Maybe the L24 for 気になってる人 comes from the lack of furigana? If the content is anything like the preview, content-wise it looks much easier than L24.
edit: Ah, and possibly from casual language/slang, which can be a real hurdle at points.
6 Likes
Could be! I think many of us on WaniKani are biased by our higher-than-normal kanji knowledge.
6 Likes
Note the difficulty rating is affected by who takes part in the polls, and so I wouldn’t consider the WK difficulty ratings necessarily equivalent across book clubs. I’d trust the Learn Natively ratings more as they have a larger pool of ratings (at least for a manga-to-manga or LN-to-LN comparison). By that rating, it’s not that much more difficult than ホリミヤ, but as mentioned there will be fantasy vocab that will likely be new (and not covered as much on Wanikani either), and the pace for a BBC will be faster.
I wouldn’t let that stop you trying though, even if you can’t promise yourself you’ll finish it. The thing that makes reading easier fastest is more reading.
5 Likes
Usually I’d agree there, but in this case there’s an overlap of 6 people between the two specific polls that Till mentions - and those 6 people all voted for Moderate Effort for Frieren, and Minimal Effort for 気になってる人. (Both polls only had 10 and 9 people respectively.)
(Still, it’s only based on the preview, so it might be that 気になってる人 gets much harder later.)
In my experience there’s a rather big gap between a L22 (like ホリミヤ) and a L25 (like Frieren). A L22 is usually “I’ll have little trouble reading this on my own” for me, and a L25 is “There are lots of passages I’ll struggle with, and I need DeepL / a book club / a translation to check or consult with”.
4 Likes
I’m repeating myself here, but what I said at the time of the last poll about Natively scores under 30 never having anything to do with how hard I personally find a book is still true.
ホリミヤ felt like the hardest thing I’ve ever read (and I still haven’t finished it). Vol 1 of 舞妓さんちのまかないさん (L26) was the easiest book I’ve read so far and the only one ever where I didn’t need a book club. I also had less trouble with ヤニ吸う (L25) and even あなたも殺人犯になれる (L28) has a better ratio between sentences I can understand with only minor lookups vs. sentences I can’t make sense of without someone else’s help and it feels more rewarding. And of course, everything that has a BBC is doable because it has a BBC.
So I’ll continue ignoring the difficulty scores and voting only based on interest. Luckily in this poll, all the possible winners sound kind of interesting.
3 Likes
This means the club will have to read both so we can scientifically compare these competing theories!
9 Likes
I understand somewhat because the text ratio in Maijochan is relatively low and there’s not a lot of internal narration, but the bit in the hairdresser with the harbour Kansai Ben was unintelligible to me lmao
3 Likes
The winner is 気になってる人が男じゃなかった
We will start reading on the 3rd of February.
@seanblue do you feel like you can commit to hosting this time?
No book will be removed from the poll due to its performance this time around!
Could one of the regulars update the title?
I would also like to take this opportunity to look for someone to take over my duties in this book club (polls, keeping main thread updated etc.). My life has changed quite a bit in the last couple of months and I don’t have as much time as I think is necessary to do this properly. I really wanted to find a resolution for the difficulty discussion before the current poll, but I could not find the time. If you are interested please leave a comment in the thread!
20 Likes
Like that?
5 Likes
What on earth Discourse, this is the second thread where despite having the thread on “tracking”, I get no unread-number indicators and it doesn’t appear in my unread list … I missed the voting orz.
3 Likes
The winner is 気になってる人が男じゃなかった
If anyone wants to pick it up in preparation for the club, it is currently one of the works eligible for a 87% off coupon from BOOK☆WALKER.
17 Likes
Woah, the original price is surprisingly high. Are the bits made out of digital gold?!
(And after the coupon it’s super low - thanks for sharing!)
2 Likes
The price is probably high because of the partial color pages.
4 Likes
Probably not. I’m happy to help figure out a schedule of course, but probably don’t want to commit to putting up weekly threads.
2 Likes
Anyone who is looking to read this sometime and doesn’t already have it purchased, there’s a digital sale for the next week:
13 Likes
Do you dream of reading a particular book, but you can’t nominate here because it’s slightly too hard for the BBC? Come nominate it to the Intermediate Book Club, there will be a vote for the next pick soon 
14 Likes
ヤマノススメ
Encouragement of Climb
Author: しろ
Page count: 149
Natively: Level 24
Summary
Japanese
幼い頃、山頂で見た朝日をまた二人で…。約束したあおいとひなた。月日は流れ、その間にあおいはなぜか高所恐怖症に！？ 二人の約束は果たせるの？ 同人誌で人気を博した作品が、漫画になって登場！
English
Aoi Yukimura is a quiet girl who prefers staying indoors and is afraid of heights. When she reunites with her childhood friend Hinata Kuraue, who is outgoing and loves mountaineering, they decide to climb a mountain together, in order to see a sunrise they saw together when they were younger. Along the way, they meet several other girls who are also interested in the outdoors, and begin a series of adventures on various mountains across Japan.
Availability
Personal Opinion
Before there was Yuru Camp in the cute-girls-doing-cute-things-in-real-world-places genre, there was Yama no Susume. I’ve enjoyed the anime of this for a while, and was quite surprised to discover on my most recent trip to Japan this year that not only is there a manga, it’s also twenty-four volumes long, and counting.
Pros and Cons for the Book Club
Pros
- Travel real Japanese locations vicariously through manga. (If this gets chosen, I hereby promise to research and post map links to said locations each week.
) - Has anime adaptation.
Cons
- No furigana
- This one more of a personal opinion thing, but oof they sure smoothed up the artwork for the anime, didn’t they?
Pictures
Difficulty Poll
How much effort would you need to read this book?
- No effort at all
- Minimal effort
- Moderate effort
- Significant effort
- So much effort my head might explode
- I don’t know
0
voters
18 Likes
This looks delightful! I look longingly at the Yuru Camp threads, but I’m not a fast enough reader to catch up with you all. It would be fun to start something like this with a live club!
7 Likes
That’s a convincing sales argument if I’ve ever heard one.
10 Likes
@Shadowlauch - It looks like you still need a volunteer to run threads for the next book club pick. I can do this - I’ll try and get a thread up later.
I also wanted to say thanks for running this book club over the last couple of years, you’ve done a fantastic job of keeping things organised. I’m aware you asked if someone could take this on from you as your life has become more busy recently. I haven’t seen any volunteers yet but hopefully there is someone out there who is thinking of putting themselves forward.
20 Likes