Hi everyone! I’m looking forward to the next reading session, and I was thinking a little bit about the format. Last week we assigned roles and blasted through two chapters pretty quickly. It was definitely fun, but I feel like the pace may have dissuaded some less experienced readers from speaking up at parts that were tough to understand. Even on my third read-through, there were certainly plenty of colloquialisms and nuances that I’m sure I missed. I think we might get more out of it by artificially slowing ourselves down a little. That will make the club more accessible to beginners, while intermediate learners will still gain a lot through review and through helping explain to others.
I have a few ideas for how we could do this. I jumped into a discord group reading session with GameGrammar today (it’s a great Twitch channel, anybody studying Japanese who likes games should check it out, here’s today’s stream) and the format was really nice. Each person took a turn reading a passage then giving a general translation. Throughout the process Eve (GameGrammar) would give feedback and help people along. Using this format people of all levels were able to follow along, even if they weren’t actually doing the reading.
This exact format wouldn’t work for us for a few reasons: we don’t have a 先生 to provide feedback; and, a manga reading lends itself much better to distributing roles than to reading passages. For the first issue I figure one of our most experienced members might fill the role. For the second, after reading a section (either a page, a few pages, or the whole chapter), we could go back and take turns attempting a translation page by page. This way, by the time we’re done everyone has experienced the story regardless of level and we’ve likely discussed a few good words and grammar points along the way.
This method, or a method like this might decrease the barrier to entry for some members and might encourage some more questions and discussion. Let me know what you all think and what other ideas you might have!