Please don’t hesitate to ask questions, even if you think it’s a silly question. Helping each other learn is what book clubs are all about!
When asking for help, please include the ‘chapter page number’. This makes it easier for others to help you and it makes the information in this thread more searchable. The ‘chapter page numbers’ are the ones in between the panels on every page, not the ones that occasionally appear at the bottom of the page (those would be the volume page numbers).
Please blur out major events in the current week’s pages and any content from later in the book/series by using spoiler tags: [spoiler]text here[/spoiler].
Just got done with both the main chapter and the bonus - an entertaining chapter to end on for sure (full chapter spoiler warning) and with a sweet twist at the end. Takagi might tease Nishikata, but she is considerate at least
Since this is the last week of the club until Ayumu starts, I just want to thank everyone who’s taken part and helped me get into reading my first manga in Japanese - from a beginner who was only just starting on grammar studies to where I am now (which, to be clear, I still have a long way to go from). Extra thanks to everyone who was patient with me and helped me in the early weeks when I was still very unsure and having to go through line by line. Now I’m much more confident and able to work mostly without translating between Japanese and English
I joined this book club on a whim - I saw that it was starting soon and thought “why not?”, and I think it was a good decision all in all
And hopefully I’ll be seeing more of people in the next ABBC (or the Beginner’s club when that starts up, since I’ll be joining in with reading that too)
i can only echo this sentiment, i’ve made more progress here than anywhere else, will definitely join the next book club too.
honestly after reading the last chapter here, i’m getting back that excitement for learning japanese, that i had way in the beginning and which i lost after my repeated failed attemps at learning before i found wanikani.
Poor Nishikata. Thank goodness he is in still in denial, or her “lie” about liking him would crush him. But it still was an extremely dick move even for Takagi
I think it was a way for her to gauge his reaction while maintaining plausible deniability. If he reciprocated, I’m hoping she wouldn’t present it as a lie, or it would really be too cruel. But any other reaction left her vulnerable, so calling her confession a lie was her way out. Flirting is way too complicated when you’re this young.
I enjoyed the bonus story, very funny. It was nice to see our protagonists in a wider setting, till now it felt like they were the only ones in the whole school. I really like Sanae’s deadpan manner.
Just finished up. This chapter and the bonus was absolutely adorable. I had one struggle during the chapter, but it was a font issue. ソ and ン look incredibly similar with the way the font is in this manga, and it threw me for a loop when ウソ kept coming up and I initially read it as ウン. Took me looking at it a few times before I realised my mistake. Felt like a right dunce after it clicked.
Thanks again everyone who was in this book club. Like @VikingSchism, this was my first full manga, and my first real brush with delving deeper into grammar and immersion. I also still have a long way to go, of course, but this has been a wonderful way to delve into Japanese and really get to learning grammar, which has always been my weakest point with this language, being that it’s so different from anything else I have learned.
I did pick up Vol. 2 in case the spin-off club for this series ends up happening (there was talk of it, but haven’t heard much else since it was initially brought up), but even if it doesn’t, I’ll likely crack on with the series on my own, anyway. I have thoroughly enjoyed it, even though it’s not something I would have likely picked up on my own. I like romance/slice of life stuff, but didn’t expect to actually enjoy anything set in middle school. I expected the second-hand embarrassment to be too much, given how awkward those days were, but it’s actually been quite enjoyable. I guess it’s a case of being far enough removed from that time to recognise just how little all the stuff that seemed like a massive deal/massively embarrassing back then really mattered, eh? It’s easy to laugh at now, but I don’t know that this manga would have been quite so enjoyable back then.
Anyway, I hope to see you all in the Ayumu club! Thanks again, and as always, y’all are amazing!
I’ve really appreciated all the detailed grammar explanations throughout this book, and I have one last small grammar question.
page 5
ここはどうやってもごまかさねば
I understand this as meaning “No matter what I have to do here, I have to deceive her”, but I’m confused about the construction of ごまかさねば, ごまかす is the base verb, is ねば a contraction of なければ ?
Thanks to everyone for making this book club so enjoyable and educational!
I had to look this up, too, because I was curious. I thought it was just a contraction of that phrase, also, but after searching around, it seems to be its own phrase with a similar meaning. I think it to be a shortened version of this grammar point:
But it also seems to be a bit of an archaism, used for intentional effect (in this case, comedic, but I imagine it could also be used for dramatic effect/overexaggeration):
Definitely learned a lot along the way with both book clubs. At this point, except for the vocabulary, I am getting quite comfortable reading the manga at absolute beginner and beginner levels.
Thanks to everyone who read along and helped with the questions. As they say in Japanese, おつかれさまでした!
I’m a little late, again because I was protesting again (climate breakdown). I’m spread a bit too thin at the moment but I made it. I got through my first manga in Japanese!! Many thanks for all of you for your very helpful posts and encouragement.
Finished the chapter yesterday! My first ever book in Japanese finished! (Well… honestly I haven’t read the bonus chapter yet but I’m really looking forward to it.) Hopefully I’ll have time today to go back through my notes. I probably have few questions to ask.
I’ll echo what everybody else is saying: I’ve learned so much reading this book and I really appreciate all the people that made it happen. Reading this last chapter, some pages were still a struggle, but other pages I understood easily. The parts I struggle with the most are Nishikata’s internal monologues and all the unfinished sentences. I feel like I need one level deeper of an understanding to guess what’s left off of the page.
I’m planning on reading along with Ayumu next. I’m sure I’ll see some familiar faces (or profile pictures) there! I haven’t decided yet if I have enough time to read along with the Takagi-san offshoot book club. I have a copy of the book already, but it still takes me a fair amount of time for me to read.
What is everybody planning on doing with the week between books? I’m going to use the time to properly drill myself on all the verb forms that I look up every time. I also want to go back to the first chapter to see how much I’ve improved.
I’ll likely do some grammar practice, but I also have been reading some things on my own that I’ll use the time for, as well as getting the Volume 2 discussion thread up since the start date will be decided on by then.
All of this between the small dinner we are doing on Saturday with our vaccinated family members for the holiday.
And WaniKani, of course is always a given fact of life for a while still.
More reading! I’ve been attempting Magu-chan: God of Destruction, but the titular Magu-chan has a tendency to speak in classical-style japanese so it’s a bit tough going. I’ve also been working through some graded readers on this site and those have been fun
I definitely think just drilling conjugation for a bit can help get the forms to stick (especially with those godan verbs) in the short term
With the final week slowly drawing to a close, let me join you all in thanking everyone who participated in this book club. Your answers, but also your questions, were invaluable. Sometimes trying to answer someone’s question helped me cement my understanding (and question my knowledge) even more than having my own questions answered. A special thank you goes out to @Phryne for hosting, and to @ChristopherFritz, who mainly in the beginning, when it most mattered, patiently broke everything down for us beginners into its simplest terms, making even complex concepts easily approachable.
This was my very first manga in Japanese, and as I stumbled my way through the first chapter, worrying about how much was eluding me, I could never imagine that by the end of the book I would have developed the confidence to try my hand at reading novels (and amazingly, due to more conventional sentence structure, they sometimes even feel easier). I have still a very long way to go, of course, but the progress I’ve seen during these short nine weeks was more noticeable than at any other point in my studies. More importantly, native Japanese material is not something unapproachable and vaguely threatening any more. I know I can look up grammar I don’t understand, I can look up unknown vocabulary, I can find the patience to break down complex sentences until they make sense, and I know I can turn to others for help if none of the above works.
Being generally more interested in novels than manga, I wasn’t planning to join the Ayumu club. But the book was free, so there’s really no reason not to read it and participate - any book club is fun, after all. So I’ll probably see those of you who will choose to participate there, or elsewhere around the community.
And to those late joiners, please don’t hesitate to ask questions, even if the book club has ended. There are many people who will be more than happy to help out.
Hello! I’ve been lurking and reading along, the questions everyone asked often mirrored my own and the answers were great so I didn’t end up contributing much.
This was my first native material, an entire volume of manga! Almost seemed insurmountable in the beginning but lightened up so much as the weeks went by.
This was great, thank you to everyone who asked, answered and participated, and I surely will be continuing with Ayumu.
I saw some discussion of continuing with the next volume of Takagi san separately from the book club, and I’d love to join if that were to happen!
All in all a great experience, almost sad it is ending but looking forward to the future!
