Beginner Japanese Book Club // Now Reading: 気になってる人が男じゃなかった // Next 葬送のフリーレン, then ウスズミの果て

Gah, sorry - I did mean to post at the weekend, but totally forgot. It’s not a problem if you get a nomination in over the next day or so.

Last chance for nominations! I’m going to draw a line tomorrow at 2020-03-06T21:00:00Z

1 Like

10 Likes

Can I ask how to join this book club? Thanks!

1 Like

When will we be voting?

Welcome! Just participate in the club’s activities, like voting for the next book, reading along with the others, asking and answering questions or whatever you see fit :slight_smile:

8 Likes

Next week!

In the meantime, it’s helpful if you can take a look through the proposals (in the OP) and vote on their difficulty for you :slightly_smiling_face:

2 Likes

この美術部には問題がある!

Summary

A girl with violently too much common sense, a boy whose sole ambition is to draw the perfect 2D bride, an addlebrained ghost member, and their always sleeping president — what is wrong with this art club?!

Availability

Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/4048916459
Kindle: https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B00EETP0TY
Bookwalker: この美術部には問題がある!(1) - マンガ(漫画) いみぎむる(電撃コミックスNEXT):電子書籍試し読み無料 - BOOK☆WALKER -

Personal Opinion

The anime was funny and I liked the characters. Seems like a reasonable difficulty for the club too.

Pros and Cons for the Book Club

Pros

  • I remember liking the comedy from the anime.
  • Not too difficult and has furigana.
  • The main character is awesome.
    image

Cons

  • Art-specific terms here and there (at least there are a few in the first chapter based on the preview).

Pictures

First Four Pages of Chapter One

Additional Pages

Difficulty Poll

How much effort would you need to read this book?

  • No effort at all
  • Minimal effort
  • Just right
  • Challenging
  • Impossible, even with everyone’s help
  • I don’t know (please click this if you’re not voting seriously)

0 voters

6 Likes

Ooh this one’s been in my wishlist for a while now!.. And it’s currently ¥311 on Amazon kindle. Didn’t know it had an anime tho.

1 Like

Hi! Sorry I have a bit of a dumb question about the difficulty polls:

What is the difference between minimal effort and just right? Or just right and no effort? There are no numbers to guide me in my choice, and I’m not entirely sure how to interpret the wording. It kind of sounds like just right would be little to no effort… for my level I expect some effort to be just right for me :sweat_smile:

From easiest, it goes:

  • No effort at all
  • Minimal effort
  • Just right
  • Challenging
  • Impossible, even with everyone’s help

(I think they should be in order before you vote?)

I think the point of the wording is that (as you say!) some effort is desirable (depending on your goals), because you won’t learn much if it’s too easy. So “no effort at all” means you can read it flawlessly without any aids, “minimal effort” means it’s pretty easy for you to read, “just right” means that you can’t understand everything but you could work through the text with help and looking stuff up.

But also… don’t worry about the wording too much. You can also just consider it a 5-point scale of difficulty. The usefulness of the polls is in comparing the difficulty scores between each pick, so as long as you give a higher rating to the ones you find more difficult and vice versa, it’s good. It’s actually more helpful if people utilise the full range across the picks.

7 Likes

Ok thank you so much for the explanation! Very clear now :slight_smile:

1 Like

To be honest, I always wondered about this “Just right” as well :wink:

It feels a bit orthogonal to the others, because I read it as a subjective measurement (“just right for me”) while the others try to (kind of objectively) describe the amount of effort I need to put in. But how much effort is “just right” will vary from person to person, I guess… It can mean that I think a book is “just right” for me if I can read it without needing to look up anything (i.e. then it matches “no effort”). Or it can mean that I think I’m totally fine (= “just right”) with looking up almost all of the words and grammar points in the book (which makes it identical to “challenging”). In both of these cases I would want to choose the category “just right” in addition to the “effort category”. If you really want “just right” to be the middle entry of this five-point scale, I would better understand this with a wording like “medium effort” or “normal effort” or something like this.

1 Like

I agree - it also depends on what one’s personal goals are when reading. If someone wants to get a lot of reading exposure (broad rather than deep) then actually they probably want something at “no effort” or “minimal effort”.

That’s why I mentioned it’s really probably best just to view it as a 5-point scale.

I suppose if we were just changing that one category it would be okay - otherwise it gets confusing for people to compare between the polls. I also think we should add numbers to the polls going forward to make it a little more clear.

I’ll update the OP to that effect after we close nominations (though I’m doubtful anyone else will be putting forward another nomination…?).

Alternative: the other option is to delete and re-make all the polls. It might be good to force a refresh, but it would probably also be quite annoying for everyone who’s read and voted in the past. Not sure we’d be able to get every person with a current nomination, either.

3 Likes

Adding numbers going forward is probably good enough! :slight_smile: No need to bother everyone again at this point…

3 Likes

Totally agree that it should be fine to add numbers and/or change the wording of the middle option. (I would prefer the wording change as it increases clarity imho, but I’m not fighting for it :slight_smile: )

For re-making the polls, if we really wanted to be scientific about them, we’d probably need to re-make them with each voting round anyways as the readerbase changes and the readers’ skills change, but hey :slight_smile:
I think they are ok as a relative measurement to compare the books, and other than that voters should check for themselves before voting in order to avoid big surprises…

1 Like

Yeah, I have many issues with the polls, but have to resign myself to this :sweat_smile: the biggest thing, I think, is encouraging people to vote across the majority of nominations if they’re going to vote at all. Otherwise the comparative nature completely breaks down.

I try to refresh all of my votes each time, but of course not everybody is going to do that / has the time for that.

2 Likes

On which note…

Please get rating!

We may get another surprise nomination or two sneaking in before the deadline, but it would be great if people could start to look through the samples and rate how difficult each pick is :slightly_smiling_face:

It’s most helpful if you can rate as many of the nominations as possible. If you’ve rated any of them before, try to revisit your ratings if you have the time :wink:

The list of nominations in the OP contains links to the nomination posts. This is where you can find the difficulty polls.

I will likely open the voting on Tuesday 10th, but I make no guarantees… :stuck_out_tongue:

4 Likes

:sweat_smile: O…oh. I did propose that wording. I was mostly trying to put words on a 1 to 5 scale, but it didn’t come to my mind that the middle of the scale was not necessarily what people would be aiming for in terms of learning.

5 Likes

It’s okay Nath, we still love you :stuck_out_tongue: :purple_heart:

6 Likes

I honestly haven’t got the foggiest idea how to rate things.

4 Likes