I haven’t watched the anime, but I had a look at the title list and episode 12 correspond to the epilogue of volume 1… I can’t see how you would make a full episode out of that, so there might be some stuff from volume 2 in there as well, not sure.
Still, having watched the anime in its entirety would probably spoil the content of volume 2. (It’s still ongoing, but I guess they will finish it in ~4 weeks).
At 12 episodes per book, I don’t think they missed anything. I would be afraid that they added things instead.
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So based on what I’m seeing the poll so far, we’ll open things up to start reading 薬屋のひとりごと2 in mid-April and will be following a schedule. I’ll leave the polls up, so anyone who’s still interested and hasn’t voted yet, feel free to!
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Sorry if this was asked before and I missed it…but I am curious for those who have read 薬屋のひとりごと1 how L38 it “feels”. I know given the setting/general plot, there is a lot of niche vocabulary. I am mostly curious if the prose/writing style is challenging too.
I want to join but that rating scares me 
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I’ll be testing it as well, but I the fact that starting on vol 2 and the high level / specific language might burn me is real.
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It’s been a while since I read volume 1 (back in 2022, I think?), so my memory may not quite be all there, but I seem to recall the writing style not being anything too difficult. 
Feels like it was just the vocab that took the most time.
For those who haven’t read vol. 1 and/or it’s been a while, reading the first four volumes (I believe) of this manga adaption (「マンガ」 薬屋のひとりごと | L30 | Natively; not sure about the other one) should cover the events in volume 1 fine, iirc.
Edit: come on, render, link
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Thanks, I’ll most likely do that, but reading the manga and novel are completely different beasts 
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For sure! I don’t know how much of the vocab will carry over, sadly, but for story reasons it’s a decent stand-in, I thought!
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Any plans for when the home thread will be up?
I kinda want to put it on watch as to not miss it, although granted is a bit early.
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Hmm. I didn’t have any particular plan in mind; beginning of April, maybe? Granted, there’s nothing stopping me from setting up something basic now as a stand-in.
薬屋のひとりごと 2 home thread?
- Go ahead and put up the home thread
- No rush, beginning of April is fine
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Fair enough.
It’s just that too much is going on in RL and that I’m half planning another Japan escapade before my almost free tickets disappear, might miss it out completely as it happened before.
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@Megumin I found a jpdb set for it if you want to review some of the vocab prior to the club, too. https://jpdb.io/novel/7308/kusuriya-no-hitorigoto
Thank you! That is encouraging to hear. If it is just high level vocab, I think I could power through.
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How odd; that’s got the cover for the manga on it.
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Huh…that is weird. I thought maybe I mistook the manga for the light novel, but the Amazon link on the page leads to the light novel so
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Yeah, I think all the other info on the page is right, it’s just that image, haha.
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Is there anything like this that it’s not abandoned?
I don’t really want to tie into yet another ecosystem.
Screen scraping is explicitly against the jpdb terms of use, so I doubt it. (Personally I think the large set of premade decks are the major reason to use jpdb at all, so it’s not surprising there’s no convenient way to exfiltrate them.)
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It can’t hurt to try to read through the preview pages on Bookwalker or Amazon, but based on the books on your profile, I think it would feel very, very challenging.
It’s the hardest thing I’ve tried to read by far, and I found the grammar very challenging (not to mention the constant lookups). I was checking things sentence by sentence, and dropped after 55 pgs, cuz I was trying to read too many things at the time.
For comparison the next highest things I’ve read:
- 後宮の烏 | L35 - difficulty was the vocab, and the slow pacing. Dropped bc I got bored. Felt much easier than 薬屋のひとりごと
- Sword Art Online Progressive 1 | L34- vocab and sometimes pacing was main difficulty. Much easier
- Sword Art Online 2, 25-27 | L33 - vocab was the challenge. Much easier
- Log Horizon| L33 - vocab and grammar/writing style. Dropped bc I wasn’t in the mood for so many lookups.
Log Horizon is the one I’d consider next hardest. I got 82 pgs in, and distracted by other stuff. It’s meaningfully easier than 薬屋のひとりごと imo.
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Thank you! This is a really good reference. I don’t mind doing a ton of looks ups if the story is interesting enough. However, if the grammar and writing style are also on the advanced side, it would probably be in my best interest to get more books/vocab under my belt first.
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We’re still about a month and a half out, but given all the current bookclubs I thought it might be prudent to ask now. Dracula Daily will be starting up again soon, and I was curious if there were enough folks interested in following along in a foreign language to make it worth putting up an informal book club thread for it. @DIO-Berry and I did it last year in Japanese, and I had a really good time. While I don’t think I’ll be reading Dracula again in Japanese (at least this year), I don’t mind setting up and maintaining a thread if there are others interested. And Dracula’s popular/old enough that I’m sure it’s got a translation in most major languages, so if someone wanted to read in a language not represented on Natively, that’d easily be possible as well.
What’s Dracula Daily?
DD is a fun yearly event set up by Matt Kirkland, where he emails out chunks of Dracula to be read over a period of about 7 months. Dracula is written in an epistolary style, and each entry in the book is dated, allowing us to read along as the characters write.
This means that you may read a page of text on day XX, a paragraph the next day, then ten pages eight days after that. One benefit to this is that you get to follow along chronologically, as opposed to how the original book sometimes structures things. You also get to wait in suspense with characters as they wait or investigate.
What level would you recommend being to try this?
I’d recommend being comfortable with around level ~30 books, at least in Japanese. You can probably score some wiggle room depending on your own personal familiarity with Dracula and how the translator of your particular edition translated it, but somewhere around L30 should be a decent benchmark to gauge with. Here’s my review of the JP edition I read; please note this is only one of several translations, and difficulty will vary according to that.
Any other thoughts?
The event runs from May 3 to November 7. You can jump in and out any time, and read how things work best for you. For example, last year I read about half in Japanese and half in English; I got to a point at the end of it all where I was way too busy to read the daily entry and be able to keep up, so I took that into account.
As a general note, you can generally expect entry length and density to be lighter in the earlier parts of the challenge, and heavier near the end. The last few months in particular I remember having quite a bit of text, and as mentioned above, sometimes had to swap languages if I wanted to keep up.
So, what do you think? Interested?
- Yes
- No
- Not Sure
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