FINALISING NOMINATIONS // Currently Reading: 10 Minute Biographies // Absolute Beginners Book Club

emucat · February 25, 2021, 9:47pm

Currently Reading: 10 Minute Readers - Biographies (2nd Grade)

Overview

Welcome to our Japanese book club for absolute beginners! In this club, we choose a Japanese book and read it together. We then discuss what we’ve read, whether that’s meaningful discussion on the content, questions about vocabulary and grammar that confuse us, or just motivating each other to keep moving.

What Does Absolute Beginner Mean?

This bookclub is aimed at readers who are tackling native Japanese material for the first time. A grammar knowledge around the level of JLPT N5 / end of Genki 1 is probably about right. Kanji knowledge is not essential as the books chosen will generally have furigana.

The bookclub isn’t really aimed at readers who are “absolute beginners” in Japanese. At that level your time is probably best spent learning basic grammar and vocabulary before tackling native material. However, reading native material can be a fun way to motivate learning, and readers of all levels are welcome to join the fun and ask questions!

Should I Join?

The goal of this Absolute Beginners’ Book Club is to help you practise reading so that in the future you can take the jump to the Beginner Book Club, where more advanced books are being discussed.

With that in mind, anyone is welcome to join in and read along. You don’t need to do anything to become a member, just grab a copy of the upcoming book and join in the discussion when it starts!

Set this thread to “watching” to keep up to date with discussions about upcoming books.

Instructions for setting thread to watching

If you set this thread to watching, you’ll get notifications when there are new posts. You can always turn this off again if you no longer want to receive them.

To do this, scroll down to the last post in this thread. You can use the slider on the side as it’s quite long! Under the last post look for the grey box in the picture below, click on it and select “watching”. You’re all done!

Additionally, you can always read previously selected books and get help from the past discussions; feel free to ask new questions too!

Previous Books

**** Continuing as an offshoot bookclub

Proposed Books

Any book suggestions are welcome, so feel free to nominate something you’d like to read using the template below! The books suggested must be appropriate for absolute beginners though; please read the guidelines before making a nomination.

Guidelines for Proposing Books

Nominate something you are ready to read
- This is a big cooperative group, but there’s always a minority keeping things active. If your pick wins, there will be some expectation that you contribute throughout.
- If you can’t read your own sample pages (at least mostly) you may not be able to judge the difficulty effectively, and won’t be able to help others much.
Books nominated must not be longer than 100 pages (of text)
- Our reading pace means this is the longest we could tackle within a reasonable time-frame.
- A book of short stories can be longer: we will only pick select stories.
Do not nominate anything clearly NSFW
- This can be hard to judge without reading the book, but if you’d associate the work with fanservice or gore, even if just by reputation, please don’t suggest it for this group.
Furigana does not imply something is easy

Proposal Template

Copy this template into a new post when proposing a book/manga.

For page samples, you can either take photos of your own copy (try to make the three additional pages ‘representative’ if possible), grab photos from the internet, or use previews from e.g. Amazon, BookWalker, EBookJapan. Make sure the text is legible!

# Insert Title Here

## Summary
Insert summary from Amazon/Wikipedia/MyAnimeList/wherever here.

## Availability
Insert link to book on amazon.co.jp here.
Insert link(s) to ebook here, or mention if an ebook is not available.

## Personal Opinion
Insert why you think this book would be good to read, personally and for the book club here.

### Pros and Cons for the Book Club
#### Pros
* Insert pros here.
#### Cons
* Insert cons here.

## Pictures

[details=“First Three Pages of Chapter One”]
Insert images here (can be photos from you or the internet, or from ebook previews).
[/details]

[details=“Additional Pages”]
Insert a few more images here - try to make them representative.
[/details]

## Difficulty Poll
How much effort would you need to read this book?

[poll type=regular public=true]
* 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)
[/poll]

List of Proposed Books

Books

Book Title	Description
日本昔ばなしアニメ絵本	Japanese Fairy Tales
福娘童話集	Lucky Princess Fairy Tale Collection
こぐまのクーク物語春と夏	Kuuku the Bear Cub’s Story, Spring and Summer
日本の昔ばなし	Japanese Folk Takes Collection Vol 1 (Issun-boshi and other stories)

Manga

Manga Title	Description
あたしンち	My Family
Wanted	Short stories from the creator of One Piece
からかい上手の高木さん	Teasing Master Takagi-san

Removed Nominations

おじさまと猫 - An Old Man and a Cat - Bookclub started elsewhere on Wanikani August 2020 - Link

Where to Purchase Books

This section explains where to buy Japanese books in general. Please see each book’s thread for where to buy those specific books.

Purchasing Japanese Books

Physical books:

eBooks:

Amazon JP (Kindle-compatible)
EBook Japan (doesn’t show tax until checkout; not Kindle-compatible)
Book Walker (accepts paypal)
Honto (mobile reader app is region-locked – on Android get an APK, on iOS use JP App Store; not Kindle-compatible)

If purchasing eBooks from Amazon JP gives you trouble, check out sirvorn’s wonderful guide on purchasing eBooks from Amazon JP.

If you can’t find an online store that will ship to you, you can use a forwarding service like Tenso or White Rabbit Express to forward the package to you for a fee.

If you live in the right place, you may also be able to find the book at a local Japanese book store. For example, Kinokuniya.

Historic Polls

"Next Book" Polls

Links go to the original nomination post:

Book Poll 3 - Winner: 10分で読める伝記
 Book Poll 2 - Winner: 結婚しても恋してる
 Book Poll 1 - Winner: しろくまカフェ and チーズスイートホーム

emucat · January 18, 2019, 3:57pm

First thing first.
I have created this thread to decide the new book for the Absolute Beginner Book Club.
I don’t plan to manage this group as my personal circumstances are going to change drastically in a couple of weeks and I won’t be able to (probably). If somebody want to, they are more than welcome!

Second: I have obviously copied the post from the Beginner BookClub

Third: The Current book is expected to be finished by March 12th, 2019.
So my first question/poll would be:

emucat · January 18, 2019, 3:59pm

When should we start the new book?

Immediately after the current book ends (March 13th, 2019)
One week after the current book ends (March 20th, 2019)
Two weeks after (March 27th, 2019)
One month after (April 12th, 2019)

0 voters

Radish8 · January 18, 2019, 3:59pm

Ooooooh!

A couple of suggestions:

I would remove the current nominations or there’s going to be a lot of confusion with the Beginner Book Club
I would consider reducing the page-limit for this book club, and/or coming up with some more concrete guidelines over what sort of materials would be of an appropriate difficulty for this club. In general, I think it will be helpful to make it clear to people what would be appropriate for this club vs the Beginner Book Club.

Perhaps you could even just limit suggestions to those Graded Reader-type books similar to なぜ？どうして？ That might be too restrictive, though there is a huge variety on the market.

emucat · January 18, 2019, 4:02pm

Absolutely! I have just “copied” as a Template and I still have to edit it (a lot!)

The current book is 100 and something pages I believe… so the limit should be more than that, but less than 200. 150 maybe?

Radish8 · January 18, 2019, 4:06pm

Sure! Don’t forget that pictures can add a lot of length; we tend to consider something under 200 if it’s under 200 pages of text.

The other thing to consider is pace: we basically picked 200 because at the pace we go, we could read something that long without taking half a year over it. So you could start from considering how long would be reasonable to spend on one book, and then matching that to a rough estimate of pace.

Michikusa · January 18, 2019, 4:14pm

Nice one!
I just have two comments:

The link you have for the current book takes you to a point in the thread near the end, it might be better to give the link that goes to the first post!
I personally don’t see much point in all these discussions and polls, but I do very much like the idea of an Absolute Beginner Japanese Book Club, and you can count me in with whatever book you choose and whenever you start it!

Thank you @emucat!

emucat · January 18, 2019, 4:18pm

I’m a democrat

If I get’s too crazy I guess I can always be a “dictator”.

Regarding the next book, the one we are reading right now is part of a series right? Do you know how to find others in the same series?

Another option would be to jump to a 3年生 . This way people can start with the 2年生 we already have, and the progress to the new 3年生.

Michikusa · January 18, 2019, 4:24pm

Oh yes, there are a load, and I guess they are all on Amazon.
Here’s なぜ?どうして?せかいはふしぎ 1年生 for example, although, right now, I can’t find 3年生. There are also others on other topics.

Toyger · January 18, 2019, 4:26pm

I got tagged since it copied the old proposals
Which is good, cause I’m also part of the Absolute Beginner group and want to continue being part of it! =D

Radish8 · January 18, 2019, 4:27pm

People get more invested if they feel like they’re involved. Plus, you might get a good idea from someone!

The more book clubs we have going at once, the more divided up the potential pool of readers becomes. I do think your book clubs have been providing a much-needed extra level of reading difficulty, and of course anyone should always feel free to start any book club they want, but having these kinds of ‘home’ book clubs does help to pool readers together.

It also helps to keep the actual discussion threads free for discussing the contents of the book.

Anyway, I hope it goes really well, @emucat!

Michikusa · January 18, 2019, 4:28pm

Yes, all true! Thank you @Radish8.
(Especially the bit about keeping the threads free of off-topic discussion!)

Toyger · January 18, 2019, 4:30pm

Personally I would love if we did something with a story in it =)

Something like the top row here:

I can show images inside later (was mostly thinking of the two in the middle. Don’t remember if the first one comes with translations or not. If not, then it would be perfect, since it is made for Japanese Learners )

I would do it right away, but have a sleeping cat in my lap =P

I just grabbed the photo from here; A Hoarders Loot

emucat · January 18, 2019, 4:31pm

Is it “the same” book but easier?

Maybe there is not a 3年生…

Michikusa · January 18, 2019, 4:35pm

1年生 is a completely different book with different essays in it. It also has a lot less kanji so in a sense, for us, it could be thought of as harder! (And you are right, perhaps there is no 3年生?)

emucat · January 18, 2019, 4:40pm

I agree I would like something more story driven. It’s something I missed in the current book. I have the feeling I’m missing a lot of grammar related to conversations, slang, etc…

On the other hand, maybe we can find that in the other Book Clubs… I don’t know…

My general suggestions would be:

Another 2年生 to keep the same level as the previous one
The 3年生 of the series if it exists (or another 3年生) to have some progress and close the gap with the Beginner Book Club
Something more story driven.

The good thing about the current book is that you can join at any point as the chapters are independent, but… it might not be that interesting to follow (Although I’ve learned a lot of cool facts)

Toyger · January 18, 2019, 4:41pm

The three books I showed all have separate stories, so people can jump in at any time.
The first is aimed at Japanese Learners, the second and third are 1st grade, but believe both where series with higher levels too. So if we want stories, we can look for these series (but 2nd and 3rd grade has more kanji, so might be easier than 1st)

Saruko · January 18, 2019, 4:42pm

How were other people feeling with the ２年生 difficulty level? I thought it was just about right - there were some things that I needed to look up, but not so much that it felt like hard work. I wouldn’t want to drop down to １年生 level, and I still feel like there is much more for me learn by reading on ２年生 level before moving up to ３年生.

I thought that we could have gone at a slightly faster pace (like 2 pages a day) and still have been ok.

I liked that the chapters are independent (I did skip one). And I also liked that the book is factual, so that we can use prior knowledge to help us understand the language.

Michikusa · January 18, 2019, 4:42pm

I started reading Yotsuba with the Yotsuba reading club long before I was ready for it (although I do love Yotsuba, enjoyed the experience, had lots of great help on the thread from the kind people there, and am looking forward to vol.7 when the club resumes with that). So… I wonder, is there a manga easier than Yotsuba?

Michikusa · January 18, 2019, 4:44pm

Me too. Personally, I think 3年生 would be stretching it a bit too much for me.