Description of your request or bug report: How about a new category for magazines and Mooks?
Hi everyone,
Recently we have started a book club for the literary magazine GOAT and we were a bit unsure about adding it to Natively, because while the bulk of the magazines are short stories, many people do read it for the interviews, discussion pieces and essays that are also heavily featured.
Other popular magazines in this category are Harta (WaniKani club), which basically does the same thing for manga, and ć¦ćŖć¤ć«, which mixes contemporary and emerging authors, with subcultures and cinema
Also, I think entries in that category should be excluded from grading because difficulty will vary wildly not just across volumes, but inside a given volume as well. (Also, typically people donāt read those front to back, just the parts they care about, making it even harder to gauge difficulty)
Yes, definitely excluded. For example I have some amazing Yurucamp Mooks, but even among those from the same series, the difficulty is completely different, either they are telling you about an amazing product, a side story of the series, or guides to go to places.
I donāt want to wade in too much on the category thing, I donāt mind if the magazine sits in a magazine category or in an other category (sorry!). The GOAT magazine is currently other, and Harta is currently manga, for example.
But I was surprised by this and just wanted to add a contrasting view:
I see what you mean, and Iāve written more comments in the drop down about approximately how much it varies compared to my perceived accuracy of Natively grading.
The counterarguments are
that happens anyway with many books and series
isnāt something better than nothing?
is Natively really that precise that it matters?
current content excluded from grading (textbooks) are given a grading - and sometimes that feels even more problematic than if grading had been allowed
um, I wrote some thoughts
The content of the magazine that sparked this request looks like it is basically all around level 28-32 for the short stories (bulk), and perhaps a bit more than 33 for some of the interviews that rely a lot more on current events/cultural knowledge. Perhaps it strays a bit outside of that, but I donāt think Natively gradings are more precise than +/- 2 at best anyway. Iām not sure it matters, is what Iām getting at. If some people grade it like itās 28 because they read the easiest short stories, and others grade it like itās 35 because they only read some hyperspecific target interviews (unlikely, but stick with me), thenā¦ isnāt that still valuable? Itās definitely not <25 in any case. And someone looking for content around level 22 would have a good idea that this would be a waste of their time.
The other magazine Iāve read -
Harta content varies much more and is easier to quantify since the manga get collected into volumes. Manga in Harta ranges from 22-33 last I checked. The magazine has landed at a level 30 so far. And although I would have rated it a bit lower, I think thatās within the error of the ballpark level that is worth being happy to approach before it is worth bothering to buy it. For someone looking for a level 22 manga, thereās no way Iād recommend they read it in a manga magazine like Harta - the format itself objectively requires a higher comfort level with Japanese, probably more like level 26-27 as a minimum. The current level, although imprecise, sends a signal that you want a pretty good comfort level with Japanese to approach the magazine.
So my question is - what do we lose by having a grading that might be fuzzy? Isnāt being there better than not? And what would be the point of having something on Nativelyā¦ that isnāt graded?
Ideas for other solutions
Perhaps rephrasing the grading question when comparing media across categories (or even within categories ie other, or magazine) - instead of asking if something is harder or easier, it might be more appropriate to ask which book would need to be approached at a later stage of learning. (I donāt necessarily think this is great, and it might have unintended consequences, but this is how I think when I grade wildly different books)
Or perhaps once books have a certain number of gradings that should make them āstableā, show a range of levels for that book. Frieren, for example, despite having loads of gradings, cycles through levels 25-28 multiple times a year and is currently at 24. Might be nice for people who encounter it at a high or low level to know what the range normally is, e.g., how much it varied across the last ~50 reviewersā gradings. (but have a minimum, i.e., the range feature only turns on from 10+ reviewers and doesnāt include the early level movements that donāt really mean anything)
Iāve always wanted to read one of these anthology type collections but I never know where to start since they rarely have them from the beginning. Iād be interesting in trying GOAT (and actually subbed to harta but havenāt started reading yet because I wanted to catch up on the manga in whatever the earliest volume I have is). I like the possibility of just digging in and not knowing what youāll find
I wonder if it would be possible (or worthwhile) to have the ability to divide mooks/magazines/anthologies/collections as if they were books in a series that could be marked as read/reviewed/graded individually? Like series within a series: GOAT (series page showing volumes) > GOAT (volume page showing works) > GOAT: Title (work page). Every individual work could just use the image from the collection.
Pros:
Users would be able to mark exactly what they read for materials that contain various authors/types of content, which are dipped into rather than read cover to cover (itās a bit unsatisfying having to put something in āstoppedā when youāve actually finished the thing you wanted to read)
Individual works would be graded more accurately than a collection which would likely vary a lot in difficulty
Easier / more reliable way to find author works: Iām guessing something like GOAT wonāt include every contributor in the author listing, but by separating the collection into individual titles, the work would turn up in the results if you were searching for a specific authorās works
Cons:
May be difficult to implement
Benefits only a small percentage of userbase
Requires manually splitting collections into individual works (title, author, number of pages, blurb)
Due to need for manual splitting, it would be inconsistently applied (winter issue of GOAT split as several people reading it, but other issues still exist only as a collection)
I definitely agree on having all volumes in a collection
Iām not sure if and how further splitting each volume would be possible (that would be a question for devs, I am a total boomer when it comes to this stuff), but I did do the manual splitting myself when I created the tracking table!
I have an excel table with authors, titles, and type of entry (short story, essay, interviews ect.), it would be no biggie for me to add number of pages for each entry
As for the blurb, I could put down whatās already in the title page, but I think a big point of creating a club is getting inspired by reviews left by members or suggestions by someone who is already familiar with the author writing style, and plans to read the story.
This seems like a better use case for reviews, and I would personally hate having to grade the contents of every item individually, and would just completely block them all from grading (well I already do that with Yurihime issues, but itās bc theyāre not automatically grouped in a series, and it gets redundant). Particularly later on, I canāt imagine remembering the details of difficulty for each item
I agree, it could get onerous. If Iām following 15 different mangas in a magazine, then every issue I finish having to grade all of those separately could get annoying and very redundant (grading Ch 1 of a manga as well as Ch 2 from the next issue, then Ch 3, etc etc). And grading short stories against each other is tricky, or at least could be if I started reading a lot, I also donāt think each one will persist as well in my memory as, say, a novel.
Perhaps having reviews (and club notes) will help people.
Getting collections sorted and removing redundant entries feels like a much higher priority.
I think you can still mark them as finished! At leastā¦ I still mark things as finished even if I didnāt read everything! Have you seen the data manager tool? You can choose to track the exact page numbers you actually read. And as long as you read whatever you consider to be āenoughā of something, I donāt see it as a bad thing to mark it as finished rather than stopped.
There is the club reading the choose your own adventure survival books - we read perhaps 1/3 to half the book because we donāt explore every single option, just based on the choices the club makes. That feels totally legitimate to mark it as finished, which most people do. (And some people bravely explore every corner of it!). And with manga magazines, I freely skip series I donāt care about or want to catch up later on, but after reading what I want, Iāve read more than a mangaās worth of manga and I mark it as complete. And later Iāll open it again, but for now itās done.
I do this with Yurihime. Thereās a handful of comics in there that I just donāt read, from lack of interest. And like you said, data manager is there if you wanna be really precise about stuff
Basically same as playing a visual novel: āI finished the game, but didnāt get all the extra endingsā (which personally in usually too lazy for, unless I know theyāre really worth it)
I just had a thought that for manga magazines you could have a listing on the series page (or whatever) that links to anything contained in the magazine that are published elsewhere. That way you could see what the gradings for the individual series within it are, and the magazine itself can have an overall grade to help people get an understanding of what they can expect. (Itād also be nice to have the individual series point back to the magazines, so you could realize, oh, I really like a bunch of things from X publisher, maybe I want to try the magazines, or whatnot).
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