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

Someone please explain this to my tutor. Love him but… I can’t read advanced stuff and it does nothing for me…

Ah the good ol’ days.

They were indeed. ~<3

Thanks for your assessment of the difficulty. Clearly there is a large difference between WK level 12 and 55 :wink:

So I read the first page yesterday. For the first few sentences I aimed for full comprehension and as expected this took very long because I had to look up every other word. That doesn’t really work, so after that I tried just reading without looking up anything. I could get the gist of it, but I’m certainly missing important stuff that way.

I think I could read one page, look up a few words and understand it reasonably well in something like 30 minutes.

I have ordered it and it should have been delivered by last weekend. Unfortunately, it has not yet arrived yet and could have been lost in the mail (O.o). However, as soon as it will be physically in front of me, I will also give you my estimate on the difficulty :slight_smile: My level is somewhere in between beginner and intermediate (above N4, below N3).

Thanks for your assessment!

For my purposes, and a few others of us here who are less confident in our grammar abilities, how much of Genki/equivalent grammar have you done?

Put my vote in. Would be interested in joining a beginner level book club.

So i read the first five pages and it took me around 25 minutes. I could have done it a bit faster, but i did look up everything ^^. Even just when I wasn’t sure if I remembered the reading of the word correctly.

The story moves really fast in the first few pages without much background or exposition. (I mean 2 repeats in 5 pages???) That makes it kind of a strange read. I feel like it would be easy to follow the overall story though, even if you don’t get all the details until page 5.

5 pages a day seems about right, so people can catch up even if they miss a day or two.

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I use Tae Kim for grammar. I am comfortable with the Basic Grammar section and am about halfway through the Essential Grammar section.

I’m planning to get through Essential Grammar before we officially start reading, but I at least on the first page I felt the grammar was not so hard; sentence structures seem to be mostly straightforward (or I’m just missing grammatical structures I don’t know about yet :laughing:). Vocabulary took way more time to look up for me at least.

Yay! My book has finally arrived!! So, I started looking into Autumn Prison and I immediately recognized the very small amount of furigana xD Gosh… there are many Kanji (even on the first page already) that I have never ever seen… The grammar seems to be quite comprehensible though :slight_smile:

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Awesome! Mine has just been shipped! :grin:

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If you’re using Tae Kim for the sake of it being free I would recommend following it up with http://imabi.net/

Tae Kim’s Guide is a good overview and reference, but it’s explanations and examples tend to be very shallow. Imabi does a pretty good job of covering the gaps (including some simple practice), but suffers from poor organization.

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Thanks for the tip, I’ll definitely look at that!

Actually, I specifically said/suggested :

I don’t believe anyone suggested the beginner group wait.

My suggestion was implying a completely separate group that @windupbird and I will be in. No one has to wait for us. In fact, when I’m ready, I’ll probably start an entire new thread for it since, as I said, it’d be a completely different group. I only posted here to see if any others would be interested.

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Cool! I’ll have to look at Tae Kim’s to see what he covers in what order (it may be different) but it sounds like I shouldn’t have too much trouble reading it.

@Caracal remind me to email you back with my address. I believe I will take you up on that earlier offer of yours. Thank you. <3

Sure! Remind you here or via email?

That idea spurred the vote (now in the OP) to split this group. So even if the current beginners level up by then, you may find that there are more beginners interested. There are always new people joining WK, right?

: D

Either or. I’m just not at home and still working on my Master’s application… your last email which I’ve not responded to yet (but I might’ve read it when I was very sleepy/busy?) has gotten really shoved down in my inbox by now. (Sorry for not getting back to you sooner!)

I should be home in 20-45 minutes. Hopefully after I have finished the application, I’ll have time to respond tonight. XD

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Uhhhhh… I’m confused by everything you just said. xD

I don’t see anything in the poll about a group starting next year.
What do you mean about beginners leveling up?
Yes, of course people are always joining. I figured I’d make a new thread when I was ready to start “my” book club. Edit : Or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll just join the others at whatever they’re doing at the time. That’s probably a better idea. I dunno. I’ll figure it out in January lol

K. No worries…I just did another too-log rambly response. I’ll email you now, then. And for once it’ll be a reasonable length, promise. :slight_smile: