I’ve already ordered kiki, so I’ll have it when I’m ready for it. As it stands, I’ll continue to casually study its vocabulary and see how hard it is in 6 months after I’ve started delving deeper into N4 material.
Aria will probably arrive a little late so I may ask to mooch someone’s vocabulary sheet for chapter 1, but I’ll cross that bridge closer to the start date.
while the club has finished this already, i bought and downloaded it right now and will start it in a few hours, when i do my commute.
all the chapters are linked, which might be helpful.
tagging this thread with my reply, so i can find it more easily 
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You know you can bookmark threads, right? 
Anyway, I doubt you’ll have any questions. But if you do feel free to post them.
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no, didn’t know that thanks!
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I bought this book in Japan when I was there a few months ago.
I think I might try and read it soon. Possibly.
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Go for it! There are still people here happy to answer questions on it, even though we read it last year.
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Hey, this topic will be useful for me eventually.
Kiki’s Delivery Service was actually the first novel I read when studying Vietnamese, so I will be very excited when my Japanese is good enough to read it in another language. I’d say in a third language, but I don’t have an English copy, which is part of what made it a difficult book to get through.
I’m guessing I’m at least three or four years away, though.
Not necessarily, depending on how much you study. I read it after about two year (with difficulty for the first few chapters). It helps having people to read with though, especially when you’re just starting to read.
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Just started Kiki today. I will try to speed read this maybe, starting in December.
I’ve only read the first chapter so far, but I can already tell there’s gonna be a lot of re-reads to figure out the ひらがな parts. 
There’s also less ふりがな than I expected. (That is to say, I expected it to be everywhere for some reason. Not that there’s not a lot of it. :P)
The targeted reader group is printed on the back of the book: 小学校中級以上. Does someone know what that means exactly? Is it from 3rd/4th/… grade? Does it assume you know kanji up to xth grad and show the others with furigana? Does is only use the kanji you learn in 小学校, with furigana from a certain grade level?
^^;
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Depends on the version. My version also didn’t have much furigana. Just all the annoying hiragana. 
I believe that’s what it means. I’m not sure exactly how they decided when to use kanji with furigana, kanji without furigana, or just hiragana though.
Thanks!
So everyone was just guessing as well?
I meant to ask if someone knew around which grade(s) a kid is 中級 but sometimes I ask different questions than I mean to.
Oh, I don’t think I actually know the answer to this question. I misread what you wrote originally and associated it with 中学年, which I learned recently and literally does refer to 3rd and 4th grade.
So… I’ll tell you instead that my original assumption about the book (and these types of books in general) was that it included kanji for all words learned in elementary school, and words beyond that were written in hiragana. But that really is just a guess based on gut feel.
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That would at least explain the nerve-racking かの女 we saw in Time Girl, as Jisho claims that the first kanji is only taught in junior high 
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How about seeing あした and あたし right next to each other? Seeing the former as 明日 sure would help…
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Since this series is on my “to read” list for 2020, and since 「霧のむこうのふしぎな町」 has been murdering me with so many words I don’t know plus lack of kanji, I decided to peek at the first few pages of Kiki.
Squints for furigana.
So, I don’t know if there’s an ebook with furigana out there, but this is what I have. Not a problem; I may just find something else to read before Kiki.
It might not be too bad for me to read, though. I was able to get through most of the first two ebook pages looking up only a few words and one or two kanji. The overall of the 6 books is 1,356 unique kanji making up a total overall 72,703 kanji across the books.
I haven’t done any per-book stats, but for the overall, I should be able to recognize/read about 85% of the kanji I’d encounter. I won’t reach 90% until I reach and complete WK level 26, though. And 95% recognition is at the end of WK level 39… =(
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Aoitori Bunka is the publisher I look for to get furigana. I’m not sure if they do ebooks or not though.
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Generally speaking, Kadokawa Tsubasa Bunko (角川つばさ文庫) has this series of books with a distinctive green border, they have all the furigana. They are available on Bookwalker and probably on a bunch of other ebook stores as well.
(I could not find an edition of Kiki from this publisher, though, sorry about that!)
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Okay, we need some polls up in here.
This post is following on from the discussion that spawned from this post or thereabouts.
If you are interested in a re-read group for Kiki’s Delivery Service, when would you want to start?
- April (probably 18th or 25th)
- June (probably 13th or 20th)
- August??
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I am happy to organise this if it starts June or later, but someone else would need to volunteer if it started earlier as I’ll be Zenitendo’ing.
Do you think we need a separate home thread from this one to organise the re-read group?
- We should have a new home thread
- We should use this home thread
0 voters
This OP is a wiki, so we could edit it to add any new information we need (obviously without destroying the existing information), and it already links basically everything anyway. But maybe it’s a bit weird to start playing around with it given MissMisc isn’t around to yay or nay, and it might be tidier to have a new thread.
I don’t know, I got about two hours’ sleep last night so I can’t think straight
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Maybe a new “reboot” thread with ample links to this original one?
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This one is on my list, but the ebook lacks furigana (which I’m sure I can waste time programming a vaguely passable solution for, for personal use), so I’m not in a super big hurry.
I’m still partway through Mist, though…
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