I will say, if someone said they could only read either Orange or Dreamin’ Sun, but not both, I would recommend Orange.
Granted, I’m only four and a half volumes into Dreamin’ Sun, so maybe it’ll be completely amazing later. But so far Orange is the stronger series for me.
I’m not sure when I will finish Orange. (I’m discovering that I can only keep pace with book clubs sometimes. 
If my subconscious doesn’t want to read that book for whatever reason (completely unbeknownst to me I might add) then it is just not happening.) But that doesn’t have to stop me from starting Ouran Host Club!
One thing is, I would like to get a little more of Girls’ Monthly Nozaki-kun under my belt, because I think some of the vocabulary from Nozaki-kun will be useful reading OHC! So May or June would probably work better than April. I’m not in any particular rush. 
The funny thing is that Ouran wasn’t on my radar at all until I just now remembered it and now I’m almost chomping at the bit to start reading it, haha. Although I know with two VNs that would be a bad idea, at least until I know how well reading both at the same time goes!
I’ll go ahead and float the idea in the read every day challenge, and see if more people are interested for a May/June start, and if there are more people, I’ll start setting that up.
Otherwise I’ll force myself to let it lay for a couple of weeks, because I really should. xD
Advertisement Mode: I have vocabulary/frequency lists for the first three volumes, potentially useful if decide to try prelearning some vocabulary. (Lists are linked in the table at the bottom of the page.)
It looks like the next most-frequently-used word in the series for me to learn is 庶民.
For me, later is probably better (especially if I’m starting reading a new BBC at the beginning of May). So, June would be good for me!
Yeah, there’s clearly still space in the lower right!
Yes, they do use that one a lot haha.
Like an hour later … clicking away the words on your site is so addictive!!
Eta:
This feels distressingly accurate.
Noted. So June would fit everyone, May might be a little hectic for Tobias, and anything before then would just be me and Christopher.
I’ll see what the read every day crew says about May/June-ish to see if this has the potential beyond a casual club or a more organized club.
Yeah, I haven’t posted there yet because I’ve not read Japanese for a couple of days. 
Welp, people are interested, so I guess I’m probably starting another club… xD
At least, I’ll finish off main VN club duties mid next week and probably won’t need to do anything there after that. (For a couple of months, and then it depends on if I’ll keep being the organizer or if someone else takes over.)
B$ is obviously ongoing. Orange will finish end of March. A Dictionary of Japanese Grammar looks to be starting last week of March. And Ouran High School Host Club would probably start in May/June, and B$ should finish end of June.
So I shouldn’t have 3 active clubs for very long, instead mostly have 2.
How did I end up in this position, lol?
Question for @ChristopherFritz: Any chance you have page numbers for Ouran? Because the paperbacks are literally published with 0 page numbers. I saw not one flipping through quite a few pages, and the ToC is useless since it just says “Ouran High School Host Club” and then “Extra episode XYZ” and “Egoistic Club” (whatever that is exactly, but directly related to Ouran, so are the extra episodes). And I checked the first volume, and it has 3 chapters for Ouran in that ‘main’ section.
Also, man the style is a bit rough, haha. I do know it gets better later in the series, but holy smokes, I’m surprised this thing got popular enough to get an anime, but maybe all manga looked like that at that point. I only flipped through, looking for chapter breaks and page numbers, but still. xD
Oh yeah, that’s a thing.
If chapter 1 is page 3, then…
[1] Not a typo 
Oh, phew. 
Otherwise we’d be reading with blind length of chapters which sounds ridiculous for a book/manga, but I’m not about to count all pages. xD
Also, what?! Cluv? I guess I didn’t look that closely, lol. I guess it’ll be clear eventually.
I thank all my lucky stars for you @ChristopherFritz. Otherwise my plan was to just check how many chapters it was and divide all the pages by that and leave it at that.
I don’t know how a Japanese person gets “egoistic” without getting the “b” in “club”.
The English release “fixes” it:
Knowing the chapters are between pages 3 and 154, and knowing there are 3 chapters, taking 151 pages and dividing it by 3 gets you close enough. (Assuming there isn’t a mix of long and short chapters, which isn’t the case here.)
The real question to figure out will be: 50 pages each week, or splitting chapters for 25 pages per week? (A worry for closer to club time, I’m sure.)
That is rather hilarious. xD
Yeah, I saw it kinda would have worked out for volume 1, but who knows how it would in future volumes.
Very true. I guess that is something the club will get to decide if participation shows up when I get the thread up. ^^
Wasn’t sure if either of you wanted to be publicly called to the book club in the book club thread, so @MaraVos and @TobiasW I had some time yesterday and put up the thread for Ouran!
Well, how am I doing with Japanese? I feel like my overall progress is fine. I do notice finally getting comfortable with some words I always stumbled over before. And I am recognizing some words that I’ve learnt through reading or in the late parts of WK (the 50s are hard to remember recognize because… well, I’m not entirely sure). So even without any formal study I feel okay on that front.
As for WK, I’m now burning level 45 stuff and having 20 reviews a day. I guess soon the daily reviews will increase again, well a couple/few weeks, when I hit the start of my 4-days per level.
Do I regret going fast through the 50s of WK? Yes and no.
Yes: I feel like it was really beneficial for me to do vocabulary lessons as soon as they unlocked, and that didn’t work for me when going full speed because I wasn’t about to do 50-80 lessons at once, also that many lessons would have taken away the benefit of doing the lessons sooner anyway. So I lost that reinforcement and some of my problems remembering the 50s items is probably because of that.
No: I feel like the 50s overall felt quite a bit more useless. Also a lot of kanji meanings that didn’t match the vocabulary they were in at all, mostly because the most common uses of the kanji didn’t match its meaning, and the vocabulary that did are so rare they aren’t worth teaching. The 50s is really were similar kanji is starting to get painful, because I noticed a lot of same readings due to radicals just didn’t match anymore. So many of those would have changes to the reading from what is standard for the radical they contain. And with so few vocabulary words per kanji it is hard to reinforce that difference. So a lot of this would have been so much more painful and I would have been more likely to take a long break/quit before hitting 60 if I hadn’t been speeding along.
If you had to do the 50s over, would you do it the same way? Probably. My no regrets answers weigh heavier to me. Although maybe I could have stretched the levels to 60 days or so, to better match vocabulary lessons to the day they unlocked. But I’m still afraid I’d find the 50s annoying enough in their similarity to previous items and vocabulary with different meaning and all those things that going slower would in the end actually be more painful than doing it quick and having the frustration I had. So strong probably that I would do the same.
Was it worth getting to 60? I think so. I do see items from the 50s while reading. It isn’t like they don’t appear at all. I suspect I’ll see more of them if I start reading more novels. But at the same time, VNs love using kanji for words that don’t use them much, and often the more uncommon kanji too. So more kanji knowledge does pay out well when reading VNs too.
Will you ever reset and go through it all again? Hell no, such a waste that would be of my time. Could I learn some items more solidly by going through them with WK’s very smart system again: absolutely. Would it be worth all the time: Nope. Any item that is shaky will be solidified as I consume it again and again and again. I don’t think I could ever see a benefit big enough to offset all the time I’d have to spend redoing everything again. I’d rather learn the basics in another language.
So yeah, I guess that was a bit of an update after being level 60 for almost 4 months. I guess I could add it to my level 60 thread… Eh, I’ll see.
I don’t see any reason not to do all the burn reviews I have left. Giving myself another look at the items. And yes, I’m still correcting my mistakes, as I’ve said, WK worked a lot better as a discovery tool with added reinforcement than a pure learning tool, and I’m not about to switch away from that now. I’ll finish WK on June 20th, as long as I finish all available reviews that day.
If WK adds more items, I’ll probably only do them if there are some that are new to me. If I look at them the first time and I can accurately pinpoint meaning (and hopefully reading), then I will skip those lessons until something actually new comes, then I guess I’ll knock them all out. I hope that I will have been reading and watching enough by then that I’ll never see anything new on WK in newly added content. ^^
While I’m currently puttering along on my WK reviews, I am about to start some serious grammar study because I was finally convinced to start the A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar 
book club. I did say I wanted to study grammar in 2023, and I guess now I will be. It’ll be a slow and steady wins the race kinda thing.
I think at the currently winning options for schedule we should finish in six months or so. So late September–October-ish? And then we’re probably moving on to the Intermediate one unless everyone have come to their senses and realized a dictionary reading book club was a stupid idea.
In other reading news, Orange book club is almost over. Next week I post the last weekly thread for that, at the same time as I post the first thread for aDoBJG. I’m also casually reading along with the 古見さんは、コミュ症です。 
book club. I read a couple of weeks ahead, but I think they just caught up last week. So I’ll probably pick up Komi-san in the next week and read a few chapters.
TobiasW and I have also started our reading schedule for ルーパーズ 
. I’m currently caught up but on Monday the next chapter starts, and then we’re reading a whole chapter in a week (I think, I’ll need to double check the word count, but I think there is only one more chapter over two weeks and that would be chapter 11, and we’re starting chapter 10 明後日).
I’m also caught up and not with BU$TAFELLOWS 
book club. We just started week 2 of Shuu A, and I only just started reading that. So I have quite a bit to read in the next week. Also I still haven’t touched Limbo’s path, so technically a route behind, but for now I’m ignoring that.
I hope to get enough of a dash at some point with B$ that I’ll finish a route and then quickly dive into Limbo’s. I have a couple of months to make that happen, so I’m not worried (yet).
And the last reading news is that I will be leading another long term manga reading club starting in late May/June: Ouran High School Host Club 
. My favorite anime, but the manga that also goes further than the anime. The anime covers the first 8 volumes, and the whole series is 18, so I look forward to 10 more volumes of story and developing of stuff.
I suspect that my reading time will be plenty busy with two VNs until Ouran starts. And also with the assorted other things I will do from time to time, not to mention all the days I won’t read.
The only other thing I’m kinda thinking a bit about is that I probably want to try and dig into Rurouni Kenshin (the manga) some time this year. It would be good practice for when I want to read the Hakuouki VN. If I can get some of that samurai language down, and then I think tackling that very long VN will feel more doable.
Also, I do want to read two novels this year. Hopefully when I finish the two VNs I’m currently in the middle of, I can do that, unless the VN club will be ready to pick the next VN and I’ll want to join that one. Thankfully the one they picked this time don’t exist for Switch, so I didn’t have to think about joining. xD And I think that one will take about 4 months to read, which means the next vote should probably be in June or so, perfect timing for when I’ll finish both VNs I’m currently reading if I keep to schedule.
Anyway enough about the musings my mind go on. Right now my focus is on leading my active book clubs and reading Loopers and B$. Komi-san has a tiny bit of my attention, but I think I’ll probably keep reading ahead of that one whenever it catches up to me. Or possibly I’ll read it all this week, finishing the first volume, who knows?
