Do you rate/review everything you finish on Natively? Why (not)?

Natively
1

I’ve noticed when perusing user profiles that many people don’t rate or review all their finished books - some are rated and reviewed, some just rated, and some neither.

It made me curious as to why someone wouldn’t rate a lot of the books they’ve read. While writing a review can take more time and effort, rating is something that’s quick and easy to do, so I’m wondering why people choose not to rate any of their books, or only rate some of them.

Personally, I rate everything I read (or watch) after finishing it. For Korean and German, I also try to write reviews for everything, even if it’s just one sentence. Usually the only time I don’t leave a review is when I’m reading a series - if I’ve reviewed the first volume, I won’t usually review the subsequent volumes unless there’s something significant about the language or plot that might affect whether someone wants to read it.

Since Japanese has a significantly higher userbase, I’m not as dedicated to leaving reviews, especially for graded readers or easy children’s books which are quick to read. Many of these already have several reviews already, as well as lots of ratings, so I don’t really feel the need to unless there’s something that others haven’t mentioned.

For languages with a smaller number of users, writing reviews can be really helpful, as unlike Japanese you can’t easily find sites, articles, or blogs with lists of books recommended for different levels (particularly true of Korean). I also find I like reflecting on what I’ve read: what I found easy or difficult language-wise, whether there were any parts I didn’t understand, what I learned from the reading experience, and so on.

I love reading other people’s reviews too, and finding books to add to my (admittedly already very lengthy) TBR, so it’s a bit frustrating when there’s a book that’s been read by one (or several) people, but no one has left their thoughts on it, or even rated it. I feel like rating a book is almost part of the reading experience, so I’d feel really odd not rating something I’d completed!

So, do you rate and/or review all your finished items on Natively? Are there reasons why you decide not to rate or review?

(I am hoping Prompt user to rate/review and grade after marking item as finished will get implemented at some point to help encourage more rating/reviews!)

18 Likes
Ability to review without rating
2

I try to rate everything, but I don’t always do reviews… Naturally it takes more time, and I feel like I’m not very good at writing coherent thoughts–so most times it’s just a thought dump anyway. Some people here write really nice reviews and I’m there like “Oh yeah and I liked this character, they were nice”

10 Likes
3

I usually don’t rate manga volumes but I rate novels and light novel volumes most of the time. I feel like it’s not really worth it to rate manga volumes most of the time because… Hmm good question. Because reading them doesn’t take as long? :laughing: I think it’s more important to rate light novel volumes and novels. I think most of the time I’d prefer rating the series as a whole when it’s manga

10 Likes
4

I rate all my books. If somebody does not rate a book, I consider it rated as 0 stars :wink:

I also grade all my books immediately.

I usually write reviews only if I already wrote something about a book in some other thread, thus turning that into a proper review is not that much work.

9 Likes
5

I rate everything I read, but I’ve written only two reviews after having read 16 Japanese books. (though I’ll do a third one after my current book).
I just don’t feel like I have something useful to say most of the time that hasn’t already been said, and I also just find it hard to put my opinion into text.

I do grade the difficulty of every book I read.

9 Likes
6

I sure hope the site doesn’t add more popups and try to optimize engagement, or at least they can be disabled.

I find it difficult to give meaningful ratings. The perception of a 5-star scale is an issue. Everything below 5 is perceived as substandard, and 5 has a huge range from “it’s a mindless chuckle if you have a certain niche taste” to “this is on the level of classical literature”. So everything that I’d even consider finishing is a 4, which gives very little signal to anyone.

Rating for language learning is even more difficult, because it wholly depends on where the reader is and what kind of language he’s interested in learning.

11 Likes
7

I agree with this to some extend.
If it’s a popup I need to click past (like having to click no for it to go away) it would annoying. But I’d be fine with some non-intrusive ways of getting people to write reviews. Like a little pop up that says “consider writing a review!” that goes away by itself after 3 seconds and doesn’t interfere with anything else.

6 Likes
8

I do rate and grade everything I read but I don’t find ratings in general particularly useful. I have issues with rating art on a simple scale in general. I would rather write my thoughts down but not necessarily as a review as they aren’t necessarily thoughts that are useful to others, and I already do so elsewhere anyway (whether publicly or not).

Actual reviews are simply too time consuming to write, and again, I don’t seek them out myself, if there is a review from someone I know the tastes of I read it, otherwise I don’t. So I don’t particularly feel the need to contribute myself either.

tl;dr: ratings and reviews are just personal opinions of third parties I don’t have any particular reason to think I would agree with. In reviews case it might still have useful information in theory but most people are not that good at writing reviews beyond I liked it / I did not like it (including me!)

Side note, I find it confusing why people write reviews in the target language. I get adding a translation of your review as an addition, but only writing japanese I find a bit annoying. Reviews are meant to be for other people, but people seem to be using it as personal writing practice opportunity.

14 Likes
9

I think when there are enough ratings quantity-wise, the individual subjectivity starts to matter less. At one point you get a feel how the group-mind rating relates to your personal rating.

I think it’s not so different from the level ratings we give, in the end everything is subjective, but if enough people rate, there will be at least a general trend. You might have two media at the same level and find one difficult and the other easy, same with star ratings, you might enjoy it or not.

There’s still benefit to rating, in my opinion, even at the individual level. I like to follow people with similar interests and looking at their ratings/reviews can be very insightful.

11 Likes
10

A thought dump is better than nothing! :smile: Well-written reviews are great, but it seems a shame if people are discouraged from sharing their thoughts because it won’t be as eloquent or detailed as other reviews.

Agreed! I’m hoping we’ll eventually be able to rate and review whole manga series, as I find most of the time the enjoyment/language use is consistent across multiple volumes.

I have noticed this on other sites (Viki, where no drama scores lower than 9.7/10), but I don’t think Natively is like that?

I think it’s enough to rate things by your own enjoyment/learning and trust the wisdom of crowds will do the rest. :smiley:

I think they can be useful even if you don’t agree with them - I saw a one-star review of a LN saying the person thought it would be focused more on cooking but the story was more slice of life, and since I love slice of life that made me want to read it. :laughing:

14 Likes
11

On principle, I don’t rate memoirs. Other than that, if I haven’t rated it, I probably just forgot.

I rarely review something. I am not good at it, so I only do it if
a.) no other reviews exist and I feel the need to say something that is not already covered by the blurb
b.) existing reviews leave out something that I think is important to know
c.) I feel like writing a review… very rare, but it happens :wink:

9 Likes
12

I try to rate everything I read, watch, or play. That includes Natively, AniList, IMDb, or whatever else is relevant for the media I just consumed. This helps me remember in the future how I liked something since memory is short lived, and obviously it’s also to help others decide whether something is worth consuming.

I don’t write many reviews on Natively. I’d write more if there were series-level reviews, but I rarely have something useful to say for specific volumes in a series.

10 Likes
13

I rate everything I read; this is more for myself to be able to look back and trace how I felt about certain books, especially books in a series. It’s a nice mental nudge of “wow, I consistently liked these books up until volume X, what happened there?”.

I do try to review most of what I read as well, for a few different reasons. One, as some people have mentioned, it’s always a bit disappointing for me to find a book multiple people have read but no one’s left any thoughts/comments on, so I hope that me leaving a review encourages others, especially if they disagree with my thoughts.

Two, I’d like to be a better writer in general, and it’s fun to practice by writing reviews; there are some I definitely feel I phoned in, but there are other where I’ve been able to take a step back and go, “wow, I did a good job on this”.

Three, for a lot of language learners the only real input they’ll have on whether a book might be worth their time is the thoughts of others (especially if their language skills aren’t up to par in terms of evaluating a book’s topic/themes/difficulty on their own), and with the main Natively site setup, the only way they can get those thoughts is via review. I’ve read some awesome classic '90s/early 2000s BL manga, for example, some where you aren’t going to find much info in English no matter where you look (because they’re just not that well-known in general), so I’m happy to write down my thoughts if it might encourage someone to try something they might’ve passed over the first time.

For those worried about not writing a “proper” review, I would tell them not to worry too much about it. While there are certainly times I appreciate having a well-laid out, thoughtful reflection about a user’s experience with a book, sometimes I just need as many raw thoughts as possible to cram into my skull to compare and mull over whether I should lean towards trying a book or not.

Edit: Oh, I guess I should mention that, compared to books, I very rarely write reviews for movies/TV shows. My listening skills feel weak enough that I don’t want to comments on the difficulty or intelligibility of a show when it’s very possible any difficulty is just due to me accidentally picking something waaaay harder than what I anticipated.

20 Likes
14

I used to try rate everything, but stopped as i thought the value wasn’t there with such a low bandwidth signal. If something’s truly a 1 or a 2, I probably won’t finish it so now we’re down to a three point rating scale from 3-5. And there’s a lot of cultural relativity on those scales. Like is a 5 a masterpiece that should only be given out a few times, or is it just a “yeah, i enjoyed it”. If use the stricter scale then basically everything gets a 4, so now you have a two point rating scale, while if you use the looser definition then how do you highlight the stand outs.

I also don’t know how to weight entertainment vs language learning vs “assumed appeal to the natively audience”. Like I’ve felt indirectly called out by some of the comments on this forum in the past about people rating fantasy too leniently. But a lot of those fantasy manga (esp e.g. frieren) really were genuinely quite easy for me compared to some slangy yuri with a music focus for example. I don’t think language learning suitability really exists in a vacuum like that, its a lot more about how advanced the book is (which is the what the natively level tries to measure) versus your skill level and how well the subject maps to genres familiar to you in both your native and target languages.

The other thing then is content suitability. Like take Onimai. I quite enjoyed it, i think the language is quite often useful in real life and approachable. So that’s a 5 then? But I also know it’s got quite a high fan service level, even with my general level of tolerance from decades of anime and I know that there are plenty of people here would find the series objectionable as a result. And then like, how much of the appeal is from the trans-adjacentness of gender bender anime? So is that 5 going to be generally applicable?

So basically I just felt the ratings are too low signal to be meaningful, and that probably nobody cared.

11 Likes
15

I don’t do either much :sweat_smile:

I remember writing review for something that was VERY GOOD (like, skipped lunch glued to my phone good) and for something that I felt needed some nudity warning and a light spoiler on how it goes from it so readers could decide. Ah, and one more where handwriting and stylized fonts were too much for me despite the full-furigana text.

So yeah, if it’s something I feel like I’d want to know, I’d write it. Otherwise… Otherwise blurb tells you what it is and your weebness level will tell you if that’s your cup of tea or not.

Like I read 5 volumes of 転生魔女は滅びを告げる 1 (FLOS COMIC) | L23 I gave it a 4 and I struggle to describe it for review. “The usual otome!isekai but MC is so realistically calm there is no kyaa for me”. Is this even valid? Is anyone interested in that? Idk

Rating is also kind of… if it’s 1 I probably wouldn’t buy it yet, so my scale is 3-5. I choose mostly stuff I liked some time ago, so 4-5 for all is kinda… eh…

Especially rating different manga volumes is beyond me - I’d read say 5 in one day and would really struggle to differentiate between them.

6 Likes
16

I rate every book I read based on the Goodreads scale - 5 is amazing, 4 is very good, 3 is I liked it, 2 is mid, 1 is awful. So 3 is my baseline of readable and a 4 or 5 is good.

I don’t write reviews unless a book is particularly good or frustratingly bad. I never know how to rate the language learning rating and the entertainment rating. It’s extremely subjective. Something easy would be a low LL rating for me but probably high for someone else. I don’t know how I feel about that LL rating being required.

I rarely grade books, though. I find it tedious. I know it would be helpful to others but it’s also a pain in the ass to compare a book I read 3 years ago when I was worse at Korean to a book I read yesterday. I can’t objectively say which is harder because the former FELT harder but my reading experience then can’t be compared to now.

13 Likes
17

I occasionally rate books, but, honestly, I should probably stop rating, because if I find the book interesting, it’s going to be 4 or 5 stars, and I am pretty good about reading books I find interesting, so everything ends up being 4 or 5 stars. Meaning that my ratings are fairly useless.

Looking at the specific books I rated, I think a big reason I actually ended up rating them was that there was either 0 or 1 other rating. So by putting 4 or 5 stars, I was sort of saying, “If you’re looking at this book’s page to try and decide whether or not to read it, I think it’s fine to spend your time reading this book”.

I never write reviews because of the need to assign a star rating. I’m not really sure why this is, but, to some extent, I think it frames my writing on a text in a strange way. Like when I’ve tried to write a review for one of the few books I’ve rated, I always end up deleting it because what I’ve written feels unrelated to the stars and unhelpful to the potential reader.

I think in writing this, the core of my issue is that there is a sort of “product review” feeling when I see star ratings. Like the book is a bulky vacuum that has trouble getting corners and going up stairs and I should know this before purchasing (I suppose there is a parallel here with a book that is in desperate need of an editor). I would really like a “Thoughts on the book” option where you can just write some text without assigning a star rating and have that posted on the book’s main page.

9 Likes
Ability to review without rating
18

I don’t always rate books, especially “Nth book in a series”. My rating scale is roughly “1: awful 2: not recommended 3: you’ll probably enjoy it if you like this kind of book but I wouldn’t recommend it unprompted 4: really good and I would likely mention it if asked for recommendations 5: outstanding” so anything I didn’t bother to rate is probably a 3 in practice.

13 Likes
19

I think some of you are overthinking the whole rating books thing. Even if 90% of the time you rate 3 or 4 stars, that still influences average ratings in a useful way. And a book doesn’t need to be perfect to earn 5 stars. Everyone will rate based on different criteria, but that will average out as more people rate books. Personally, I’ve never given a book 1 star because I know my interests well enough that I’ve never picked up a book I hated that much. I’ve given a handful of 2 stars, but not a ton for the same reason.

EDIT: I’m not saying anyone is obligated to rate books obviously, just that it doesn’t require a precise approach.

17 Likes
20

I once made a thread around when I started reading as I was unsure about ratings and gradings myself. The majority of people just told me to not worry about it so I was casually rating and grading every book I could. After a while I looked back and realized that I was just rating between 4 and 5 stars, but maybe that was just because I was mainly choosing books well known for their literary merit.
I also didn’t feel like much of a hobbyist when it came to reading, so my rating was always through the lens of “What about this book makes it so highly praised?” rather than a critical lens that interfaced with my personal emotions of interest about the contents. For a bit there I also reserved ratings for books that felt rather special to me.
In the end, I feel like I’ve wrapped back around to overthinking things and I should at least give some rating, even if superficial, to indicate that I think these books are worth the read.

10 Likes