ve progressed enough in Japanese that I can distinguish Tokyo-ben from Kansai-ben and Hiroshima-ben by ear, but despite actually visiting those locations, I don’t recall having any conversations in those dialects. Could be because most of my conversations were with hotel or restaurant staff.
I think I want to nominate Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid. I’m reading through the first volume now. It’s…pretty easy and I think I might also move my nomination for ‘WANTED’ from the ABC to the BBC but I’m not 100%.
I guess I should start working on some nominations.
I’ve only read it in English, so I couldn’t really make any kind of informed estimation of the level of Japanese, but… Shoko, when she speaks, mumbles so much that it’s quite difficult to tell what she’s saying in the English version, when I’m a native speaker of English. I imagine it’d be quite a bit more difficult in Japanese as a Japanese learner.
Aside from which, it’s got various themes which pegs it as being aimed at somewhat higher ages than the genres we normally read.
Though, I’d never looked at all seven covers together. Never noticed they’ve all got Shoko and Shoya except for the sixth…