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 added you, but it is editable by anyone, like some other threads on these forums, so you can generally add yourself to groups and edit your status.
i put you in the ‘doesn’t have the book yet’ section because i don’t know if you ordered aria yet

Basic users cannot edit wikis.
It’s to prevent abuse/sockpuppets.
@mopsy747 You will automatically upgrade to standard user if you stick around the forum (post a bit, read a bit, like a bit) for a few days.

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oh i didn’t realise

@saiakuma Sorry for the trouble! Just ordered the book, the potential start dates dovetail quite nicely with when my current lessons finish so it’ll force me to keep studying…

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Plus we can continue creating vocab lists. If we ever actually read it as a group I’ll have already finished the first volume by then. Maybe I could go back and create the vocab sheet in advance at that point, or at least include all the kanji readings.

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The KR Manga Time imprint’s font OCRs pretty nicely and I’m planning to pick up what’s been released sometime in the next month or two anyway (even though I’m still struggling to read some of their other titles due to a lack of applied recognition practice), but maybe we can split the work of extracting the raw sentences, if it looks like it’s likely to get picked in a future cycle.

Even if it doesn’t get selected, maybe we can contribute it to (Back up) Floflo.moe - A WK-friendly website for reading for our own reading purposes.

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I’ve never tried using an OCR before. Wouldn’t you have to scan every page for that to work? Or find an online copy that was already scanned I suppose…

Yeah, it would involve taking a picture of every page (or scanning them, but phone snapshots seem to work quite well), building strings, and grouping the fragments into sentences by hand, but that’s still much faster than radical lookup on the scale we’d likely be dealing with for a furi-free book.

Using some other means to skip the picture step would work, too, but I don’t want to propose anything morally grey.

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On the first page, よだつ, in the second-to-last line. Looks like it’s part of 身の毛が弥立つ.

めくって in the second-to-last line on page 2. I suspect this is vocab, specifically 捲る, rather than a common grammar point.

遠ざかって in, again, the second-to-last line on page 5. It’s a conjugated form of 遠ざかる, but I thought it was a directly modified form of 遠く that I hadn’t yet learned.

So none of it ended up being grammar, just vocab and kana-form stuff.

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it was no trouble, i had to add myself as well haha
i was more telling you for future reference :slight_smile:
best of luck on your lessons!

i’m excited to start reading this

woot? 76 new messages? what did i miss? anything important?

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Mostly us discussing new guidelines for nominating books, including adding polls to nominations to gauge difficulty. Plus two re-nominations following those guidelines here and here. Details are in the first post if you’re interested.

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Are there guidelines for what the poll options mean?

If I were to join a book club, I’d want to take on a “Challenging book”. “Just Right” and “Minimal Effort” would be something I can read on my own without a club.

IMO, “Impossible” and “No effort at all” would be a waste of time.

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A challenging book takes more time to go through.
Other people may have different targets, based on how much time and efforts they want to dedicate to the book club.
The polls are mostly to inform the decision of those who didn’t check the material.

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I believe that the meanings you inferred are what is intended.

However, it’s pretty subjective, which may also be intentional, that we’d want to pick a book most people find to require “minimal effort” or be “just right”. (I don’t have stats to back this up, but I’d wager people are likely to overestimate their abilities or find a short preview a lot less daunting than a 40-page weekly workload)

I’d like to see an analysis, by poll or discussion, about what level of reader a book seems like it would be appropriate for, maybe updating the post with some numbers once we’re mostly in agreement.

There will still be a vote each cycle to decide which book is chosen; this is just a vetting process to make sure we don’t include something on either extreme.

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The options mean different things to different people. I think getting overly specific wouldn’t really help at all. The average difficulty should still be useful if we get enough votes for each nomination.

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Just joined for Aria - I’m looking forward to reading with everyone!

Do you guys actually think I should keep that “I just like to click polls” option in the difficulty poll template? I hate the idea of keeping it… But I hate even more the idea of people corrupting the average.

Can I suggest that we start a new thread every time we start discussing books for another round? (Not for each book, just for each round.)
Why? This thread is getting really long, which I think would be very off putting for new people who don’t want to spend hours scrolling through stuff which is no longer relevant, or not having it clear what is currently relevant until you get closer to the end.
Solution: We’ve already chosen the Round 3 book, so let’s put all these suggestions and polls into a Beginner Japanese Book Club Round 4 thread, please?

That could have the opposite problem though, where people don’t know which thread to check. Plus, generally we wouldn’t be resetting the nominations each time. This is a special case because we’re trying to clear up the guidelines. Also, that makes it sound like this thread is just for nominations, but it’s also for general book club discussions. I understand your concern, I’m just not sure your suggestion would make things better… (I don’t have a better suggestion though…)


Side comment: I’m curious how you’ll vote on the Scary Stories poll. It felt so easy after spending months reading Kiki.