What kind of hijinks are being got up to?
5 isn’t the series finisher, right? It’s still ongoing?
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yepyep, still ongoing hard, it just got more interesting 
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Excellent. Volume 4 ended with what looks like a new character joining the fray. Can’t wait to see how he ends up derailing 蘭丸’s carefully-laid plans even more. 
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Decided to start
leisurely, and with no expectations… 「雨垂れ石を穿つ」 (slow and steady wins the race)… basically just seeing what I can learn from comparing it to the EN translation. I imagine it will make the anime feel a bit easier 
Also this 366 / 1 pg a day book of cool factoids:
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I’m 38% (which is equivalent to ~235 pages) into 正体 | L30?? and I think if this weren’t an audiobook I would have DNF’d it already. How can I be more than 7 hours into an audiobook and barely anything of substance has happened? It’s about a fugitive on the run! There should be more drama! It’s not like nothing happens at all, just that the few drama spikes quickly sizzle out, and an excessive amount of time is devoted to repeating character facts without really developing the characters.
I’m torn between stopping it out of annoyance or hoping that once I hit 50% maybe things will get exciting…which could just be sunk cost fallacy kicking in.
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Oooh that looks useful! (my JP conversation is at most two 1 hr JP lessons per week… but still)
And my wallet takes another hit…
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I didn’t even notice when I hit 300 books read on here. That woulda been 5 days ago. It’s nearly all manga though (267/305)
I’m nearly 2/3 of the way finished with Daiya now, finishing vol 30 today. I think I’ll be a little sad when I’m done, even though it’s got an act ii (though, I don’t plan on getting that for a while)
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Haha - same! That looks fun! 
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I think it’s pretty great so far (p30 of 224), tho the JP font doesn’t distinguish つ vs っ, which is pretty annoying (everything has romaji though). Weirdly the order is: romaji, 日本語, translation.
Some is familiar from anime and manga, some is “ohhhh that’s what that is”, and some is new for me
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Yet another book that doesn’t understand its audience 
Nice! Since I’m reading two manga series with Kansai-ben I’m slowly getting more interested in actually learning the dialect, and the preview of the book looks really nice (and has a fun writing style). It’ll probably help with the mangas too!
And considering how much I love Kyoto, and that every time I’m in Japan I spend weeks there, it’s about time I’m actually learning the local language instead of the boring non-dialect Japanese
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I’ve also started reading this. Found a few others in the series as well. So far it’s mostly been accessible for me even though it’s higher than my comfort level.
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I’m not sure it’s such a misunderstanding. I suspect it’s designed to keep it accessible even to folks at a lower level. If you’re unused to the mincho(?) font, it lets you focus on the relevant info, instead of getting stuck on the kanji. The point is to teach you kansai-ben, not improve your general reading skills.
That said, there are moments when kana would be better, like is ninyaku en for 二百円: にんやく、ににゃく、or a typo? I’m fairly sure it’s ににゃく, otherwise it would be ninnyaku but that’s still ambiguous… Then again a kana font that doesn’t distinguish つ and っ clearly is ambiguous too… So pick your poison
(I generally wouldn’t assume typo, but I found one: めかん where they meant あかん… So the romaji was actually helpful there!
You should totally add the Kansai-dialect tag on their Natively pages btw (I didn’t want to do it myself, in case I misunderstood the ones your referring to)
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Glad you’re enjoying it. It’s at the perfect discomfort level for me, personally
Similar but slightly harder book explaining various idioms:
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Maybe it’s just me then, but I don’t see how I would’ve gotten much use beyond “Ah, this is fun” out of the book as an absolute beginner - and hiragana is the first thing I learnt. On the other hand, now I struggle to attach meaning to romaji because I’m unused to it, but I still can’t read all kanji without furigana, so this book feels unnecessarily hard to read for me.
Will do when I add tags later after I finish the series (or at least one more volume). I always struggle with “Should this tag be for the series or for this volume, and what should its percentage be?” when I’ve only read one, so I tend to hold back 
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The book was first published in 1995, and I think at that time it was not yet expected that every learner would automatically start by learning the kana. Including romaji was pretty much standard in most of these “extra not-a-textbook study” type books, and probably leaving it out would have reduced your sales (or at least would have worried the publisher that you might be losing sales).
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Awesome, I’ll check that out, thanks😊
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Interesting… it sounds like you ignored Romaji entirely then? (not a bad choice). You’re probly not the only one.
I find it’s random whether I get things quicker in かな vs romaji vs 感じ at this point (I’d encountered romaji when learning song lyrics, prior to learning Japanese). So I’m sort of どうでもいい about its presence. Earlier on, I used to dislike it.
I’m probly worst at pure ひらがな / かな though. (that’s what I get for skipping kid’s books lol)
Amazing how ~20 years changes things!
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Yeah, it would be interesting to find out about this trend in Japanese-as-foreign-language pedagogy, but I have no idea whether anybody’s ever researched it.
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If anyone knows anything on this I’d place bets on @javerend
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yeah! I’d have to look and see exactly when this shift happened, but at least up until the 90s using romaji (even different romanization systems!) was pretty common in beginner and upper beginner texts.
Stuff like Making Sense of Japanese by Jay Rubin (originally 1992), A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar (1989) (although the intermediate and advanced volumes drop the romaji), and Japanese the Spoken Language (1987-1990) all either include or exclusively use romaji
In academic publishing, it’s still waaaay more common to see romaji than kana as well. I think many (english language) journals’ style guides prohibit them, and even the Japanese linguistics textbook (An Introduction to Japanese Linguistics, by Natsuko Tsujimura, 3rd ed 2013, first ed 1996) I have uses no kanji or kana at all.
After some quick attempts at looking for papers about this I can’t see anyone having already written about it, maybe a fun project to work on
There were some pretty big changes in general language acquisition ideas in the 2000-2010 era though, that’s when you start seeing a much bigger emphasis on extensive reading in research at least. Not sure if that’s tied to actual classroom changes or not, since those tend to lag quite a bit behind whatever the researchers are doing
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