여러분, 안녕하세요!
As you may have noticed, I have added Korean to the site!
Korean users, let me know what you think! And any feedback you have, let me know. If you encounter a bug, be sure to log a bug report in the Product Requests category.
@bibliothecary @NihongoLearner19 Just wanted to give a shoutout for all your book requests!
Let me know how you all are finding the book input process (it’s still a work in progress).
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I think it’s mostly working fine, but sometimes when I add multiple books in a row it tells me there’s an issue with the servers and I have to come back later.
I also tried to add a fantasy romance novel that’s 19+ and it wouldn’t work at all, even with the isbn (this one). I’m not sure how to get around that since I don’t know what’s wrong, but I have a decent size TBR that’s probably also going to have the same issue if it’s because of the 19+ part…
In addition, I have a few books that are only available as ebooks on Ridibooks but not on Yes24 (I guess because they don’t have physical copies?) that I’d like to add at some point, but no rush! Thanks so much for getting the Korean version of Natively out! I’m really liking it so far 
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Shoot, yeah the 19+ won’t work for a little while I don’t think. Not entirely sure how i’ll solve that, but I’m sure there’s a way.
We’ll have to stick to Yes24 books that are not 19+ for the time being.
I know we’ve been hitting server issues, it’s still a little buggy. Hopefully I resolve all these today… but we’ll see. Until I get those worked out, I won’t be launching formally. I already have enough book requests from you all to iterate on the system and squash the bugs.
Glad to hear that you’re enjoying - i’m super excited to discover all these books, i’ve been mostly at a loss for finding good Korean books at my level. 
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To everyone who has submitted requests - I have finished populating the series and have approved them all for search. If you wouldn’t mind taking a quick look to see how they look, that’d be great! We’ve done really good work already… over 78 unique series and >1200 books!! 
A few pointed questions to a few requesters who’ve already come to the forums… but anyone can answer:
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The yonsei series is pretty crazy… are these all textbooks? Should this be broken into multiple series? Do you have any suggestions on approximate levels, perhaps by series order (ex: #13-20 should be level 13).
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It seems like Yes24 groups a lot of books published by the same publisher into one series, even though they aren’t tied together by narrative or maybe difficulty level, such as 오늘의 젊은 작가… does it make sense to keep these as series? Should they just be series but independent levels?
- I think #2 applies to some of your series of yours as well, but specifically should this graded reader series have separate leveling too?
In general, i’d love some pointed feedback on the series grouping and better estimates for initial levels. While our initial levels will not be very good starting off, the more diversity we can have, the more magical the first impression is when you first reach the site
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Yay, we have our own thread! 
Like @NihongoLearner19, I get the server problem when trying to add 19+ books, but otherwise it seems fine. I did experience a minor hiccup while trying to add a tv show: I got an error on the request page, but when I checked my dashboard, it had indeed been added. 
I discovered some other minor issues to add to those mentioned in the other thread:
- Profiles are missing the number of book contributions
- I can’t view my own stats, but can view other people’s
- The ‘where to find’ tooltip still refers to Japanese books
- Occasionally, moving from the forums to the site reverts the learning language back to Japanese.
- The profile links in the social tab all include /jpn/
- There seems to be a ghost volume in the Harry Potter series
Yonsei mess ㅠㅠ
- Main textbook (new edition) 1-10, 13, 14, 17-26, 36, 40, 44, 48, 52, 56, 61-67 (I think, hard to tell when they’re so muddled)
- Main textbook (old edition) 96-107
- Readers 120-123, 127, 139
- Workbooks 108-119
- Korean in 3 weeks 76-83
- Korean in 3 weeks (teacher’s guide) 68-75
The rest are for speakers of other languages or different editions.
As for the levels, I think all the university textbooks have 6 levels, which presumably map to the TOPIK levels. I’d probably grade them something like
- 한국어 1-1 - level 0
- 한국어 1-2 - level 3
- 한국어 2-1 - level 6, and so on.
In regards to the publisher/series issue, I don’t have strong feelings either way. It could be argued the 오늘의 젊은 작가 series is tied together loosely by the theme of “new writers” (and the matching cover designs), so if you enjoyed one book, it’s easy to find similar ones… On the other hand, it can be misleading to group them as a series when they are standalone novels, and they’re less likely to show up in search results…
On the Japanese side, there are series like 100年後も読まれる名作 that have a similar issue of having similarities (theme of foreign classics, level) but not being linked by narrative, setting, etc. Compare to 青い鳥文庫 or 角川つばさ文庫 books, which are often recommended for beginners but aren’t grouped together as a series, which makes finding them difficult.
I wonder if there’s a way to have the best of both worlds, such as including the publisher/imprint on the natively page in the same way as the author. Then the volumes could be separated, but there would still be a way to find similar books… Just an idea. 
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This could also fall into the editions/tagging updates potentially: unrelated books are no long grouped together by series, but are still linked to each other via either an alternate edition or some common tag. Doesn’t really help with the short term, I know.
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So to the best of my knowledge, while they’re all from the same publisher, that doesn’t mean that they’re similarly leveled. At least for Chinatown, the reason that I guessed it was level 35ish was because I’ve read the English translation before and it’s definitely on the literary fiction side of things.
I think that independent leveling would be more appropriate, since all the books are by different authors, so writing style and content can easily differ and affect the level. However, the series grouping might be helpful for finding similar books to read.
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Yeah, I’m not sure how well the whole forum mutings / back and forth is working. Not entirely sure how to diagnose either, so if you figure out a series of steps which I can reproduce, let me know!
I made it now so that it defaults to /kor/ if they have korean as their target language, otherwise it will default to /jpn/. Obviously if you’re viewing a profile in jpn, then that prioritization is flipped.
As for all the spots where manga vs manwha appears, it will be a work in progress. I may at some point just make the underlying data say ‘manwha’ rather then the current situation of keeping it as ‘manga’ and just displaying it as ‘manwha’. We’ll see.
I’m still working on Yonsei, but everything else should be fixed! Including the things in the other post 
Done!
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Frustratingly it didn’t work when I tried to reproduce (of course 
), but I’ll keep an eye on it.
On another note, I’m glad fetching series seems to be working now, that saves me from copying a million links!
ETA: @brandon
- I accidentally tried to add a book already in the database, and it returned a server error message rather than a link to the book page.
- I tried searching for “Harry Potter”, but nothing came up as the title is written in 한글. Should we be adding English titles for well-known books (like HP and The Little Prince) to make them easier to find?
- Just got the server error again trying to add a children’s book
- Numbers haven’t updated for several book series
- I’ve noticed when adding some books, it doesn’t detect that it’s part of a series, even though the Yes24 page does have the other volumes linked under 이 상품의 시리즈 (most recently, the 미생 volume I just added)
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Do you that Yes24 link / ISBN? Should return a Natively link…
So english titles are a bit complicated yeah. I think we’ll need to rely on submitting feedback for now or intial request notes. I’ve not devised an automated process. As for hangul to english lettering, I do have a process for converting japanese into romaji for search purposes… i just need to do the same for hangul. Should be easy.
What did you type? Granted I can probably find alerts by knowing what you submitted always helps
good catch will address.
So I thought I fixed that… mind trying to search https://www.yes24.com/Product/Goods/12278418 ? I get the below image indicating it found an ‘untitled series’
FWIW when i search 미생 I also get that 
PS: You got quite the tsundoku pile, I’m impressed haha
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yeah makes sense. That’s tied in with @bibliothecary comment on the series volume numbers not being accurate in search too.
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Just tried the duplicate search again with both the link and ISBN and both returned the Natively link. I was also able to add the children’s book just now that returned the error. Maybe I just copy-pasted the wrong info.
I got ‘unnamed series’ for that book, too. I thought the result for 미생 said it couldn’t find the series at all, though…
I’ll take screenshots when these things happen in the future in case it’s just user error. 
When I first started studying the language, I got into the habit of buying any second-hand Korean books I came across because it was almost impossible to get non-textbooks any other way.
… Is what I was gonna say, but then I looked around at the bookcases full of English and Japanese books and realised that’s not the whole story. I basically live in a library with a bed. I should change my name to ‘bibliophile’… 
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So that’s correct behavior. It found a Yes24 series but since there’s no link to a dedicated series page, we just use the same name as the book for the series. I don’t know why Yes24 sometimes has a link at the top to a dedicated series page and othertimes just surfaces the volumes on the item page… 
there are worse ways to live!
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I think we may need to cap the number of volumes for this series populater, these yes24 series are a bit out of control 
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After watching one episode, the series was automatically set to finished, even though it has 26 episodes listed. I’ve tried setting it to ‘watching’ in Basic Info, but it doesn’t save the changes. 
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Ugh, you’re really hitting issues with the video section 
So, that series is just in a very sad state for TMDB. Is that series pretty obscure?
Basically the issue is that the other episodes don’t have ‘aired at’ dates, so we can’t tell if there will be more episodes. Outside of updating the tmdb database, i’m not sure what we can do… I could rework the logic, but not entirely sure how at the moment.
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I wouldn’t have thought so, but I suppose as a children’s show it wouldn’t be particularly well-known outisde Korea (although there is an official English dub). There was another show I wanted to add, but couldn’t find at all on TMDB, so I may have to sign up and add the content myself. 
How has it been handled with Japanese if a book/movie/tv show can’t be found on Amazon / TMDB? I’m guessing it rarely happens, but it’ll probably occur much more often with Korean.
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