Happiness Week 2 - Absolute Beginner Book Club

For me, it is the first time I sign up for a book club, but I am loving it!

Although at my level it is very slow, it is a rewarding experience when you are able to understand the story. Sadly, I made the mistake of not looking at the vocab sheet in the beginning and it is only now after checking it that I can fully visualise チョココロネ, haha.

Thank you very much for all your help, looking forward to the next week!

PS I find the double-paged “vampire looking down” the best scene so far and I do share some concerns from week 1 about the protagonist being too much of a perv, although this might be because we are just at the beginning of the story and the first half of the first chapter still weights a lot.

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I’ve seen several comments like this about the protagonist and I was thinking about it and I don’t think that he’s being portrayed as a “perv” at all. It’s more like he’s a young adolescent male with all the hormones that entails. I thought it was worth noting that when his friend points out the girl on the stairs he seems to be embarrassed and red-faced rather than excited (now his friend might be a different story, haha). Of course later he is aroused by the memory but again, he is a young male. I just thought I’d try and cut him some slack. Also I’m writing from a male perspective (I was young once, LOL) Of course I haven’t read the rest of the manga, so I might be totally wrong…

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I see your point, and to some extent, I agree with you. Neither I want to raise a debate about this kind of behaviour here nor to stigmatise the protagonist for it. The main problem for me is not the act per se, but how gratuitous that scene is in the context of the story, as we cannot infer any feelings from the protagonist so early. We do not know who the girl is or the kind of relationship they might have if any. I wonder if the only reason behind that scene is to add more insight into the kind of life he is living before being bitten. A life where he is bullied and keeps everything for himself. I don’t know, but as you pointed out it is too early perhaps to tell.

One last thing I fully agree with you is that probably his friend should be the one to blame here haha…it makes me also wonder if this means that the friend will play a different role in the future.

Apologies for overanalysing too much and writing too many assumptions that probably will be proven wrong haha.

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Finished this week’s chapter. Time to work on vocab and grammar! [dies dead]

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Found it a lot easier this week - I actually managed a few bits of dialogue without having to look anything up! But I definitely still needed the vocab sheet for chunks of it, so again a massive thanks to everyone who put it together :slight_smile:

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This is my first manga. 100% newb here… :durtle_hello: I have always admired the art, but… WOW. Some of the art in the pages for this week were incredible! :star_struck:

I also found this week a bit easier to read (perhaps because we didn’t have a newscaster or bullies to decode? :upside_down_face:) In any case, I am looking forward to the story unfolding!

Thanks to our fearless leaders for choosing this book, and thanks to everyone contributing to the stellar vocabulary list! :heartbeat: どうもうありがとうございます!

Responses...

…since I got yelled at via blue message box next to a draft for replying to too many individual posts, lol… :face_holding_back_tears: thanks Koichi; I am still learning the message boards.

@Memoria - same same. I hope she’s not too sexualized either… but vampirism has a long history of being sexualized. I’m no expert on the topic, but I have a friend (American) who is an horror author. In some of her fiction, she writes to try to reverse the sexism vs. the sexuality. My expectation is that our leaders would’ve had more smut warnings if things got too bad, so time will tell.

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Thank you for sharing this excerpt detailing the questioning particle の. I also had not seen this before (as I am a new-comer to manga), and I really appreciate the examples that you shared here.

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What do you do with the vocab sheets? I mean, do you put all those words on anki/kitsun/memrise or something like that?

Whats your advice/personal feelings That’s my first reading. I’m just reading and looking up words in the sheets and adding some words when I’m the first to have troubles with them.

Should I do something more if I really want to improve?

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What you do with it really depends on how you learn best. If you already have an SRS deck, you might as well put in the words you didn’t know, can’t really hurt.

I for one don’t do either of these, because if it’s a common word, I’ll see it often enough, and if it isn’t, then that couple of times I see it will probably be plenty to recognize it in the wild.

But others for example check if it’s on wk, and if it is, they don’t bother, and wait for the time they meet in on there.

So tl;dr if you’re not sure, try different methods and see what sticks.

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There is something nice about adding words you’ve learned from reading to an SRS deck, because you’ve learned them in a specific context and that context helps remember them. However, it’s a bit of a chore adding all the words to an SRS deck. There will also be some that are really not that common and probably not worth the effort reviewing repeatedly.

I’ve tended to focus on downloading Anki decks that someone else has already done the work on e.g. decks by JLPT level, Core 5k/10k, vocab lists from a specific textbook etc. I do this on the understanding that I’m learning words that someone else has curated to be a more common group of words.

I then just add a handful of words from the bookclub books to my own Anki “bookclub” deck. I often tag them so I know where they came from originally. The sort of words I pick to add:

  • Words that strike me as useful to learn
  • Words that seem common or are listed as “common words” in Jisho
  • Words that I remember coming across previously but had forgotten
  • Words that feel like useful vocab for continuing to read that particular manga series
  • Words that strike me as particularly fun to learn and reuse

You might also want to look at Kitsun.io - someone might have already built the deck for a book you are reading.

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I read this manga a few years ago in English, so it’s definitely cool to now read this in Japanese! I’m a big fan of 惡の華 (Flowers of Evil) and ぼくは麻理のなか (Inside Mari).

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I’m now quite overloaded with WK and BunPro … so maybe is not a good idea to add another “complete” deck but there are words made with kanjis already in wk with another meanings that I can surely add to my routines since I’m already familiar with the kanjis.

Thanks for taking your time to answer.

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The Anki Bookclub deck seems an interesting idea. And I see you have a “selection filter” that seems pretty accurate.

I will start adding “a handful” of words for each chapter no on SRS but in a simple plain notebook to start. Focusing on words that will likely appear again in the series. And if needed I will add those words to an SRS deck.

After all the more I read the more I will get exposed to those words “in the wild”. So instead of overloading me with more SRS, I will better focus on reading more.

Thank you for your time giving me your advice.

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Hello everyone! I have just acquired my copy of the book. This is my first time buying a manga in Japanese, and indeed my first time to attempt reading anything Japanese that isn’t subtitles :joy: I doubt I’ll be caught up for Week 2 but I’ll definitely be there for Week 3. I’m not that adept at grammar/vocab just yet as I’m only a handful of months into the language, but I look forward to just understanding what I can. I’ll have a look through the vocab sheet too, but as others have suggested, it might be a bit overkill to create a fully fledged SRS deck just for the sake of it. I’d like to keep things casual enough, this time around at least. Anyways, looking forward to discussing my first Japanese book with you in due course. またね!

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A little earlier than advertised - week 3 thread is up:

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I knew about the franchise, but I didn’t realize the spelling difference. There used to be this franschise in my country, but it disappeared a while ago. Actually, probably most of DVD rental.

I am late to realize that survival depends. Why the boy, but not the man?

Never realized before what コロネ means. Only heard of another ころね before, haha.

Another one I would ask…

  • それとも、同じになる? (page 32-33) - translated to 「Otherwise, become like me?」
  • いたい いだい まぶしい! Pretty sure it’s 痛い いだい 眩しい!, but not sure if いだい is an actual vocab here.
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I guess that’s why it’s so important to use katakana コロネ to show that it’s referring to the loan word of the “cornet” pastry instead of the another ころね :joy:

I interpreted it similarly as “Or, will you become the same (as me)?”

I don’t think いだい is an actual word. It might be a way to show that he was slurring his words, so いだい is likely 痛い as well. Interestingly, on page 40 and 41, the dialogue went:

Okazaki「かわく…」
Mom「かわく⁉︎ のどが渇くの⁉︎」
Okazaki「渇く…」

I think there’s a deliberate choice of using hiragana vs kanji here for the word 渇く in the dialogue. By using only hiragana in the beginning, it shows it’s not very clear what Okazaki is saying initially, since かわく can be かわく(to get dry​) or かわく(to feel thirsty​). At first, his mom reiterated what he said without knowing what he really meant, so it’s still written in hiragana. Then, she made sense of it which is when it got written in kanji, telling us that it is 渇く and not 乾く.

I rambled a bit there, but just wanted to share why that subsequent dialogue led me to believe that Okazaki’s previous dialogue いたい いだい まぶしい is likely a slurred speech!

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As someone who read the whole thing: no. (thankfully). The lewd stuff stops pretty soon. Agree with downtimes that the images without context are safe.

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The highlight of Week 2 reading was

DVD返すの忘れてた

Jokes aside, I’m interested to see how Okazaki changes after having been bitten. He already seems to respond badly to light and is “thirsty”.

:scroll: p32

このまま死ぬ?それとも同じになる?

Summary

:point_right: “(Do you want to) die like this or become same (as me)?”

  • このまま: this + state
  • 同じになる: the same become (Aになる)

死にたくない

Summary

:point_right: “(I) don’t want to die”

  • 死にたい: to want to die
  • 死にたくない = connective form 死にたく + ない: to not want to die, explained here

:scroll: p41

乾く?のだがかわく?お水もってくるから・・・

Summary

:point_right: Thirsty? Is it that you’re thirsty? I’ll bring you water.
Not sure what から means here.

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Mostly an incomplete sentence. You can think of “(Keep hanging on because) I’ll bring you water”.
Or anything else that makes sense in this situation “(Wait a second because) I’ll bring you water”.
You are going at light speed through the weeks :smiley: !

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