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’ve held off on start reading it because it feels a bit text-heavy. I’d say somewhere between BBC and IBC at the very least.

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The home thread for Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun is now up:

(As is the thread for Ogawa Mimei; see the OP)

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Oh, I forgot to post the thread for the runner-up :sweat_smile:

Here it is:

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The first two volumes of this manga are currently free to purchase and keep on Book Walker.

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Kobo says me too.

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Hello everyone. A new book club will start next week to read up on some introductory subjects in mathematics:

We will follow the YouTube series “Maths in Japanese” and mix in a couple of Wikipedia articles to solidify the vocabulary terms introduced by the series. While the videos are more on the beginner side the Wikipedia articles are more leaning towards the intermediate level, I’d say.

Come and join us on our journey into the beautiful world of mathematics :blush:

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do you have any advice for reading it? i actually find it difficult since so many words are not using kanji. did you have to look up a lot? thanks!

don’t know if it will help…use the book club resources…can always post up a question in the Yotsuba threads…other good resources ichi.moe is a great site as is deepL (it’s basically cheating though - lasts ditch effort if stuck)…

when you find it’s all hiragana…try reading it out loud (even if it’s in your head)…that has helped me a lot sometimes when I look at something and feel stumped then read it out loud and go …oh duh…im dumb haha …

keep in mind though at level 15 (if that’s your current level)…sadly you are stuck looking up a lot unless you know vocab from elsewhere… it’s just a grind … but overtime it does get easier…the most important thing is to find something you WANT to read, it’s interesting…if it’s boring the slog isn’t worth it. Yotsuba is a good recommendation, but honestly I found it wasn’t as easy as everyone said it was…in the beginning…but it is a good beginner manga …and some of it is absolutely hilarious.

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Thank you! Yeah, I’m level 15, I’ve been studying some vocab with other apps, but somehow I still lack some very basic vocab, probably because I just haven’t been reviewing those basic ones enough.

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Honestly, even if you review a lot, there’s just a lot of basic vocab, and it doesn’t always translate from SRS to real stuff (e.g. I often read a word, look it up, and then go… oh… I learned that 3 levels ago on WK - oops) - it takes your brain a bit to translate it out to the real world.

Stuff that is really basic for native speakers we sometimes skip over as older learners (example - animal names - not really that important to know zoo animals most of the time as an adult language learner, but if you go to consume native stuff that is simpler - which is often aimed at younger audiences - there are probably a bunch of animal names that you’re going to end up looking up that otherwise wouldn’t really be priorities). I also find that things that seem basic - like helper verbs (in English, it would be things like ‘do’, ‘would’, ‘can’) are deceptively difficult because they’re so general that they have a lot of meanings and you have to develop a ‘feeling’ for what they mean and how they’re used because they don’t map easily over to English the way a noun like ‘house’ or ‘carrot’ do.

We all look up a lot, especially when first starting reading, and especially when first starting a new series of books. Keep reading and it gets better. I am at a similar WK level - recently finished my first book, have just been trying to read a lot - choosing some things others have read helped initially so that I could reference previous discussions. Now I’m at ‘choose a long manga series and keep reading it’ - lots of vocab and structures get repeated - only looked up 38 different words on my most recent chapter (ch 22, for reference) - between ch’s 10 and 20 I typically looked up 50-70 words - I have no record from before that, but suspect that I was looking up 80+ words/chapter (i.e. most of them). I am still confused often, and some chapters are harder than others, but working with context helps a lot.

Good luck!!

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I just noticed -
Haikyuu!! isn’t marked as having an offshot club but I’m quite sure I saw them being on 3rd volume right now. I don’t want to change it myself as I’m not participating and maybe I don’t know some details :sweat_smile:

EDIT: Same with Fruits Basket…? Although as far as I can see here they continued but didn’t finish it, and there isn’t even such option to pick in the main post :upside_down_face:

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yeah! We’re just at the end of vol 3. @rainysunday has been setting up threads etc :slight_smile:

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Thank you! I’m quite bad at keeping track of these things :sweat_smile:
I’ve invented a new indicator and labeled Fruits Basket accordingly.

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+++ looks stangely depressing, like graveyard crosses, but also fitting for a hiatus indicator. I know I’m reading to much into this but that was my first thought.

And I added the proper indicator to Haikyuu!! then :slight_smile:

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No you don’t, that’s why I picked it in the first place :flushed: :joy_cat:

But maybe it can also mean “let’s read more+++” :wink:

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The thread title is not updated yet. I tried updating it myself but I don’t seem to be able to do that.

Thanks for the pointer! I took the liberty to update the title (if anybody would prefer a different text, please speak up! I did not include the next book on purpose as the titles are both really long…).

You need to be a Regular in order to be able to update thread titles.

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Is this part not editable by non-Regulars?

image

Maybe I should ask someone who isn’t a Regular :laughing:

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It’s not :slight_smile:

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Nah, this is one of the Regular superpowers :woman_shrugging:

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