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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I agree that in general, people shouldn’t put too much weight on comparing the ratings of native material here with JLPT levels because the JLPT and LN and manga don’t sync up well at all, but I don’t really agree with the idea that most LN and manga written for upper elementary school kids are harder than N1 articles.
Yeah, LN and manga will have some things that are unlikely to be in an N1 test, but just because those things wouldn’t be placed in the test doesn’t mean those things are more difficult. It just means they don’t want to assess those things because they aren’t viewed as important for the purposes of the certification.
For example, there might be a fantasy book written for 8-year-olds that has a bunch of fantasy vocabulary that are unlikely to ever appear on the JLPT, but that doesn’t mean those vocabulary words or that book is harder than N1 articles. That vocabulary just isn’t important from the point of view of the test designers. The certification is mostly used for entry into jobs and university programs, so it doesn’t make sense for them to test you on fantasy vocabulary or kids slang.
Overall, I would say that many of the N1 articles are more dense and difficult to parse than a lot of LN and manga. A lot of N1 articles are talking about philosophy or science and they are like opinion pieces debating about the correct way to conceptualize something or what is important in life. That’s pretty different to just reading a relatively straightforward sequence of events in a story thats just explaining what is happening and conversations between people. But yeah, it’s all relative to whatever you have more experience reading and what type of vocab you know.
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Yea, although it’s not 100% percent the case, the JLPT reading is largely made up of essays written by famous people.
A piece of really good advice for the JLPT is to get the KM reading comprehension book and/or an essay collection book like ベスト・エッセイ2021
I am still poor at the JLPT reading section, but now when I go back and look over the reading questions I can finally understand why the wrong answers are wrong.
I forgot what I wrote before but N1 vocabulary is very common in kid’s books, while N1 grammar is pretty specific (and in fact, the N1 JLPT has very little N1 grammar, including the grammar questions!!!). And I feel like any light novel has much more difficult kanji than you will ever see on N1.
So I really feel like the JLPT system doesn’t really compare with native material very well. The best thing I did to increase my ability to read native material is join this website and start reading a lot of native material.
Unrelated, but, I feel like the listening section matches really world Japan pretty well, especially if you go to school and have a job.
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