Hunter × Hunter 🐸 (Absolute Beginner Book Club) - Starting on the 27th of August

Here’s a tool for converting manga / comic images to HTML, which will allow Yomichan and text selection. I haven’t used this yet, so YMMV!

Edit: I started using this, and it works quite well. Make sure you go into extension settings for Yomichan and allow access to file URLs.

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In addition to what other people have said, I also just use Google Translate a lot. You can write the kanji with your finger and google is quite good at picking it up!

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I recently started using mokuro + yomichan and it works great! Not perfect, but it makes it so easy to look up 90% kanji/vocab (but it doesn’t always help with grammar). The vocab sheet is still helpful though, as experienced readers will try to put the meaning specific to the text when there are multiple meanings.

Other online tools I’d recommend if you haven’t heard of them yet:

For reference, when I decided I wanted to read my first manga with the book club, I studied as much grammar as I could in a little over a month. I had only done a few chapters of Genki I before. I found Cure Dolly’s lessons clicked with me more, so I watched the first 20 or so lessons before the book club started reading.

When I started reading (Teasing-master Takagi-san), it would take me sometimes an hour to finish a page. You can do it though! Over time it does get faster. You can always ask questions if you get stuck, or skip over a part if you get the general idea.

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I’m looking to give the Absolute Beginner Book Club another try. I first dipped my toe in with 三ツ星カラーズ but found I wasn’t able to keep up with the time commitment since I was attending university at the time. I also hadn’t done much grammar study so I was kind of lost in the small portion of the book I did read. The premise of this book also just sounds more interesting to me.

I already have an Amazon JP account, so I was thinking of just ordering a physical copy there. Amazon JP won’t sell me a digital copy. :confused: If I’m going to participate, I might need to go ahead and order a copy now since they’re saying it might not arrive until like the 22nd (unless I pay more for faster delivery.)

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Is it giving a reason as to why?

The most common one would be if you haven’t set up a Japanese address (either a fake one, or an import service of some sort that some people use). Otherwise, sometimes a VPN has to be turned on every once in a while to trick the site into thinking you are in Japan.

(Of course, this is only if you want a digital copy. If you prefer a physical copy, ignore me! :stuck_out_tongue:)

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In my case it just says “The Kindle title is not currently available for purchase.” I don’t know if it matters, but I currently don’t have a JP address on my account, just my US address. I do have a Tenso account that has a real JP address, might that work?

I’m kind of torn between physical or digital, but if there’s any difference in text/image quality I’ll take the one that’s higher quality. I like digital for the “doesn’t take up space” factor, but there’s also something nice about holding a paper book in my hands.

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This is probably the issue then, the tenso account should work.

The digital copy should have a better text quality, but others said, that it isn’t much more readable, than the digital version

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Yeah, you have to have a JP address to access Kindle titles, so that’s the issue for sure.

As far as quality, this is an older manga, so the print version will likely have clearer text. Newer manga, the differences tend to be negligible, but that varies by publisher.

(@Gorbit99, beat me to it. :stuck_out_tongue:)

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Let me try adding my Tenso address to my Amazon account and see if I can purchase the digital version. If the text quality isn’t to my liking (like if detailed kanji or small characters are hard to make out) then I’ll try a physical copy.

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no need to purchase it twice, I already linked a picture about the quality here

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Hm, some of the kanji is kind of hard to make out, but the furigana seems readable…enough.

Yeah I think I’ll try the Kindle version. Now to take on the task of figuring out how to enter my Tenso address on Amazon :joy: :sob: It’s rather confusing. I know Tenso gives you a guide for how to enter its address on Amazon, but the guide might be a wee bit outdated in terms of what the address field names are called.

Edit: And before anyone says it can be a fake address and still work for purchasing eBooks, I’d like to actually enter it correctly. Outside of letting me purchase digital content, it’ll also theoretically allow me to purchase physical items from vendors that can’t ship to the US. Somehow it never occurred to me that I could use my forwarding address with Amazon. I is the stupid sometimes :sweat_smile:

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…I added a JP address, but it’s still not letting me purchase the Kindle version…

Do I have to set the JP address as my default address or something?

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I think so, yeah, this is why ideally you have a separate account for jp stuff

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Hm. It works fine for me if I switch my Canadian address to be the primary, but you can try defaulting to the JP address and see if that resolves your issue, yeah.

Further up, I linked a step-by-step process for this, so maybe you can check and see if some step is being missed.

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Ah, so it looks like I hadn’t done a couple of those steps. I didn’t set my region to Japan under my digital content and devices settings (didn’t realize that was a separate thing from your shipping address), and I didn’t have my iPad Kindle app logged into my Amazon JP account.

I just got the free sample of the Kindle edition sent to my iPad as a test, seems to work great!

Thanks for the help! :+1:

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This looks cool! Won’t work with having the digital version from Bookwalker unfortunately as it needs the manga to be on your computer

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i’ve just finished the first two chapters, レオリオ is killing me with his “tough guy” use of language, haha. Some of the stuff he says is very uncommon. Thank the maker for Jisho.org

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So knowing that this book is upcoming I decided to buy the physical copy on a recent trip to Tokyo! I’ll take the plunge and follow along in the club, even if probably my level is nowhere near enough for it, but I guess you gotta start somewhere… right now I’m just getting through level 0/1 graded readers.

I got a bit scared that the furigana on the physical copy is absolutely tiny! Like, barely readable if you have perfect sight. In that sense a digital copy would have been preferable, but it’s cool to have the actual book in your hands!

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Not really, the digital copy was scanned with a lower resolution, so the furigana is still hard to read. I’d suggest a magnifying glass or similar if you need it.

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It seems that the furigana isn’t super clear no matter which version you pick up, but if you need help figuring out what a word is, that’s what this forum is for.

Yeah Jisho will probably be one of my lifelines while doing this book.

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