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

By the way, if you exclude temporary ratings from Natively, Death Note is on page 1/12 and Attack on Titan is on page 2/12 in terms of difficulty. So while levels 29 and even 32 are on the low to average side for book difficulty, for manga they are quite difficult. (Though of course there could be bias in what manga have been added to Natively so far.)

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Right, probably I learnt much more than I realize at the moment, AoT would be totally new under every aspect,
In takagi-san I’m already struggling when a new character gets introduced :exploding_head:

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Hoping in that bias so hard :crossed_fingers: if the first couple of regular pages take more than one day, I’ll set it aside (I begun with 1-2 pages a day with takagi-san)

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I didn’t recognize you right away since you changed the avatar …

don’t jump into the deep end too fast…though if you wanted something more challenging this book isn’t bad…Kiki’s (though not my fav)…has had 2 book clubs so that info is already there… the upside if you buy something you can’t read…it only means can’t read yet!!! :wink: you can always come back to it.

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Me neither, I keep thinking ‘who’s this message from… oh, it’s me’

I will give it a check, but as a second choice I didn’t look at the difficulty (maybe I should have had😅), I only picked the manga basing on one of my favorite series… if it’s for real this much difficult as I’m intending, I’ll probably lower the challenge and try to still chose between things I liked the anime version… something that should be drastically easier and yet offer me a solid +1 level of difficulty should be my dress-up darling, I heard… since I liked the anime I could go with that!

Now that I mention it, I’ll do my research on it but again if someone has experience with it, please suggest!

Right, since I already bought volume 1 and 2! It will be a nice mid term goal to look forward :laughing:

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I assume someone have suggested it, but if you look through the Master List of Book Clubs, you might find something you’ve watched as anime and enjoyed that have already been covered by the clubs. It is a good way to be able to push into more difficult stuff as I’m sure you know from using the Takagi threads.

And if AoT turns out to be too difficult right now, well you’re not the only one who’s bough stuff waaaay ahead of when they will be able to read it. I brought the Rurouni Kenshin manga before I’d read much at all, and that one is rated as level 35 on Natively vs AoT measly 29. :joy:

I think Kenshin is probably still about 2 years in my future, or maybe 1,5 years. And I bought it in 2020. (I haven’t studied nor read for most of the time since buying it though. Took about a year and a half off, so only advanced like 6 months since buying it. So not as bad as it seems. :joy: )

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I wouldn’t be able to wait for so long, if I love so much the series I’d rather jump in anyway and make my way bit by bit :joy:

Thanks for the link, I didn’t know there was such a thread where all the book clubs are listed, useful!

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I own a lot of other series that I want to read too. I’m a book shopaholic or book collector, so I can wait with the harder ones until later. :joy:

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I’m willing to throw my hat into the ring on this one. Should I somehow manage to beat out all the competition hoping to run the club, it’d then be a simple segue into running 耳をすませば thereafter.

By the way, is there any guidance or best practice on when to create a home thread for 耳をすませば?
One month before the start date?

How much of a break will there be between Shadows House and 耳をすませば? One week? Or no break?

I’m not familiar with protocol when there are two picks.

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Because now one said anything I had already put the home thread up and decided to do it myself, but if you want you can take over!

Usually we have a week break. Between 夜カフェ and Shadows House I removed the break because the last week in 夜カフェ is mostly only the afterword. So 耳をすませば would start on the 10th September.

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Just a reminder: URLs in the OP should be in the form https://community.wanikani.com/t/x/12345, not https://community.wanikani.com/t/12345. Note the x that should be included. When the x is missing sometimes it acts weird and in the past it has completely broken, so it’s safer to include it. I’m mentioning again because I noticed some URLs in the OP were missing the x.

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The x part of the URL is usually where the title goes. I assume it doesn’t matter if x is replaced by the title? (I would think that internally they just ignore it)

I’m not even sure where you’d copy a URL without the x. Is it an old format that’s not used anymore, or is just something that happens to work but isn’t guaranteed to in the future?

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Correct. As long as something is there it’s fine. The reason we have a convention of using a single x is to make the posts easier to edit. Having the title in the URL can make it really long, particularly when the title includes Japanese since then it gets encoded in the post editor.

I think it’s from people trying to shorten the URL like we suggest and just accidentally deleting the title portion or not realizing it’s a problem to delete it.

It’s sometime that happens to work but is not guaranteed to work in the future. One time in the past it broke, causing infinite redirects until the browser tab crashed. It took the Discourse development teams multiple months to fix it, and they said afterwards that there was no guarantee they’d fix it again next time it breaks. So better safe than sorry!

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Thanks for pointing this out. A bit of regex should’ve fixed all the current links in the main thread.

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The 夜カフェ book club is in its last week, thanks to all the people that participated and especially @sumsum for hosting the club!

We will start reading シャドーハウス on Saturday!

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The first week of the シャドーハウス book club is now live. Have a look!

Could one of the regulars change the title to:

Beginner Japanese Book Club // Now Reading: シャドーハウス

Thanks!

I guess we had a small misunderstanding, since you did not answer my reply I thought I would still be doing the club and was a bit surprised when I woke up this morning :exploding_head:

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Oops, I thought I replied to that. Sorry!

Feel free to sit back, relax, and catch my minor misses such as how I didn’t post in this thread about the week 1 thread =D

(I’ve been handling just off-shoot clubs long enough that posting to the main club thread completely slipped my mind :frowning_face:)

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I’ve noticed the existence of those “Book Club” threads many times before but honestly I never really had the time to look into them. Since I’m now trying to read 「魔女の宅急便」 I was browsing a little in the corresponding threads for the first time.

What I don’t really get is this: Is there any organisation other than there being one thread per chapter? How is one supposed to make use of it, especially if the event is long past. Am I just going to have to read through all the threads and seek out pieces of information? Or is there any hidden structure that I haven’t understood yet?

What I was hoping and expecting was some organisation that is more granular and chronologically following the book. Like a group of all questions and discussions related to page 1, maybe even chronologically for that page. Then on to page 2 and so on.

Now I hope that this does not come across as a critique, it’s not meant to be one at all. I’m just trying to find out if I’m missing something…

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The structure is as you see it, in the primary clubs. No hidden structure, really, or secret passcodes to unlock the information. :wink:

It is generally 1 chapter per week, organized into individual threads. If you are coming in afterwards, this helps you narrow it down to the chapter, at the very least. From there, participants are asked to mark discussion with page numbers, but they don’t have to stick to a specific order. (Like, there is no: Saturday is only for Page 1, and so on. It would be too stifling to discussion.) Everyone has different reading paces after all.

If you use the search function on the forums (magnifying glass, upper right corner), and specify “Search Within This Topic”, you can then search the threads for specific information in a couple of ways:

  1. By page number. This isn’t always the best way because while participants are asked to mark with page numbers, that doesn’t always happen, and differences between Ebook and physical versions are an issue (with novels and such, not so much on manga)

  2. My preferred method, you type up a small section of whatever sentence you want to see if it was discussed. Like, say, a sentence was: これはぺんです, and I didn’t know what これは meant. I would go to the search function and type これは, and specify “search within this topic”, and it would point me to all posts in the thread which had that particular phrase.

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You are not missing anything. That would just be a little too fine grained most of the time. The threads organically grew while people were reading the material. It’s not like we all read one page each day or something like that. That would be a logistical nightmare with all the different timezones and such. So one thread encompasses all the discussion and thoughts for one weeks worth of assignment from the book in random order.

Now someone could theoretically go in there and make a post with all relevant content inside the thread linked in chronological reading order but that would be a tall order and nobody has done something like that.

If you have a specific question (and are not just interested in discussing the weeks contents) using the search inside that thread might yield a suitable result. Otherwise you could always try asking your questions in the thread. The threads are mostly still watched and if you used the search before to see if your answer was obviously answered and found nothing there will be for sure people helping you out. Also if you found an answer but it was not clear enough feel free to post too!

Another thing to mention is that most beginner clubs also have a vocabulary sheet. This is sorted by page and first occurance and can help you look up unknown words. The sheets already extracted the correct translation if it is a word with many meanings and it can help you to break down sentences and parse them.

Ah and I don’t know why you picked this particular book but from what I hear it is not necessarily the easiest first read (should this be your first book).

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