I wanted to share some important points right away, which nobody will read because it’s too long, but at least I can say I told you…
Vocabulary Sheet
Please read the guidelines in the first sheet!
The more people contribute to the vocab sheet, the easier the job is for everyone, so please don’t be shy about adding words. We often have issues at the beginning with people not following the guidelines though. The most important points that get missed:
don’t add a word if you aren’t confident of its meaning or how to parse it
entries must be in dictionary form, not conjugated however they are in the book
do not include kanji unless they’re present in the book
don’t dump the entire dictionary entry in the ‘meaning’ column; remove alternative spellings, limit it to only the relevant translations, etc. - no entries wider than one column width
Asking Questions
ASK QUESTIONS! Seriously, ask ALL the questions!
Questions help everybody. Other people might be too shy to ask the question you post. Someone might not realise they’d misunderstood a sentence until seeing your question. The person answering your question might deepen their understanding of the topic, or realise they hadn’t paid enough attention.
Clearly include the page number or percentage. It makes it so much easier for people to answer your question, and for other people to search for answers in the thread.
Do not post spoilers for the week. Lots of people keep up with the thread before they’ve finished the week’s reading. Please blur out anything interesting that happens using [spoiler] ooooo text here! [/spoiler]. Err on the side of caution.
Reading
The first few pages of a new book are always hard. You dive in headfirst with no context. Try not to get discouraged!
Some setting to help people ease in: Rina (リナ) has just arrived at this town’s station. She is travelling on her own, and asks a passerby the way to the Valley of Mist.
Some characters in this book speak with a dialect. Hopefully somebody with literally any knowledge of this subject can provide us with more help, but so far my highly intellectual understanding is that we’re going to see k sounds becoming g sounds, and t sounds becoming d sounds. You can see this in the passerby’s response to Rina, where she says さあ、きいだごどねえなあ - i.e. さあ、きいたことねえなあ.
I’ve read it all and I don’t think it was too long .
It’s my first time reading along and I’m really excited to start it with all of you. At the same time, I know that I’ll be one of those people who ask lots of questions, so I hope you will be able to stand me in the end ;).
Added
It’s from the book itself, but I don’t think I need to blur since there no context (well, I’m going to read the rules from @Radish8 and edit if necessary
I’m mostly concerned about translations anyway, cos I reckon most beginners’ Japanese isn’t so good that they instantly understand a sentence their eyes pass over
Yeah… I don’t have the book in front of me directly to confirm my recollection, but almost all the dialect I remember seeing was stuff in sentence enders. Lots of ごど instead of こと and がら instead of から; stuff like that. The author seemed to be pretty good at keeping most of the important vocabulary in the sentence readable, as far as I could tell.
Me, before starting to read: “I’ve got this. This is written for kids. I can handle it.”
Me, moments later: “What does 思いきって mean? I’ve never encountered this before!”
Spoiler: 思いきる means “to make up one’s mind” I feel like this is one of those words I’ll hear all the time in anime now (when I make the time to watch any).
I think I’m following the lady’s accent, but I’m not too concerned over every little bit of it.
Reading an actual text novel on an e-reader (as opposed to images) is my first chance at actually reading vertical text with word-wrapping that wasn’t controlled by the author. For example, one line ending with 「ただま」 and the next beginning with 「っすぐに」. I’m fine with it horizontally, but vertically will take some getting used to. ただ まっすぐ に
About six sentences in, I’m ready for a break =)
Oh, hey, I have 76 WaniKani reviews waiting for me. I’d better go get those done.
While it’s obviously derived from 思い切る, it also has its own dictionary entry both in jisho and monolingual dictionaries. I’ve definitely seen it several times in this adverb form.
Hello everybody! I just want to thank you. I think the reading club idea is super great. The rules and google sheet are very well thought. This is the good power of technology.
I recently moved to Japan and I received the 霧のむこうのふしぎな町 few days ago. This book reading seems to be very challenging for me but I’ll give a try: the ready to use shared google sheet vocabulary is super useful. It prevents me to stop reading for too long for looking the translation of actually most of the words.
However, could you share the link for the lower level of the booking club? I like WaniKani forum style but I still need to get handy in using it, so I could not find how to reach and saved a thread such as this one or the general reading club “threads”. Is it possible to save threads like this and have it in a sort of personal homepage? Please, forgive me for being a bit off topic, but I really want to have this thread to be present in what could be my WaniKani community homepage!
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