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

I updated the first post in this thread to clean it up bit. The main changes are:

  • I added “it’s important to remember that this book club is NOT for absolute beginners to Japanese. It is for people who are just beginning to read native Japanese material.”
  • I added a section for suggesting books and said “we need to make sure that the books suggested are appropriate for beginners.”. I also left a TBD for us to fill out the guidelines for how to nominate books and measure difficulty which we can fill out later.

Also, I feel like once we pick the next book, we should clear out the member list and re-add people. Having a list of over 100 people isn’t helpful if most of those people aren’t actually participating. Or better yet, we should have a list of people for each book instead of overall, which is what the Intermediate book club does.

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It just feels like admin overhead to me. A lot of posts in the thread are “I’d like to participate” followed by a “you’ve been added”, when there’s really nothing stopping anyone from just posting directly in the relevant discussion thread anyway.

If there’s a lack of participation or interest, I’m sure we’d notice through other factors, like only seeing a couple of people posting questions and answers with very few likes from lurkers, and seeing polls with an unexpectedly small number of votes.

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Yeah, I agree. I’m also going to add a note mentioning that people are welcome to post in previous discussions and that people will still try to help out where they can.

EDIT: After “We need to make sure that the books suggested are appropriate for beginners.” I added “With that in mind, anyone is welcome to join and read along with the current book. Additionally, you can always read previously selected books. You can get help from the past discussions, and you are always welcome to ask new questions too.”

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Yeah, I was going to suggest clearing out the members list too, and do book-specific lists.

I think being added to the list kind of makes you feel more part of things and committed, and often requires people to post to ask to be added, both of which might slightly encourage more participation. I know as a new user on the forums I would have felt quite hesitant just to start joining in, but if I’d asked to be added and had a friendly ‘yep, sure’ in reply I would have felt more okay about it, and even now I feel more obliged to participate, having added myself and voted (another argument for making the poll public).

I might be quite an outlier in how nervous I was about posting though :sweat_smile:

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Maybe each discussion-thread should start with something like this:

Everyone is welcome to participate in the exchange below, no self-introduction required!
If the discussion has already passed the page you are working through, try searching for it as, for example, “p56”. If your question hasn’t already been answered, feel free to ask, even if it’s way back in chapter one and the thread has been quiet for months; someone will be glad to help out.

{and then the explanation of the thread can follow below}

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That seems fine in general. But I much preferred the approach we took with Kiki of having a separate thread for each chapter. It kept the conversation focused, but still allowed people to jump back to a previous chapter’s thread to ask questions.

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That does seem like it would be a much better approach for more difficult material (which every beginner book surely will be to someone or else what’s the point of having a group?).

By Yotsuba volume 3, we were generating very few questions (330 posts total, many off-topic), but we were well over a thousand around the midpoint of volume 1 last year.

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Maybe we can still capture that and get the participant-list effect through use of a public poll in the first post of each reading thread.

Who’s reading along with us?
Option 1: Book in hand, dictionary ready
Option 2: Book’s on the way, looking forward to it
Option 3: I’ve finished reading
Option 4: I’m sitting this one out
[Option 5: I saw a poll and needed to click something]

It’s compact, largely self-maintaining (people can change votes if they want to update their status), and it lets us gauge interest over the course of the book and the club’s lifetime as a whole.

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Sounds like a great idea. :clap:

Let’s make sure to word option 4 (or add another option) so it can be used for “I was reading but stopped”.

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I don’t necessarily think people will update their status consistently, especially if dropping out midway through a book. I think it would be worthwhile to have finer-grained options (e.g., chapter you’re currently reading) or have a new poll per chapter.

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I think it’s unlikely that most people would even update their status from “book’s on the way” once it arrives. But if there’s a significant increase in people specifically indicating that they’re sitting out (or that they’ve dropped out), it could indicate a boring choice or something much more difficult than expected, especially if we have a new thread for each chapter; some people are sure to vote in protest and it provides an easy way to speak up without feeling like they might be in conflict with others.

Likewise, if we don’t see many people saying they’re interested (the first two/three options), it might be beneficial to the group’s long-term health to stop early and pick something else.

Isn’t that a reason to have a poll in each chapter and to keep it simple? The only options would be “I’m participating in this chapter” and “I’m not participating in this chapter”.

There will always be people unhappy with the current selection, but that doesn’t mean we should stop early. Those same people might still struggle with other selections, or other people who are happy with the current selection might be unhappy with a different selection.

I think the most important thing for the group’s long term health is to make sure we can finish the selected book in a timely manner. We shouldn’t be spending half a year on a book like we’re doing with Kiki. I think if we’re spending more than 3 months on a single book, we’re probably not choosing the right book.

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I meant, specifically, if we only see a tiny number of people marking themselves as reading along.

If we only have two or three participants, it’s probably a bad choice.

If we have ten people reading, then even if twenty are not participating, there’s still value in continuing, but we should find out why there are a bunch who aren’t happy while planning what to read next time.

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I agree, but the poll will still achieve that aim of making people feel more committed; we don’t necessarily need a poll to tell us people have stopped or started participating, but people might be more likely to stick with it if they know there’s a public record of the fact they were intending to do so.

I also agree about the timing, @seanblue - there’s several issues with taking that long over one book.

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I love the poll idea! =D
We can even do one for the main group, with options that relates to member status rather than current book! =D

Option suggestions:
Active Member (Contributes a lot, questions and/or answers)
Passive Member (Mostly read along, might comment now and then)
Past Member (Had to drop out for one reason or the other, might be back)
Lurker (Waiting For a Book I Want)

I know there is a good possibility people don’t update, so the Active one might not reflect the true number. But it still gives us somewhat of a members list =)
And as a general poll, unless you are thinking of sitting out people can vote on what they did and think they will do, even though a book hasn’t been determined (Though it seems Aria wins)
And I wonder how many are reading along without commenting as much? I’m mostly in that group myself ^^;

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Oh wow that’s a gorgeous book. I’m hoping we do this one but I might just order it anyway. Bit nervous though, haven’t used Amazon.jp before.

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A lot of my friends are actually die-hard Aria fans, so I am very curious what the hype is behind that! Will the book club start after Kiki is over, so around the 9th June? :slight_smile:

And are we just doing the first two volumes, or start with the first two but actually doing the entire series?

I don’t think we’ve totally decided yet, but it sounded like people wanted to take a short break after Kiki, so it will probably be at least a couple weeks after that.

When we did Yotsuba, we only did the first volume, then included the second volume in the selection poll for people to vote on (it didn’t win, so this book club didn’t continue it). I assume it’ll work in a similar way this time: we’ll only commit to the first two volumes for now, but if people want to continue the series, the subsequent volume(s) can be pitched in the next selection period.

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This was my first time ordering from Amazon JP too, so believe me, I understand. Check out this thread, specifically the questions I asked and the answers I got (the link starts at one of my questions). Hopefully that will help put your mind at ease. Once I actually ordered, everything went very smoothly.

I’m going to close the poll for the next book shortly. Sometime today I will create a “home thread” that will include some polls for the reading schedule. One of them will be when to start reading. As @windupbird said, it will be 2-4 weeks from the end of Kiki to make sure everyone has enough time to get the book and give those of us reading Kiki a short break.

Again, as @windupbird said, we will only do the first volume of Aria the Masterpiece (Aqua volumes 1 and 2) to start. The second volume can be on the next poll if we want. I want to note however, that Aqua is only two volumes, so Aria the Masterpiece volume 1 is the entirety of Aqua.

Also, Aria is fundamentally different from Yotsuba because it has a long term story. For that reason, I really don’t think we should go beyond volume 2 of Aria the Masterpiece (Aria volumes 1 and 2) as part of this book club, and maybe not even that (and obviously only if it wins again anyway). If there is enough interest, we can create a separate book club like they did for Yotsuba so that we can continue reading it. It’s important to make sure this book club is always open to new members, and reading long series goes against that.

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Just wanted to say that I really agree with this - if people want to continue a series they can always do so themselves, but it creates a barrier to entry for new members if the book club continues on with a series that has an ongoing story. Plus trying out new series each time provides more variety and can help to introduce people to more series they might like.

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