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

I see! I didn’t read Haikyuu but I compared it to Fruits Basket which is also quite text-heavy and contains complicated sentences. :woman_shrugging:

I‘m of course not in the position to decide this alone, and I don’t really mind one way or another, but maybe somebody else has an opinion on this?

Ah, I’ve read that in English, and found it uproariously funny. Given the number of foreigners the character interacts with, I’ve actually been kinda curious as to how it works in the original Klingon Japanese.

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I don’t know about the relative difficulties myself, but if I recall correctly, didn’t people also talk about having problems with Fruits Basket being text-heavy and containing complicated sentences?

Hmm, I don’t specifically recall such conversations. Which of course doesn’t mean that (a) they did not take place, and (b) people did not have issues with the manga. :upside_down_face:

I think I wanted to say that this manga (from looking at the sample pages) seems to be easier to understand than Fruits Basket (which was a BBC pick).
But like I said, I don’t mind either way whether this one stays here or is moved to BBC.

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This manga looks hilarious!

I’m curious how hard it would be to understand that the foreigners are speaking broken Japanese…or if it might sound natural to someone like me - who speaks broken Japanese myself.

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It looks like the nomination post for 灰と幻想のグリムガル was deleted for some reason. Does anyone want to renominate it, or should we remove it from the list of nominations?

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It does look like it indeed :thinking: Does anyone remember who nominated it?
I tried hard to check the Internet archives, but it only saves the first 20 comments or so of this thread (and does not include links).

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Hmm, I don’t remember who nominated it :thinking:
I only know that it was still there when we ran the last poll because I checked the difficulty poll.
Well, since it’s gone, we should remove the entry and move the name to the „removed“ section. (I can do that later if you like.)

If somebody wants to renominate it at some point, we will add it again.

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I don’t remember who nominated it, but based on the replies to the deleted post I’m guessing @yukinet is a likely candidate

(Though I could also just be biased from feeling like I tend to see a lot of random suddenly deleted old posts from them)

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I also keep wondering if there’s a connection between @yukinet and @yukine :thinking: (as in they made a new account and deleted the old one). I guess the similar name could also be a complete coincidence.

Edit: ah, but no, @yukinet still has posts on the forum.

I was also confused by that coincidence :rofl: But I agree, I also believe they are different persons.

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Who?

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guess it’s a good time to change an 7 years old nick, it’s going to make finding my book meter easier too!

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I’ve wondered about something recently, and I would like to check back with everybody’s opinions. First of all, I’d like to ask the readers of 博士の愛した数式 two questions regarding the pace of this book. (Sorry that this is coming so late, but life was too much in the way for me to properly make up my mind about this.)

What did you think about the lengths of the weekly assignments in the 博士の愛した数式 book club?

  • I thought they were about the same length as for other books in this club
  • I thought they were shorter than for other books in this club
  • I thought they were longer than for other books in this club
  • I don’t know
  • I did not read the book

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What did you think about the weekly “workload” in the 博士の愛した数式 book club?

  • It took me about the same time as for other books in this club
  • It took me longer than for other books in this club
  • I needed less time than for other books in this club
  • I don’t know / I have no other books to compare to
  • I did not read the book

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Why am I asking this? (Please read only after answering the polls)

I compared the numbers of pages of this book in physical form and as indicated on Bookwalker, and I found a significant difference (232 pages on Bookwalker vs. 291 pages physical). On further investigating where the Bookwalker number comes from, it turns out that Bookwalker uses a “standardized page count” for their books. I got curious and checked the numbers of other books:

Book title Physical # Bookwalker # Ratio
Hakase 291 232 80%
Kemono no Souja II 488 407 83%
Kemono no Souja I 360 317 88%
Konbini Ningen 168 147 88%
Night Market 218 193 89%
Koteki no Kanata 392 348 89%
Kitchen 200 180 90%
Haruhi 328 302 92%
Yougisha X 394 373 95%
Hyouka 224 223 100%
Kino no Tabi 222 248 112%

So it seems that many books are in the range where one physical page contains 88%-92% of the text of one Bookwalker “standard page”, but we do have some outliers: Hyouka and Kino no Tabi contain more (even a lot more in the case of Kino no Tabi) text per physical page, while Hakase contains quite a bit less text per page.

So I was wondering whether we should take this information into account when establishing the reading schedule for a book? I’m mainly wondering because this is the Intermediate club, and while the weekly amount of text does not matter as much for those who are solidly at an intermediate (or higher) reading level, it might be more important for people just having moved over from the Beginner book club.
Of course this should not be the only thing to look at, because difficulty also plays an important role. So less text might nicely counterbalance a more difficult read (which I’m somewhat expecting to be the case for Hakase) but more text + more difficulty together might be a deal-breaker for some.

Or am I overthinking this?? I’d love to hear your opinions!

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The amount of text on a physical page is not a constant either. So it is difficult to compare. You would have to count the characters/page on both media to get a more realistic value. As fixed fonts are usually used both in paper and e-book, one could count the number of characters per line and the number of lines per page. To do that for bookwalker you would first have to find the font size matching the number of pages given by the bookwalker site (depending on the device you use). A lot of work …

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博士 was my first intermediate book, so it’s hard to answer the polls. I’ve since read コンビニ人間 and am currently catching up with 君の名は. I think difficulty is the main indicator for how long it takes me to read the weekly readings and I found 博士 particularly difficult (for comparison, I could easily do a week’s worth of reading of コンビニ in a day while looking everything up and feeling like i understood 90-95%. This was taking me so long with 博士 that I would give up trying to understand most things so that I could keep up. I did read コンビニ after, so could just be that my Japanese had improved).

I don’t think taking difficulty into account for weekly stopping points is a feasible task (there were some weeks with 博士 that were a lot easier than others, for instance) and since that’s the main factor for me, I don’t think it matters whether we use Bookwalker or the physical copy to determine # of pages.

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There’s a new book club in town!

A bunch of us were really enjoying the コンビニ人間 Repeat Book Club and we wanted to read more by Sayaka Murata, so we had a poll and settled on 殺人出産, which I am sure will be a gripping read! :hocho: The pace is on the relaxed side of ‘Intermediate’ and the book is currently 50% points back on Amazon. We’re currently voting about the starting date, so there’s no time like the present for getting involved :slight_smile:

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After a bit of discussion here (book review by Myria), here (comments by Naphthalene) and here (more comments by Myria), I decided to move the nomination for 乳と卵 - “Breasts and Eggs” from Intermediate to Advanced Book Club. So if you’re still interested in reading it, you know where to find it.

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For anyone who has read コンビニ人間 or thinks they might want to, the repeat club just finished up and we’ll be reading コンビニエンスストア様 this week. If you want to revisit (or get introduced) to the outstanding author that is 村田沙耶香 (Murata Sayaka), feel free to join us! It’s a short (~7 page) love letter to a convenience store that’s available for free digitally.

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Funny you should mention that. I was working on a nomination post for Yoko Ogawa’s Memory Police. The kindle listed it at 326 pages, but then I realized that the paperback is listed at a whopping 448 pages. Bookwalker puts it at 384.

So then I looked at Revenge and The Diving Pool, but those look like they might be a bit gory (blood, murder, etc). :man_shrugging:

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