Oh, that’s cool that they released a full furigana version. I’ll bookmark it!
I normally wouldn’t recommend it because of certain grammar structures and vocab. (and some people avoid a novel of that length like the plague). Though, it is true that it depends on the person. If they’re looking to challenge themselves right off the bat, then I would recommend it as something I’m currently enjoying. But I try to recommend things that someone may be able to finish in a shorter amount of time to give that boost of confidence for them to move onto the next book. (rather than them thinking "i’ve been reading the same book for the last 3 months.) I seriously can’t see myself recommending it to someone at the N5 level as their first thing to read.
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Ah, didn’t even think about the length. Definitely wouldn’t recommend a 550 page novel as someone’s first book.
Personally I would not recommend any book to someone at N5 level. From personal experience, getting a good way into N4 would be a good idea before jumping into a book.
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Omg I was about to read this in English! Is this the push for me to read it in Japanese first and then English? 
The artwork for 悪食令嬢と狂血公爵 ~その魔物、私が美味しくいただきます!~ | L32 looks amazing, but what’s it about?
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Not gonna lie–so did I. Before, I didn’t have much access to Japanese materials in my area or to the Internet. After I got to a high enough level of understanding to be able to navigate websites and read through reviews and whatnot, I was able to start reading. My goal is to be a translator, so I’m trying to read all sorts of things, but I seriously hate reading the news lol. I do not want to translate the news if I don’t have to.
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It’s a romance story between a 令嬢 who likes to eat magical beast meat (which goes against the precepts of the major local religion and gave her the nickname of 悪食) and the count who’s in charge of the extermination of said magical beasts, preventing them from overflowing into the kingdom. Both characters are feared by the general noble population and are having a hard time finding a fiancé(e), until they meet.
Then, the story follows them as they get to know each other. I don’t want to spoil too much, especially since, with only two volumes published, spoiling anything would spoil a huge chunk of the available story 
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lol, im not gonna lie–i like spoilers so much that I will pull up the plotline of a movie in the middle of watching it. 
I hate surprises, so I never mind spoilers. I just can’t figure out how to actually hide/blur spoilers on here without using the summary option.
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Ugh, sorry no I haven’t gotten around to adding spoilers. Spoilers don’t seem to be a part of the normal discourse functionality, so I have to figure out how WK added them. On the list!
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(Edit: Sorry, I thought those links would actually include the instructions to install / GitHub information.)
(Edit 2: The plugins seem to be on their GitHub page: Discourse · GitHub)
Spoiler plugin:
Solved plugin is another one to consider if you think it’ll be useful (just depends on your intention for the forum I think):
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I don’t really think about my gradings. I just remember how difficult I felt a book was. Meaning, grading is mostly an intuitive not an analytical activity for me.
I do consider furigana, but only when two manga are otherwise at similar difficulty. Furigana might give a feeling of safety or comfort. But it’s not actually very useful to me because I don’t study vocabulary without their usual kanji spelling (at least since I finished with my beginner textbooks). While I might occasionally confuse or forget a reading, generally not knowing the reading implies not knowing the meaning for me.
Other points that make me grade a work (mostly manga) as easier:
- Beinga slice of life story, comedy or simple romance
- School or home setting, high school characters or younger, no sci fi or fantasy
- Lack of introspection or internal monologue
- Few characters (the people, not the Unicode points. Probably more important for novels than manga). Single point of view.
- Lack of slang, dialect, kana only speach or technical vocabulary
- In manga, less text and more storytelling through pictures, facial expressions etc
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I actually stopped かがみの孤城 about 6 months back because I was finding it hard – judging by pages/characters an hour. Around that time I narrowly failed N2 mostly due to the time limit (barely answered any of the reading questions).
I read a few pages yesterday and now it’s rather easy, which bodes well for the next test!
It’s probably somewhere around the same level as most “easy” LN. It’s really not much harder than say くまクマ熊ベアー, but the length is off-putting when you can only read a few pages/characters a day.
On grading:
I used grade based on how difficult a book was in comparison to どんどん読める and SouMatome/SKM reading text books.
I found pretty much every children’s book I read was harder than どんどん読める. The only thing easier would’ve been こぐまのクーク物語 春と夏. So I was surprised to see books with levels below or equal to どんどん読める (24).
These days it’s just reading pace after the first quarter of the book, but taking experience in the genre into account.
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- contents: e.g. slice of life is (imo) the easiest as it deals with real world happenings, not a lot of philosophical musings, etc.; the more fantasy/abstract the more difficult; lots of dialogue = easier vs. lots of introspection/musings/descriptions
- furigana: I find lots of kanji but furigana easier than lots of kana; (I hate when books don’t even have furigana for names
) - sentence structure: long vs. short
- formal/archaic vs. modern language
- my general, subjective feeling of struggle
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I DESPISE that, especially when the name is important for future jokes or something…At least tell us the reading 
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I tried reading it (かがみの孤城) as a beginner and it was not great. I could somewhat understand it, but it took a long time to look up words since I didn’t understand much of it, it was quite demotivating overall.
For comparison, after reading 1~3 chapters of it, I quit and tried また、同じ夢を見ていた and the level was perfect (not too easy, but not too hard), so that’s where I was in terms of vocabulary at the time. Btw if one can stand the boring first chapters, I definitely recommend as a first book, it’s really easy and helped me a lot.
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Being quite honest I go with my overall feeling while reading. I’m probably biased since I’ll improve over time, but it looks accurate enough.
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I do find that interesting since I thought かがみの孤城 used relatively simple language, but I may be getting to that point where I can’t really judge what’s easy and what isn’t. Natively does put かがみの孤城 at level 27 compared to また、同じ夢を見ていた at level 24, which on one hand doesn’t seem like a huge difference, but three levels can be a big jump in difficulty from what I’ve seen of ratings on Natively. I haven’t actually read また、同じ夢を見ていた, so I can’t comment on it from experience.
jpdb does say it’s easier than かがみの孤城 as well, though most of the stats are similar when adjusting for book length, except that there are much fewer unique kanji used in また、同じ夢を見ていた (I didn’t adjust for length here, but ~1600 unique kanji seems pretty typical for a 250+ page book, yet this book uses only 1100). Since it’s less than half the length of かがみの孤城 it is pretty hard to do a comparison based on stats alone though…
In any case, I’m glad you found a good book to try out. 
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Yeah, it would definitely be a difference since there’s a pretty big leap between N3 and N2. Though, it does depend on the book. Level 24 is smack dab in the middle of N3/intermediate. 27 is upper-intermediate, so I could see there being a difference in difficulty. I keep debating on reading また、同じ夢を見ていた, though, so I guess i’ll try it to see if I find it easier than かがみの孤城.
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I remember reading a reply that someone wrote somewhere about the difficulty of Japanese books and how they relate to the JLPT.
And that person said, essentially anything written for upper elementary school and above is N1 level or above. As I read more and more… I agree with that.
There are some books that N4 and N3 can read and understand a lot. But excerpts from those books could never appear on the N4 or N3 exams because their difficulty is too high. I think even for the N2 exams they have to make some small edits and/or add some definitions to really make sure the native material is fair for N2 learners. And even though the reading section in N1 can be pretty brutal, a lot of people would say real world Japanese is even more difficult.
So I just look at the N4, N3, N2 groupings as a general grouping and don’t really try to compare it to the JLPT.
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It sounds like you’re saying an N3 level individual must know 100% of words and grammar points in a book for that book to be considered N3 level? As far as I’m concerned, if an N3 level individual can understand the vast majority of a book after looking up a reasonably low number of words, the book is N3 level reading material. Why should a handful of particularly complex sentences/passages make it N1? By that argument, the manga うらら迷路帖 would be beyond N1 level because it has a few panels of classical Japanese per volume. It just seems overly strict to me, and if someone told me (or implied) “you’ll never be able to read a book until you reach N1 level”, I probably would have given up on learning Japanese a long time ago.
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I am saying that they could never appear on an actual JLPT test or any of the test prep books. Even though the JLPT doesn’t print word lists what appears on each level test is generally well understood (Up to N2 at least, N1 can really be any modern Japanese).
Native material is not written with the JLPT in consideration, so you just have to make guesses and say a N3 level person could probably read and understand most of this.
I passed N1 a few years ago and enjoy reading stuff at the low end of the “N2 level”. I don’t really worry about it too much. On the other end, I started doing conversations with native speakers and reading manga after I finished Genki 1.
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