Alrighty; I’ll leave it off of the offshoot list for now, but if that changes, if somebody could tag me so I catch it, that would be much appreciated! 
Hello! I purchased this book to try and do this book club cause I’m at level 20 WK and know I’m supposed to be reading stuff now. I started reading this and unless I constantly and flipping back and forth between the Google sheets and the book, I’m having a hard time on non kanji words and grammar.
Should I be doing more grammar learning before trying to read or should I just power through reading and bite the bullet. it’s just sorta discouraging to constantly need to reference the sheets for vocab and grammar
Bite the bullet. Even if you spend all your time with grammar and vocab, it will be hard the first time over. You need to grow your reading legs. It will be easier over time.
Okay. I’m doing the reading on my phone so that also makes it hard to flip back and forth between the book and the sheets but I guess I’ll just keep trying to trudge along.
It’s sort of a tough question to answer because it’s so variable what works best for people, but:
What I can say is that biting the bullet worked really well for me; but I know that not everybody has the same tolerance level for pushing through it. Early on, reading will always be difficult, even if you get a good basis in grammar before starting out, but the returns you get are well worth the effort you have to put in.
If it helps any, I posted further up in this thread my advice for people who are just starting out to read:
The biggest thing I noticed is that if you genuinely enjoy the material you are trying to read, it’s much easier to learn from and get value out of, even if the difficulty level is technically “out of your league”, so to speak. I learned a lot from Takagi-san, as my first manga, for sure – but my real gains came when I picked up things that were harder than that because I wanted to read them even if they were more challenging than conventional thought would say I should take on at that point.
Okay I’m starting at the beginning again and am gonna just try and recontextualize how I’m viewing this. It’s a language puzzle! Thanks y’all
Hello. I looked at a free copy of the first pages of this manga and the furigana was really tiny. I want to get into reading but this is completely unreadable for me. Is this normal? How can anybody read this furigana? I don’t know all the kanji so if I can’t read the furigana it will be impossible to even look up anything, right?
Is it the Bookwalker version?
Mine is not great, but definitely a bit better (this Bookwalker version).
There are other ways, maybe the simplest one would be to use the Vocab Spreadsheet as a lookup table?
It was created by this club back when they read the volume:
Hi! Yeah it’s from bookwalker. Yours does look a little better. Also nice colors, how did you get that? I’m thinking maybe I should just find a physical copy, because I checked with a physical manga I have and it’s waaay sharper, completely readable. Seems like low resolution might be a problem overall with online readers? I would have assumed it would be the opposite, that physical would be worse than digital. Oh well. 
Thanks for the tip about the vocab sheet!
I think Bookwalker has both a Monochrome and a color version, looks like I got the colored version (it’s just a few pages though). You can click the link from my post to see the version.
It really depends on the manga, but it does seem like that for some old ones the resolution on Bookwalker is not great 
Not sure when it gets better for this series, but it does, compare with volume 38, the latest:
(this is very zoomed in)
Pixelated furigana are unfortunately near-universal on digital versions of older manga, even if you legally purchase them. As you read more you’ll get a bit better at recognizing them by shape, and as you learn more words you’ll be able to intuit what they’re indicating since you know what the possibilities are. When I’m really lost, I use Jisho’s radical search, but I’m pretty slow with it so I only bother if I’ve seen the same kanji more than once in a session. If you can understand what’s happening without that one word or sentence, just tolerate ambiguity and move on.
You can try https://kankan.pt/ for a better radical search
Others have already answered your question about the furigana, but am I understanding correctly that you’re trying to get into reading native content for the first time?
If so, Hunter x Hunter is unfortunately not a good choice for that. It’s one of the two hardest mangas (the other one being “Cells at Work!”) the ABBC every tried. In fact it’s so hard that it would belong in the Intermediate Manga Club. I’ve been reading Japanese for about 4 years and judging by it’s Natively level I’d still have a hard time with Hunter x Hunter.
I’d recommend choosing something easier from the list (look for low “Natively level”, ideally ~L18 or below).
Yeah it’s my first time getting into reading. I’ve been studying japanese on and off for 3 years, and the last year I stepped it up more, and looking to get even more into it this year. I have a few beginner-beginner manga at home, and the furigana is much more legible. So I think I might just get HxH in physical copy.
I want to read something that’s actually interesting to me, and I love HxH so when I saw it on this list that was a lightbulb moment. And in the post I think people said it’s actually easier for the most part than the Natively score, except it gets more difficult by the end of the volume.
Anon said: “Somebody who has read further in the manga might be able to judge a little more effectively, but especially when looking at what it’s being compared to in order to achieve that rating, I think it’s a case of the level getting artificially inflated a bit.”
Gorbit said “It will definitely be harder than for example ハピネス was, I can tell you that much. And the difficulty lies mainly in the later chapters. But I’m confident, that most people will be able to handle it just fine, after getting used to the writing style and stuff.”
I have Aho Girl, African Office Worker and Chi’s Sweet Home in physical copy. Maybe I should go through those as preparation for HxH.
I was also hesitating about recommending you not to start with Hunter X Hunter. It was also the first one I tried to start with, and that went very poorly so I dropped it. Planning on trying again this year though.
A bit more context: at the time I was level 6 of Wanikani and had studied grammar for less than a month. When I mean it went poorly, is that I would spend more than an hour on each page to figure out which words were written / lookup in the spreadsheet, then trying to figure out what the sentences meant. I thought it was very frustrating to spend my time that way so I dropped it.
Now we are three years later, I’ve learned a lot and read a lot (described here my journey that enabled me to read: From 0 to Reading Everyday: Step by Step and Comprehensive List of Resources ) so I think I would be fine.
But I mean, it doesn’t hurt to try, you will see if it’s easy enough for you, if it’s not easy if you have enough resilience and patience to make it work anyway, or else you can just try again later and hopefully find something else that you like reading while it will help you improve your Japanese!
Another useful link if you haven’t tried reading yet: Joining the Absolute Beginner Book Club: Preparation and First Reading Experience Expectations
I appreciate hearing your feedback. Yeah maybe it is too high level, but if I treat it as study material more than reading maybe that’s a way forward.
On the plus side, I seem to have found an amazing solution for the furigana problem. There’s a browser extension/app called Migaku which seems to work excellently for translating japanese in video and text. You can just click on any phrase and it will translate it directly or in context with AI and you can save a phrase to add into your SRS later. Combined with a website called BilingualManga which puts manga text into copyable/readable format, Migaku seems to work well.
Tried it a bit on the Yotsuba! manga, seems to make the reading experience MUCH smoother. So I’m hopeful about that. 
Yes, there was a fair amount of optimism before the club started. At least in Anon’s case that was only based on the preview, i.e. a few pages. Natively was a rather new website at that point and belief in it was still a bit weak. It is usually rather accurate, and the level of HxH has barely changed since then (I think it was L29 at that time, and is L28 now.)
So… how did it turn out? Let’s check the threads:
- Week 1 had 66 people with “I’m reading along” and at the end it was only 4 (6% of 66 finished). Compare that to other ABBC book clubs, e.g. Chi’s Sweet Home where 37% finished, or Mitsuboshi Colours where 25% finished.
- There are almost no questions after week 6, so it’s probable that most of the people reading by then were rather experienced readers already.
- The vocab sheet stops at week 9.
- The grammar sheet stops at week 4.
- The ABBC proposal rules now includes “Some higher level picks have been chosen in the past, such as Cells at work (L28), and Hunter x Hunter (L29). However, these titles proved to be too difficult for this club. Please try to keep your nominations under Natively level 22. Horimiya (L22) was considered the highest level that was still suitable for the club.”
Alright, so what does that mean for you?
- Almost nobody finished the club, and those that did were probably already more experienced readers. It will be very hard, with a much lower chance of finishing than usual.
- Low discussion from the halfway point means that all questions you have (and you will have a lot of them) you’ll have to ask for yourself, whereas in other clubs you usually benefit a lot from reading other peoples’ questions and answers.
- Usually you could use the vocab sheets instead of having to look up every word yourself, but they stop at week 9.
You’re welcome to try anyway of course. You’ll probably get answers for your questions in the threads too, so don’t hestitate to ask. And if it turns out that it’s too hard, don’t give up - try something easier instead for now.
That sounds like a great idea. I’d recommend starting with Chi’s Sweet Home; it’s probably the easiest manga the ABBC has ever read.
Thanks for the detailed answer Tobias. Maybe you’re right and I should hold off until I get more experience. It will be there waiting for me as something to look forward to anyway. It’s not going anywhere. 