Intermediate Japanese Book Club // Now Reading: セーラー服と機関銃

Oof, books that big are a pain to handle. I’m definitely going to buy them in the three separate parts (which I think come out to over 1400 pages).

I’ve read dense 1200 page books in English in just a few weeks. What’s 1400 pages in Japanese compared to that? :sweat_smile:

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Just say this to yourself every day, it doesn’t have to be true, you just need to think it is!

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:raising_hand_woman: I’d love a support group of people just trying their best to read every day.

I recently started a fantasy book and realized just how different the vocab range is compared to a slice-of-life. I get sick of all the made-up terms/names in fantasy in English, I didn’t really think this through for Japanese. :scream: Plus all the old-timey grammar to make people sound really ancient and authoritative and how many effing pronouns/titles are there???

Almost wanted to give up 10 pages in but I’m 我慢’ing it and it’s not so bad if I just read knowing I won’t understand a lot of it. Surprisingly, I seem to understand more the less I care about understanding.

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I’d love a 多読 support group too :slight_smile:

Right, I don’t exactly how it’s going to go, but I’ll try to make a thread this evening JP time. It will probably be a work in progress for sometime until we figure out how to deal with it :stuck_out_tongue:

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I’d love a group like that too. Like some other people have mentioned, I’m not sure if I even have the time (I’ve barely even gotten around to read the two chapters I’ve read of 君の膵臓を食べたい since getting it a couple of weeks back) but I think having at least some sort of structure to fall back on would add motivation for me.
I may have to rethink my study regimen as well to make space for it, we’ll see :thinking:

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Alright, I have made a thread:

@Kyayna @infinitia @lopicake @brrricane @Iwasneverhere and everyone else interested.

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I was pre-learning some words on FloFlo and came to 枕木 and discovered a new word: sleeper (a.k.a railroad tie). What a coincidence that the word in Japanese contains the kanji for pillow and in English it has sleep in it. Is there any correlation? Why is it called a sleeper anyways?

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Good question :slight_smile: I became curious because in German (my mother tongue), the name for this thing (“Schwelle”) has nothing to do with sleeping; I would rather translate it as “sill”. Etymologically it seems to be stemming from an old German word that means “supporting timber”. Then I looked into the etyomology of “sleeper” and found this on wiktionary:
“Compare Norwegian sleip (“a sleeper (a timber); as adjective, slippery, smooth”).”
So maybe this Norwegian word leaked into the (British) English language here?

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Aye, I found the same thing, but haven’t able to hunt down any more details on that front. Perhaps my search fu is just weak…

too busy to read through everything, but I don’t want you guys to think I’m ignoring you. I might read boogie pop.

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… is what I assumed :slight_smile:
Take it easy! The thread isn’t going anywhere.

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By the way, when do we decide what’s the next book? Somehow I have “6 weeks before the end of the current book” in mind, but I’m not quite sure anymore where I got that idea… there are still almost 10 weeks left on Kino, but I thought I’d ask early. (Anyway, if I’m right, that’s in less than a month…)

I came across a new book in Kinokuniya I kinda want to try nominating. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Yep, 6 weeks is usually what I do, so that people have enough time to get the book if it’s back ordered or with slow shipping speeds. That means you want to close nominations a week before that, which means you probably want to start letting people know to nominate more (if they have anything) and read the samples if they haven’t already.

You’re going to nominate a book for the rest of us to read? Considering you never read books with us anyway…

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Well, good I asked then. Then, people, nominate away!
Current nominations are in the first post, but for convenience:

(Manga) Made in Abyss
(Manga) Land of the Lustrous
Your Name
Wolf Children Ame & Yuki
I Want to Eat Your Pancreas (Has its own thread already)
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny-Girl Senpai
The Familiar of Zero
紅霞後宮物語
Magical Girl Raising Project
The Closet of Nightmares
Night Market
Door D

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Cause you ain’t picked a book I’m interested in reading.

Not even sure what you mean by “never”. It’s just this book club that I’m currently not reading.

I think it was about books (novels) versus manga.

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This. Since @Belthazar, you’ve said that you haven’t really read any books from beginning to end.

Anyway, what’s the book you were thinking about nominating?

TOKYO猫びより散歩

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