Homepage La Ciudad de las Bestias bookclub

Spanish Reading Book Clubs
21

If you get it on kindle, you can use the built-in kindle dictionary to do instant look-ups! You can look up definitions for individual words you don’t know, and if a whole sentence is still beyond you, you can highlight it and it’ll translate it for you!

My first book in Spanish (El Alquimista | L25) was pretty slow-going because I read a print copy and did manual look-ups for all the words I didn’t know, but ever since I discovered that kindle lets me sort of recreate the “reading Japanese with Yomichan/Yomitan” experience, my Spanish reading speed improved a whole lot, and I’m able to read harder material without getting as frustrated!

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22

I think I said this earlier in the thread (or the main one maybe), but I’ll be posting a Google sheets with some vocab! It’s not going to be every single word defined in there, but since I’ll be doing active reading, any word I don’t know, I’ll put in the google sheets. It’d be nice as well if others joined in with filling the Google sheets, that way we’d have a more complete vocab list!
So hopefully that’ll help make reading this a little bit easier.

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23

I have finally managed to get my hands on the physical book! It’s even a beautiful hardcover edition, because somehow that was cheaper than the softcover version. Go figure.

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24

Have we decided on a start date? Not sure if anyone else is still waiting on a physical copy? There were a few people undecided in the poll about which version they were planning to read.

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25

The start date should be March 18, I believe, according to the schedule.

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26

Missed that! Looking forward to starting next week then!

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27

I started the vocabulary google sheets, so that it’s set up for week one. I used @bibliothecary 's template from the google sheets in 소리를 보는 소년 bookclub. I already read ahead week 1, just so that I could see how the input of vocab would be.
Please, everyone, tell me what you think. Is it well presented? I’m not sure whether it would make sense to include pages, since we all have different editions (i.e. my edition is only 298 pages long).
Also, keep in mind, the chapter summary tab, as indicated in the google sheets, contains spoilers! For now, I put the chapter summary (for chapter 1/week 1) in Spanish. Does anyone know of a good website for chapter by chapter summaries in English? Or we could just translate it or even write it from scratch, with enough motivation…

@brandon , could we get the vocabulary google sheets pinned on the book’s Natively page?

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28

It all looks great! Thanks for all your hard work!

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29

Week 1 is up! I decided to go with a weekly thread, that way it’ll be easier for people to catch up if they miss a couple weeks.

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30

The WaniKani Book Club Tracker userscript has Natively forums support now! I don’t know how many folks in this club use WaniKani (the script lives on your WaniKani dashboard), but for anyone who is a WK user who would like to have this club schedule on your dashboard so that you can check off the weeks as you complete them, here’s the JSON so that you can easily import it (since the club doesn’t import properly if you do it automatically):

JSON 
{
    "title": "La Ciudad de las Bestias",
    "url": "https://forums.learnnatively.com/t/homepage-la-ciudad-de-las-bestias-bookclub/7028",
    "vocabListUrl": "https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DeW_hdB5x14g28Qpsq3Q3EVvkxRDBlBk8Y4FEXcWzyA/edit#gid=0",
    "totalPages": 307,
    "weeksInfo": [
        {"startPage": 8, "startDate": "2024-03-18"},
        {"startPage": 21, "startDate": "2024-03-25"},
        {"startPage": 35, "startDate": "2024-04-01"},
        {"startPage": 43, "startDate": "2024-04-08"},
        {"startPage": 63, "startDate": "2024-04-15"},
        {"startPage": 83, "startDate": "2024-04-22"},
        {"startPage": 97, "startDate": "2024-04-29"},
        {"startPage": 117, "startDate": "2024-05-06"},
        {"startPage": 135, "startDate": "2024-05-13"},
        {"startPage": 151, "startDate": "2024-05-20"},
        {"startPage": 169, "startDate": "2024-05-27"},
        {"startPage": 189, "startDate": "2024-06-03"},
        {"startPage": 209, "startDate": "2024-06-10"},
        {"startPage": 225, "startDate": "2024-06-17"},
        {"startPage": 235, "startDate": "2024-06-24"},
        {"startPage": 253, "startDate": "2024-07-01"},
        {"startPage": 275, "startDate": "2024-07-08"},
        {"startPage": 289, "startDate": "2024-07-15"},
        {"startPage": 307, "startDate": "2024-07-22"},
    ]
}
Here's what it looks like on the dashboard:

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31

Did I miss the link to the week 2 thread?

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32

Seconding this as well @HopeWaterfall; if you’re busy I can set it up for you.

On another note, I’m having trouble figuring out the best method to make Anki cards out of all the vocab I’ve been marking as unknown in my Kindle copy of the book. I’ve been highlighting them to go back to later; does anyone know if there’s any more efficient method than slowly going through by hand and adding everything?

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33

Shall we assume that for whatever reason HopeWaterfall has other things on her mind this week. If you’re happy to put up a week 2 thread perhaps you should go ahead.

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34

The week 2 thread is up!

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35

Sorry, I completely forgot! Thanks for setting it up instead :grinning:

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36

I technically haven’t read week 2 yet, so I’ll do that in the morning. In the meantime, here’s week 3!

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37

Week 4 is up!

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39

Remember to post the week 6 thread @HopeWaterfall!

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40

I think they are moving this week so perhaps you could do the honours again if they don’t respond.

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