Week 1: 君の名は (Intermediate Book Club)

I interpreted the “doing in advance” meaning of ておく here as sort of “I guess I’ll start off by massaging them”, like he stated it as a starting point to move on from, with the intention of continuing other actions that will come afterwards.

6 Likes

Well, I guess there’s bigger differences between the Tsubasa Bunko version and the regular one than I thought, because in my copy, the line before 俺はすとんと is 触ってみるか

9 Likes

I’m about to be level 6; is it too early to join this bookclub?

2 Likes

It depends on where your reading level is! If you get the 角川つばさ文庫 (green border) version, there’s plenty of furigana to make up for any kanji you might not have encountered yet. You can read a preview here (this one doesn’t have furigana though! But you can look at the grammar). The general consensus is that the grammar is quite simple for the complexity of some of the words.

Remember that it’s never too late to join a book club! Even if the schedule is finished. Plenty of us will still get notifications if you post a question and are more than happy to answer them.

5 Likes

I’m so glad people here mentioned that the beginning is supposed to be confusing, I was genuinely doubting my Japanese abilities during chapter 1. I haven’t seen the movie yet but now I’m really looking forward to seeing this scene (and hopefully making sense of it by then).

Overall it seems like the vocabulary in this book is a bit more flowery than what I’m used to, plus I’m struggling with the dialect. Really glad I got the furigana version so I can look up words more easily.

3 Likes

At the end of the prologue, there is:

気づけばいつものように、その街を眺めながら

私は、
だれかひとりを、ひとりだけを、探している。
俺は、

I am struggling to fit 気づけば into it. What does it add, why is it conditional?

3 Likes

Some conditionals can mean ‘when’ rather than ‘if’. ~たら is the most common to be like that, but ~えば often is as well.

So this means “When I come to…” rather than “If I come to”

Hope this helps

2 Likes

Ah, that makes sense. But in what sense ‘when I come to’?

“When I come to, I am searching for someone, just one person, while I am looking out over the city like always.”

What does she come to from? Is it like she is watching the city as if in a trance, without really realising it, and the ‘coming to’ is the conscious realisation that she is searching for someone?

3 Likes

I interpret as if she’s coming to from the trance of repeating the activities and seeing the things she does everyday. She’s noticing the individual carriages, the train, how many trains there are, the lazy clouds, etc, until eventually she breaks from that trance and realises that she’s searching for someone

Which I now realise is exactly what you wrote :joy:

5 Likes

Love it, thanks for your help! I am really enjoying the fact that it isn’t just reading, but also interpreting :grin:

2 Likes

From what I uncovered 気付けば can be used as a sort of set phrase, meaning something like “before I knew it”.

12 Likes

Maybe pretty basic, but I was super surprised at the use of 昨夜 on page 10.
When I looked it up, it apparently is the same as 夕べ, which also can be written as 昨夜 but the つばさ文庫 's furigana say さくや, which apparently is a legit reading for this word too.

Anyone here who knows if this is a very common word/reading?

2 Likes

さくや is what I read it as, so it can’t be that uncommon. Although it’s the second reading in Jisho (don’t know if that order is by ‘commonness’). ゆうべ feels a bit more casual.

4 Likes

The dream sequence has soo many new words aaaaaaaaaaa

Someone tell me it’s ok if I skip a couple XD

5 Likes

It’s totally ok :slight_smile:

Of course that depends on your personal goals for reading, but if you are fine with being able to follow along while at the same time not understanding every detail and nuance, then go for it! The most important thing is that you enjoy reading the book because it’s great if it feels like a fun activity and not like studying for a change :wink:

11 Likes

Why not abandon adding book words to SRS, and use book reading as a different, complementary style of learning? I used to add the words to SRS, but gave that up and I don’t regret it. I do read each passage a couple of times, but that still takes way less time than studying, and it’s more fun, and thus more motivating.

9 Likes

I’ve started only adding words I think are particularly useful/common and skipping the rest, so that will take a lot out (taking out frequency:1 words on floflo reduces the book’s word count by over half). WK’s vocab is woefully lacking so I need to supplement it somehow. ^^

5 Likes

I recommend only SRS:ing the freq>2 or 3 words and just looking up the other ones, if you can’t help it :slight_smile:. You’ll encounter them eventually, and words that only appear once are probably not very common and currently not helpful for the completion of the book.

7 Likes

No lie, there seems to be an infinite number of Jukugo!

…But after weaning myself off of SRS, I’ve gotten better at inferring meanings from Kanji and context, which is how I learned the vast majority of my pretty stellar English vocabulary. I figure that the more natural (and fast and voluminous) my reading gets in Japanese, the more likely I will learn Japanese vocabulary the way I learned English vocabulary – by reading tons of books!
If course, I love reading, so I’m really motivated to be able to read lots of books.

Currently, the way I’m approaching book club is:

  1. Read through the whole chapter without looking up anything-- just sidelining words I don’t know, and doing my best to make sense of it. Some words, like 輝く show up so often that I start to recognize them without needing the context any more. This is a very shiny book, apparently.
  2. Read it again, looking up all the words I don’t actually know. That way, I can see where my guesses were spot on or way off.
7 Likes

I think I’m already lacking a bit behind, but I guess it’s fine I’ll probably catch up. :smiley:

Today I read this sentence:

そこには胸の谷間がある。

Seriously I think this is the funniest part of the whole book. :smiley:

And to commit to the SRS discussion:
I try not to add too many words to SRS, because I simply think SRS is taking way too much time one could spend on other stuff. I already know a lot of words and I think the words that pop up often enough should be recognized naturally eventually.
Overall I think it’s best to find the area you are lacking most in (for me it’s grammar … ) and work on that particular area. I guess if you are lacking most with kanji/vocabulary you could focus on SRS though.

Also I’m taking a japanese class for a while now and our teacher always tells us not to learn vocabulary lists. So just to share another view. I’m seriously not sure how kanji learning is supposed to work without memorising tons of vocab. :thinking:

5 Likes