ノベル 平野と鍵浦 ジーンピクシブシリーズ | L30?? looks incredibly short, at the very least; you could probably skate through that one fairly easily, especially given that you already know the story from the manga.
3 Likes
Yeah, it’s only about 125 pages of text, so I’ve got no doubt I could read it quickly, my dilemma’s more that these are the last 2 BL novels I’ve got rn, one I know I’ll like and one I’m not so sure now what with how poor my luck w them has turned out so far, so do I wanna save the one I know I’ll like for last… idk, I may end up putting it to a poll when I decide to read one
5 Likes
Saving the one you like for last makes a lot of sense to me! Especially since these are the last few on your backlog, and one’s by a publisher you haven’t had much luck with.
6 Likes
I’m curious, guys: for those who mark their dictionaries as Owned on the site, is there a point where you feel comfortable marking it as Finished, even if you haven’t read the thing cover to cover? Was just pondering that earlier today; I don’t really want these hanging around my Owned list forever, but I appreciate marking it as part of my library and have no intention of treating it like a “real” book.
Related: what do you guys put as your Finished date for a book you finished ages and ages ago and no longer remember any exact dates, let alone a year?
5 Likes
Funnily enough, I was thinking about the dictionary thing yesterday! 
I’ve got children’s dictionaries for Japanese and Korean, and I thought that if I get to a point where I feel like I know most of the words, I’d be fine marking them as read. I had thought that I could make a small pencil mark next to the entries I’d read, but I couldn’t do that to a book - it would feel sacrilegious. 
Although “read a whole dictionary” might be an interesting challenge. Or a book club!
As for the date, you can just make a guess at the year and put random dates. Or is there a reason you’d want it to be accurate?
4 Likes
Nah; as much as I’d love for it to be accurate, there’s no feasibly way to do that now. 
If I had my way I’d have accurate page updates, even, but that ain’t gonna work. What I’ve done for the moment is broken up my JP learning journey into broad points; basically “before college”, “college”, “after college” and just set dates to those end dates as a general “I probably got around to it at some point in this time period”. That’s probably the best I can do for now. 
There are two reference books where I realized I could do better, though: Kanji De Manga: YojiJukugo | L15 and The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course: A Step-by-Step Guide to Mastering 2300 Characters | L0. See, I made Anki flashcards as I made my way through the books, and those Anki flashcards store the card creation date. So I was able to check the first work I added for each and the last word and set those as my start and end dates! In theory I could update my activity manager to be totally page-accurate for this method, but…
3 Likes
On goodreads, I just leave it empty. I don’t know if that is an option on natively. 
If not I would just put something like 2000 and it would show me “ah, that’s one of the books I read ages ago, but don’t know when” (2000 is prior to me starting to study Japanese)
3 Likes
Hmm. That’s a really good idea; I do like that. No ambiguity about it. For what it’s worth, it looks like you have to have at least a year on a Finished book for Natively (though that error message could probably be tightened up @brandon; it’s not happy about the fact that I moved it from YYYY/MM/DD to just YYYY):
3 Likes
so, i think it’s just dumb and wants you to first set the day to be blank, and then make the month blank… it errors out if you only toggle the month to be blank.
Still a bug, but only a bug on the UI. 
You can only have a YYYY set, that’s totally fine.
2 Likes
Would you like me to write up a formal bug report?
So for me, I’ll either just leave it as owned or mark it finished and then move it to a different list named something appropriate. I haven’t yet decided what to call that list but there’s probably a few textbooks and such I’ll have on it that would be difficult for me to read cover to cover.
I can’t answer your second question though because there’s nothing that I haven’t read previously then re-read since I joined the site so I just put it through under the date I reread it after joining the site.
3 Likes
I’m still reading 魔法少女育成計画 ACES | L36. Sadly not as good as the previous volume, which is impacting my pace. I’m about 60% done after nearly three weeks, which is how long I took to read the entire previous volume, which was also 150 pages longer than this one. This volume is fine overall, but still a bit disappointing since the previous one was so great.
Other than that I haven’t been reading much. A little manga here and there, but kind of stagnated on that for the moment. Just ordered some new manga to try to remedy that. Surely that’ll help and not just make my backlog even larger. 
5 Likes
I am making my way - slower than I thought I would - through 世界のニュースを日本人は何も知らない | L30??. It’s a very interesting and accessible read (imo) even though I don’t 100% agree on every point made (and don’t always understand every detail 
). The book started out explaining or illustrating why Japanese know very little about international affairs and how what they know is skewed (though, Japan is not unique in that regard ) and then it proceeded to contrast the misconceptions Japanese have about countries and what the reality actually looks like referencing statistics and general research/articles.
It’s written as if the author is talking to the reader, so everything is in polite Japanese and there are those rhetorical filler questions that Japanese use, to make a statement less forceful.
So far, I would recommend it, if you are looking for adult non-fiction that is surprisingly easy to read. (My brain is getting a workout with all the numbers being written in Japanese. 
)
13 Likes
My brain hates numbers. 1989年 my brain will read aloud as “nineteen eighty nine ねん” 
12 Likes
exactly… but here everything is written in like 四万四〇〇〇人 and 二〇十二年 my brain does not brain. It converts it into numbers and then German.
8 Likes
That’s wild. I would expect 二〇一二年, otherwise, it’s not consistent… 
3 Likes
see, this is how much my brain does not brain. You are, of course, correct. I just had a brain fart. but even easy numbers like 八二% is just so weird to read for me.
5 Likes
I just read that as ‘Hani percento’ 
6 Likes
So as a new reading update from, uh, early July (I should probably post these more often; it gets really difficult finding my last update post…), here’s what I’ve been up to lately. I think most/all of these volume 1s at least I’ve written a review for, so feel free to check those out if interested.
Finished
- 二重螺旋1 | L24 and sequel: still need to finish book #3, but I enjoyed these . Whether that enjoyment lasts is going to really depend on how the story/relationship between the two main characters develops, though I don’t know if we’re going to get there anytime soon just via the manga adaption. The original LN has quite a few volumes at this point, and it’s been on my list to check out, so hopefully I can get to that at some point.
- 帝国兄弟 1 | L25 : one of my “I picked this up way long ago with little to no idea what it’s about” books. Not bad; volume 1 didn’t really do much to draw me in to check out any other volumes, but it was a fairly easy read, so I might pick up volume 2 at some point just to give it another chance.
- よつばと！10-15: finally finished this series up! Yotsuba is, as always, cute, but I was feeling the burnout there at the end, haha. Her charms had ceased to work on me, and whatever the older characters were doing was more interesting.
- FLESH & BLOOD 13 | L33 :
as usual. Looking forward to the next volume; the author probably got a huge kick out of the bait-and-switch she ended this one on. x.x - Flesh&Blood外伝 女王陛下の海賊たち | L33 : with the end of F&B 13 I was finally able to read the final short story in this collection, which was published after F&B 13. Good stuff, good stuff. Left a review for other F&B readers advising good points to pick these stories up; they have some fun past-building for some of the main characters.
- ババンババンバンバンパイア 1 | L26 and sequel: Great rec from @shablul; this series has been distracting me from my usual reading for a bit now.
Currently reading
- 吸血鬼ドラキュラ | L30?? : My current long-running read. Still reading along with Dracula Daily.
- Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication: A Self-Study Course and Reference | L0 : I’m actually using this to try to practice my speaking with, going over each of the exercises and examples vocally.
- ババンババンバンバンパイア 3 | L26 : Just continuing along with the series.
- 冥府の王の神隠し | L30?? : One of my BL pickups I’m finally getting to.
It’s been bugging me for a while that I haven’t been able to get to some books I’ve had my eye on for a while; part of it is I still read slow in JP and part of it is just my time/attention being taken up by other things. But I really want to get these read and make room for an endless wishlist I’m trying not to add too much to these days, and since I’m taking a temporary hiatus from book clubs, it seemed like the best time. I’m not very far in, but I’m really enjoying it so far!
Now that よつばと！'s wrapped up, I’ll be continuing working through some of my shorter/easier physical manga. 二重螺旋(3) | L24 is a given, but I’ll also likely pick up テイルズ・オブ・シンフォニア 4 | L24 (vol 4-5 + extra stories left) and 四ノ宮くんには理由がある 2 | L27 (will need re-read vol 1; been too long and my JP skills weren’t great when I originally read it :P)
9 Likes
I was listening to 賢者の書 (喜多川 泰シリーズ) | L23 today because it was leveled at 23 and it’s the first time I have encountered a grading that is very much off. I have listened to L27 stuff that was easier. I hope my gradings might push it up a notch because if a beginner tried this book, they’d be frustrated. 
8 Likes
