What are you reading today?

Oh, by the way, how are you managing the page numbers? I saw that you are recording your reading by pages, but you won’t be able to tell from the website, right?

A bunch of times, the narration goes “something something… NOT” for comedic effect. That can be difficult to read at first.

It’s not really her point of view. The narration does mention what characters are thinking, but is separate, and has its own opinion (even going as far as using だろう or と思う at times). That reminds me how 江戸川乱歩 likes to talk to the reader during the story (even though the writing style is otherwise completely different).
Ah, also, when something corresponds to a character’s thought, there’s a long dash (—) in front of it, so it’s easy to parse. That might be missing from the web novel version.

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I will pay more attention to the long dashes. I don’t think I have ever read a book (in any language) that uses those. I kind of guessed it was talking about internal thoughts but will look more carefully about how it works.

The no period for the final sentences of dialogue is another “new” thing for me that I wasn’t aware of until recently.

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I just wanted to say that I’m glad that other people are reading and (mostly) enjoying ティアムーン帝国物語!! I personally love it to pieces since it’s very funny and charming. My first 3 novels in Japanese were all in the series and I recently read the fourth one (and the first 8 English translations before all that…) so I’m perhaps incredibly biased.

@Naphthalene Yes, the narrator definitely rags on Mia a BUNCH but it gets less annoying as time goes on.

Anyway, enjoy yourselves! Please feel free to keep posting in the forum so I can read your thoughts :joy:

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Yes, I’m halfway through volume 2 and it’s a lot more bearable so far!

I’ll post them when I’m done with this volume, then!

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I’ve noticed two ways that Japanese books show thoughts: The long dashes at the start of a paragraph, and using parentheses. I do find it a bit odd that there are two ways (that I know of). I wonder if it’s just not standardized or if it has to do with when the books were published or some other factor.

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Good day, members of learnnatively.com, I hope you are all having the best of times reading.

Recently, I finished 小説 アニメ カードキャプターさくら クロウカード編 上 | L25. It took me a bit longer than usual because I have been busier lately. Believe it or not, I actually do have a life outside of reading obscure Japanese vampire novels. :sweat_smile:

You might be wondering why I would read the novelization of the anime of Card Captor Sakura when I could just read the manga. Unfortunately, due to my manga allergies, that was not an option, so I had to settle for the LN. :face_with_diagonal_mouth:

I am a sucker for this kind of stuff. I eat this shit up for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If you asked me why I get up in the morning, I would say さくらちゃんのために. This quote from Tomoyo-chan sums up my feelings pretty well:

さくらちゃん以上におもしろくてかわいいものなんて、ありませんわ~.

It was the first raw anime that I really felt that I could get into. It’s the cutest thing in the universe, and you should all watch it and post about it in the watching thread. :slight_smile: Once audiovisual is out, it would be nice if we could have “watching clubs” and watch shows and movies together, like in book clubs. I think a 魔法少女 club would be really fun. I know I definitely need some more motivation to get more listening practice in. What shows would you like to watch together, Natively?

With that out of the way, I must admit that reading it truthfully wasn’t as a great of an experience as watching it. The novelization just cuts too many important plot points out. I feel like you would probably have zero idea what was going on half the time if you didn’t already read/watch the manga/anime; it just moves too fast. Though, I’m not really surprised, since they crammed a 50+ episode arc down into 2 books. I can’t really recommend it unless you already know what’s going on and just absolutely NEED more Sakura. Despite this, it’s the first LN that I’ve given more than 1 star (even though LNs make up 45% of my pages read stat :anguished:).

As for difficulty, it’s about as easy as you would expect it to be. My ratings put it at 25. The manga is currently at 22, but it seems to be normal for LNs to be slightly higher difficulty than their manga counterparts.

Overall, recommended to my fellow manga-deniers who also happen to be Sakura-lovers (probably just me tbh)

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I try to remind myself that (though in my case it’s currently time travel pirate books), and I keep falling off the wagon. :sob: Suffering from success, I guess?

I would definitely be down for this! I need reasons to actively with on my listening; it gets pushed to the side far too easily. I also barely watch stuff in general anyway, so there would be lots of new stuff to discover.

Speaking of novelizations, has anyone read any good ones they’d particularly recommend? I guess you’d generally see novelizations of visual media, but I wonder if there’s any manga → novel out there? :thinking:

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I know of ハイキュー!! ショーセツバン!! (series) | L26 (:joy: they literally put “novelization” as the title) and orange (series) | L22
I read an extended extract of the latter and it did follow quite well the manga to that point, I think (I read both years apart, so I’m not super sure). I have no idea about ハイキュー.
Ah, also, warning: the novelization of orange has furigana on EVERYTHING. It gets annoying pretty fast.

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Well, I am now done with said book and sadly, it got much worse immediately after that. :sob: Basically, the whole time they are in レムノ, she just keep being caught by surprise (which, in itself, is not a surprise) and getting bashed by narration. I feel like it could still work if only she managed to keep a good poker face (like nobles are supposed to do in light novels), but instead she keeps going “はぇ?” and looking confused… and people just either don’t comment on it or think she is doing it on purpose. Plus, she has an insane amount of luck. Considering the epilogue for this arc, it might be that she has indeed some godly protection or something (after all, Anne did pray for that in the prologue… so maybe?) but it still felt repetitive as a joke and just jarring in terms of plot. It feels like there’s no real challenge or tension :slightly_frowning_face:
I just had a look at the illustrations of volume 3 (which starts the next arc), but I didn’t feel like reading ahead for now. So I’ll just move on to another series in my pile.

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Fair enough! Thanks for letting me know what you thought of it!

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Started 私の推しは悪役令嬢。 | L32 for another bookclub. This could be either funny and cute or really boring and awful… :thinking:

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If you feel like it, I’d love to hear what you think! It has its flaws and strong points both imo, so I guess it really depends on your tastes and tolerances. :slight_smile:

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Finally found time to finish this 4th story, and… well, now I know why it’s part of the カタログ (where we can’t have nice things).

I feel like the stories so far have been a bit of a mixed bag, from pretty meh to rather nice, but I feel like this one has been the best so far. If the last two stories are as good, I might really consider continuing the series.

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I’ve been working through こころ | L39 this week. It’s considerably easier language than the other Soseki novel I’ve read (坊っちゃん | L41), but also less exciting and funny. I’m finally starting to get invested into the story now but the beginning was hard to stay motivated through.

I also finished Book 2 out of 2 of 二ノ国 光の後継者と猫の王子 (series) | L24, and I highly recommend it. It sets up and delivers on a really interesting story in just 2 volumes, and it’s a cool exploration of the Ni No Kuni setting. Worth a read if you’ve ever been interested in the series.

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I think it was @eefara who asked about details on 天使の傷跡 and I don’t think I ever followed up, so here is the basic gist thus far. I’ve reached a (probably) major spoiler point so will leave that out, but generally hiding just because some people like to go in fully blind:

So a news reporter and his girlfriend go walking, see a dude who has been stabbed staggering towards them, he dies and his last utterance to the news reporter is 「てん」. The dagger he’s been stabbed with looks like it has some kind of sigil on it, and it turns out this guy too is a reporter, but kind of a skeezy one.

It’s a really fun read so far, and definitely challenging my kanji knowledge. I think my binge reading of Aozora short stories prepared me well for reading a paperback copy of a pulpy 1960s crime novel. The actual grammar and vocab isn’t hard, it’s just got kanji like 何処, 屑箱, and 或 and the like scattered all about.
All my studying is coming to fruition, ya’ll.

Also I picked up another book by the same author called 恐怖の海 (who wouldn’t with that title :heart_eyes:) and from reading the first page it seems super breezy. It looks to be published in 1995, though, so 30 years later than 天使の傷跡.

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Just finished また、同じ夢を見ていた today. Really wholesome story. 100% recommend

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Wow, my goal is to get up to the level to read authors like Soseki, Kawabata, Tanizaki in the original! Out of curiosity, what are the main challenges? And how did you build up to reading Soseki? :slight_smile:

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That’s a great goal! I actually had no knowledge of classic Japanese authors until a while after I started learning, and only picked up an interest in them recently.

How did you build up to reading Soseki? :slight_smile:

I picked up 吾輩は猫である | L48 in 2020, and struggled through the first chapter over several days with the help of a dictionary, audiobook, and occasionally referencing an English translation. After that I decided Soseki was too hard and moved on to easier stuff for awhile :sweat_smile:

Then, near the end of last year, my university offered a Japanese history class that I enrolled in. One of the books we read for the class was 坊っちゃん | L41, and I decided to read it in Japanese because, I mean, I might as well right? This was really hard compared to the modern books and LNs I’d been mostly reading, but I also really enjoyed Soseki’s style and all the little jokes (once I finally started to get them). I mentioned it in my review on the book’s Natively page too but this blog was really helpful when I got totally stuck on strange metaphors or 1900s references.

So in a sense, I feel like I didn’t quite “build up to it” as much as I could have, but I did have about 10 novels by different authors under my belt before I tackled 坊っちゃん。 The pressure of a class schedule forced me to work through the book at a steady pace, and now I feel more confident with Soseki’s style.

What are the main challenges?

I would say Soseki’s outated and sometimes just strange kanji usage can be confusing at first. Things like 此処(ここ)、其処(そこ)、 and ~に就いて(について)you get used to pretty quickly, but there’s also uncommon grammar like ~がものはない that forces me to stop reading and google stuff for awhile. Thankfully I’ve got a version of the book that has editor’s notes explaining the weirdest ones. Other than that, I spend the most time figuring out what the narrator means when they’re describing their thoughts or reasoning on something. The dialogue is quite straightforward, but it gets harder in these sections of internal monologue.

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Thank you for such a detailed reply, that’s really helpful! The edition you mention with editor’s notes sounds interesting, where did you find it?

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What did your teacher think of you reading the OG, out of curiosity? I can’t imagine they get many students who choose to read in the original language, haha.

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