時をかける少女 Home Thread (Beginner Book Club)

Oh, well I’m glad to have been able to pass on that titbit :grin: it kind of gives a bit more meaning to some scenes of the film if you know the story of the book, I think.

Awesooooooooome :purple_heart:

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Wow, you took the day off just for the bookclub? That’s what I call passionate :wink:

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Thought I’d share in case anyone wants to do something similar. I Blu-Tack’ed the names of the characters I’ve seen in the first chapter to a promotion I got in the book that I’m using as a bookmark

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Oooooh, good idea to learn their names in some way.

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I remember when Floflo was like:
和子 means “son of a person of high social standing (archaic)”

And I was like, not here it doesn’t. :laughing:

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Does that mean I wasted my time learning that word D:

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Well, a word is a word.
At the same time, the word 和子わこ and the name 和子かずこ do not even share their reading…
So, for now, yes :/.

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same for 一男 which means something like “manly warrior”, hehe…

i watched the anime now, and i like the book better :slight_smile:

on a sidenote, i wish i’d have gotten the version without furigana
now i need more to read :slight_smile:

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Dangit :confused:
I’ve successfully ordered the book today \o/ It should be here by November 25-28th, so hopefully I will not fall too far behind

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What kind of things do you like to read? :slight_smile:

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in english, that would be stephen king, isaac asimov, john scalzi and so on. it’s not so easy in japanese, because a japanese kindle version of books i like is probably tough to find or not existent. the shining exists in japanese (i bought it, but didn’t start yet), but others, like talisman, are not. asimov seems to be a problem in japanese, too.

that being said, i liked this book here, so others like this might be fun to read, too. main problem was that this was published for a very young audience (1st class, 2nd lass elementary school?), so a lot was written in kana, and everything (but numbers) has furigana.

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Oh, nice. I have similar tastes, I guess :D.

I wouldn’t recommend reading a translation of a book, though. In my experience, it has been frustratingly bad. (Obviously, it’s something that can be ignored if the goal is study alone).

I feel it’s better to read original stories. I sadly haven’t found good SF/Surnatural(? In French we say “fantastique”) in Japanese so far. 1Q84 is pretty good until the third book, and is a much easier read than I had expected. Shin sekai yori is technically SF, but in a setting where technology reverted back (which I feel is kinda cheating), and it’s also horribly hard to read due to uncommon kanjis everywhere with basically no furigana. (My spouse, native speaker, gave up reading it, mentioning that the author was just trying to show off; YMMV, it was okay with floflo)

A while ago, I read アリス殺し, which has a premise based on Alice in Wonderland (and murders happen) and it was pretty nice. The conclusion fell a bit flat as far as I am concerned, but a good read nonetheless.

Oh, also 秋の牢獄 was pretty good (book read in the intermediate book club).

If you (and others) have recommendations, I’m also interested :slight_smile:

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Me too. :slight_smile: I might get that version eventually too, just for the side stories.

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i don’t have any recommendations yet. from what i understand, the intermediate book club has disbanded, too. maybe next time, i’ll check the different versions of the book we’ll read and get one without training wheels.

it’s a bit like watching anime with subtitles. even if you understand everything, your eyes wander to the subs. furigana do the same.

i’ll check and see what murakami has, if he’s good. i heard good things about him, but never got to reading his books. i don’t know, japan isn’t renowned for it’s overwhelmingly rich novel scene. there are light novels though, no idea what to think of them. was 時をかける少女 a light novel, too? it wasn’t very long.

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Not exactly disbanded, but none of the experienced members (myself included) have time to organize stuff.
Things will change once I convert @seanblue when some of us get more free time (January in my case).

I don’t know much about the novel scene in Japan or any country for that matter. Japan has litterary prizes, which means (I guess) that things are happening at least.

I don’t know much about light novel either. I basically discovered them thanks to the intermediate book club and floflo. They are separated from regular novels in bookstores, and I had never wandered in that area before :p.

The best way I can describe it is that reading a light novel feels like reading a manga, but with the images described to you rather than shown. It’s a much lighter style than novels (hence light), which I found at time underwhelming. The one I am finishing right now (Sword Art Online) is pretty fun.

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yeah i’m more the “proper book” type. i do like some lighter reads sometimes, but the stories have to be good. i’m only 24 on wanikani, too, means kanji will continue to give me some trouble, but kindle has a great jp-jp dictionary built in, that’s very helpful. how well i do reading a book “for adults” remains to be seen. i’m very skeptical still, the shining will probably make me look up a lot, and make me try to remember other things, so it won’t be as fluid and effortless as this book, which i read in 2 days.

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My book arrived in the mail today, this is the first time I’ve received mail from Japan, really exciting!

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by the way, i found it fascinating that this book taught me うなずく and かぶりを振る (to nod and to shake your head). i honestly didn’t even know i didn’t know them yet, lol. now i do… the book bombards you with these expressions, if it’s not spamming ぼんやり, hehe

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I learned that one quite quickly from 魔女の宅急便. It was used all the time.

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you’ll get a load of reviews here then :slight_smile:
it’s a useful word and i still can’t believe i didn’t know it yet. that would be one to put in houhou/anki or use it on lang-8 till it’s solidly memorized. i can totally see how it’s popping up left and right in written material.