The Intermediate Manga Club (IMC) // Reading now: ふたつのスピカ // Next: 銀の匙 (March 22nd) // Next: 蟲師 (May 31st?)

Alright, the poll is closed, we have a date for the next picks :slight_smile:

Calendar view
date book week
04/20/2024 とんがり帽子のアトリエ 1
04/27/2024 とんがり帽子のアトリエ 2
05/04/2024 とんがり帽子のアトリエ 3
05/11/2024 とんがり帽子のアトリエ 4
05/18/2024 とんがり帽子のアトリエ 5
05/25/2024 とんがり帽子のアトリエ 6
06/01/2024 break -
06/08/2024 紡ぐ乙女と大正の月 1
06/15/2024 紡ぐ乙女と大正の月 2
06/22/2024 紡ぐ乙女と大正の月 3
06/29/2024 紡ぐ乙女と大正の月 4
07/06/2024 紡ぐ乙女と大正の月 5
07/13/2024 紡ぐ乙女と大正の月 6
07/20/2024 紡ぐ乙女と大正の月 7
07/27/2024 break
08/03/2024 鋼の錬金術師 1
08/10/2024 鋼の錬金術師 2
08/17/2024 鋼の錬金術師 3
08/24/2024 鋼の錬金術師 4
08/31/2024 鋼の錬金術師 5
09/07/2024 break
09/14/2024 book #4 1

紡ぐ乙女と大正の月 will start June 8th and run for 7 weeks.
鋼の錬金術師 will run on August 3rd and run for 5 weeks.
(of course the schedules can be adjusted if everyone agrees that it is too slow / too fast)
The poll for book 4 will be on July 27th.
Book 4 will start on September 14th.

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紡ぐ乙女と大正の月 will definitely be a step up from とんがり帽子のアトリエ in terms of kanji and word usage. I’m reading volume 4 now and just ran into 助平 written like that in kanji without furigana. It’s スケベ if you were wondering. :sweat_smile:

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(I’m still team not-splitting-chapters for 鋼の錬金術師 but I guess we can review that by the time we’re done with 紡ぐ乙女 and have a better feel for level ~30 content and how fast we want to go)

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My last attempt at reading a level 28 (Ouran High School Host Club) one year ago was very short as I found it horribly difficult, even with Mokuro. And I painfully remember that when I read the BBC’s pick Behind the Supermarket, Smoking with you it was also quite a struggle, so honestly I’m fearing the levels 30!
True, a lot of time has passed since, and I don’t find Witch Hat Atelier very hard so far, but let’s see…

11 Likes

it is worth noting that after people from the ouran club rated the first volume, it went from 27 up to 30 on natively :laughing: it’s hard! It’s probably still in the top handful of hardest manga I’ve read. I have a feeling that the difficulty in 鋼の錬金術師 will be fantasy/science vocab, which mokuro can help you with, where ouran was all the characters talking like lil spoiled rich kids (and all the handwriting :melting_face: ). I haven’t actually test read it yet to check, though, but from what I remember reading of the series in english

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i ain’t gonna lie i just finished a lvl 30 a few days ago and i’m still a bit head spinny. honestly it’s mostly just pure lack of vocabulary; having to look everything up all the time gets really tiring (for manga especially since without mukuro you don’t have instant lookups)

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I don’t mind looking things up all the time too much (maybe because I’m old enough to have done that with paper dictionaries back in the day and that builds some tolerance for it…) but it’s the grammar that often frustrates me. You know when you understand every word in a sentence but you’re still not sure what it actually means or you think you understand but it doesn’t seem to make complete sense in context (and then sometimes you end up looking up the English translation and you realize that you actually got it right and it’s just a weird non-sequitur).

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this one is so annoying lol especially because a lot of ‘beginner’ recommended manga also sometimes just has weird non-sequitars that don’t make a lot of sense even to native speakers (lookin’ at you Yotsuba!)

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Can someone volunteer to run the 紡ぐ乙女と大正の月 club? I would still prefer not to.

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What does it entail precisely? Just making one thread every week?

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Creating the main thread and weekly threads, creating a vocab sheet (which is just copying an existing one and creating empty week sheets), and figuring out the schedule (which is already done here I think?).

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Yes, I already provided a schedule which was agreed on. I just don’t want to commit to making the weekly threads.

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My Google sheet skillz are severely lacking so I’d rather somebody else did that but I think I can make the threads.

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Here you go:

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Awesome thanks! Whenever you can, feel free to already create the home thread and post it here, so people can start talking about the book, if they will join, where to buy etc…
Another tip: You can look at another main thread, click reply on the first post, then click on the top left icon, next to the Bold icon. That gives you the whole original post, you can use that as a start and tweak it

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I have a small request. Can we switch over from the current poll options to the ones here? It seems like different book clubs use either the one you’ve been using or this other one, but I think the other one is better for a few reasons. For one, I don’t see a point in having an option about dropping the book. Most people just stop voting when they drop out, so that option is rarely used. And similarly, I’ve never seen a point in having people vote differently based on whether they are reading now or read a few days ago (“finished this part”), especially since some people just vote once and others change their vote after finishing. Most importantly for me though, the other poll has the option of “I’ve read this previously but I’m here for the conversation”, which I feel best represents how I’m participating. I know I can vote for “I have finished this part”, but since that doesn’t feel quite right to me I simply haven’t been voting in the Tongari polls. (I think it doesn’t feel right because people use that option differently, where as the “read previously” option is not ambiguous at all.)

If you don’t want to change things I understand. I just felt this would simplify things with fewer poll options while still representing most people (“reading now”, “catching up”, “read previously but still discussing”).

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Completely fine by me :slight_smile:
I’ll update my template for week 6 (I pre-made all the posts in the first week so I just have to post when the time comes)

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I’m fine with the new option template, but could we also keep the “I’m reading this book after the club has finished” option? I read picks from old clubs a lot and have always found this helpful to keep track of which forum threads I’ve already read.

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Ok. But from now on every new poll option is going to be an extended price target for my Patreon.

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Let me know if I messed anything up.

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