Sounds like “Always”, because that’s what you do (just not immediately).
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I’d write more reviews if it didn’t take me hours to write a proper one. I don’t understand why I’m always so slow when writing something that involves giving my opinion.
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Same. I try to leave a review if no one else has, or if the book was really good (or really bad), but unfortunately it’s a lot of work and takes me ages, so the books in my I-meant-to-leave-a-review list just keep piling on.
Mad respect for the people that review hundreds of books, I have no idea how you do it but I really appreciate it.
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I review nearly every book I read. I can say for me it’s: Low standards and a formula for my reviews.
What if anything was or could be challenging for another learner about the grammar and vocab. What if any content warnings does it have. Did I like the vibe of the story? Did I like it because it was good fun or because it made me think?
Most of my reviews aren’t in depth, so that makes it easier. I’m not trying to convey all my feelings about a book, just give a window for another person to determine if the book is a fit for them or not.
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You write some really thorough (and excellent) reviews, so I’d be surprised if they didn’t take you a while. Also I love the sliders many of your reviews have… I should try that out!
I second the low standards… Like sometimes my reviews are just “Decent volume. Some things felt a little too simple or unrealistic, but that’s fine sometimes too. Overall some nice fluff, and felt slightly less dragged out than vol 1”… other times they’re essays 
As a reader, I’d find both of those helpful. I’ve been finding it harder to say anything about language tho, unless there’s something glaringly specific to note. (Ex: in ガールズバンドクライ, Kumamoto-ben is used briefly in ep 1 & a bit more in ep 13)
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Thanks. I stole the sliders from @bibliothecary in Detailed language evaluations
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I have trouble writing reviews if I don’t have thoughts on what I’ve read or watched. So I try and jot down any thoughts that I have while I’m reading. It can be a few words, or even something close to a full paragraph or even a review pending me finishing to make sure I still feel that way.
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I try to keep in mind things I used to find difficult (usage of any dialect was challenging as a new learner) and the types of vocabulary. For example, law terms and medical jargon are something I’m pretty heavily immersed in, but I wouldn’t consider ‘standard’ vocab for a learner. So, if I’m seeing phrases like 公然猥褻罪 or whatever I know to flag it as ‘hey, there is some specialized vocab in this book’.
Likewise, I consider how ‘flowery’ the writing felt. Very flowery? Harder.
Was the narrator unreliable? Harder
Was there a lot of atmosphere but less direct dialogue? Harder
Lots of dialogue and simple action sentences? Easier.
I think it’s also worth noting at this point that I struggle to rate manga for difficulty because it tends to not have the grammar cues for difficulty, and often technical words can be clued in by context of the scene I don’t enjoy rating manga and think I’m quite bad at it (I also rarely record manga on Natively)
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Nice ideas for the dictionaries, thanks everyone
Super, I just pasted that as a note to review my dictionary when I get to it!
Here it is! I hope that’s helpful! For anyone wanting to break into a monolingual dictionary it’s delightful.
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I have that same dictionary.
There is one big problem with it, not with this special one, but with all elementary school dictionaries: it has only a limited number of entries, so e.g. you will not find a word like 公然猥褻罪 that @cat mentioned above, not even its second part 猥褻. I myself don‘t even know those kanji, so for that reason alone I would not be able to find it, even if it were present. So if I would try to use the dict to look-up that word, I would have to search for it twice.
So all in all, you can only effectively use it with a full furigana book. And as look-ups will be much slower than e.g. in the internet, you can only use it if look-ups are rare, like maybe one per page in case of a novel.
A big plus of such a dict is, if I am in the right mood, I read a bit in it and can learn new words, or let’s say at least encounter some new words for the first time.
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I know that’s just the first example you came up with but to be fair, it would feel a bit concerning to have this word appear in a book for kids, wouldn’t it?
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It comes up a lot in the type of content I read and watch (adult-oriented crime dramas, true crime content, etc) but I also would be concerned if it came up in a kids’ book
This first kanji there I see a lot and when you see it you can basically just think ‘dirty/indecent’ (卑猥 for example I feel is pretty common?) but I feel like I never really see 褻 except for with 猥. Checking my own dictionary there are only two examples of it in isolation and neither of them my IME recognizes when I try to type them…
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Nonetheless kids will hear it in the news, and they tend to be most interested in words adults think they should not yet know. So I actually doubt that a 10-12 year old would not know the word わいせつ, if they hear it or it is written in kana. Written in kana the word also rings a bell for me.
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I agree with all that! I’ve had it for more than a year now and I like to look up words where I know synonyms and see if I get a better sense of the meanings. And then browse through some other entries and the cute jokes/riddles at the bottom of each page. It’s definitely more for fun and exploration than efficient lookups. But I’m not sure I’d do anything other than digital for efficiency anyway, even when I’m reading paper books. A paper dictionary large enough to be useful is just too big, and probably doesn’t have phrases or something else I’ll have to google anyway.
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To a lesser extent, I run into that problem with dictionary apps too. Any dictionary is missing something. In my brief usage, the only words that I haven’t found in the elementary dict were words I wasn’t really expecting to find anyway.
I pretty much use mine specifically with song lyrics, or something else where there’s no time component. Even for a really simple book, it’s always going to be too disruptive for me, relative to google lens + apps. Using it has been encouraging me to use digital monolingual dicts more instead tho. And there’s something nice about not being potentially distracted by notifications, or that random thing it just occurred to me to google, bc I picked up my phone again (電子辞書 is also good for this, but then I have to input in romaji, and it’s ugly lol)
I’ll add one thing I love about mine is that it includes antonyms… which is great for really understanding a word + expanding vocab, imo
Sure - but kids dictionaries aren’t about to help them with that (at least, I can’t picture an American English dictionary doing that either)
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Just for fun on the 猥褻 conversation, I came across it in katakana in a book I’m reading and I thought that was kind of funny.
This book is pretty pulpy and is distilling old newspaper articles into digestible modern snippets so I wouldn’t be shocked if some kanji perceived as difficult have been dropped.
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The dictionary might be a birthday present that adults think useful, but in fact I think that kids will just like us use the dictionary rarely for systematic look-ups nowadays, but instead also use there phones, as there they can find the explanations of anything they might be interested in.
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Wait, was I the only one who read my kids dictionary for fun as a child?
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The only one I read for fun was a picture dictionary.
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The one I had had lots of charts and illustrations and pull out facts about different entries and was probably halfway to an encyclopedia now that I think about it. And I absolutely read the encyclopedia set I had for fun.
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