What Were Your First Novels and/or Alternatively Manga?

It’s been 18 years since I read it, so unfortunately I don’t really remember :sweat_smile: I’d read it before in English, so I had the advantage of knowing the story.

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I tried reading it in Japanese very early on and at least for my copy, 22 would be far too low. The sentences are relatively complex for a children’s book, there are lots of nonsense words (difficult for a new learner), obscure words (for a new learner. Knight, caterpillar, various unusual animals, etc), and poems to boot iirc. My copy also didn’t have that much furigana - I suspect it was meant as something parents would read aloud for their children rather than young children read for themselves?

I unfortunately don’t have it any more, but I do think familiarity with the story would help, though at least for my edition it would have been closer to maybe ~27.

Edit: Just found this page though! Free bilingual book Japanese / English, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,    目次 —    CONTENTS

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I managed to find an old blog post from back then (November 2004, an idyllic time when I was actually living in Japan), where I wrote:

I do now have a copy of Alice in Wonderland which I’m slowly wading through. Handily it
doesn’t tend too much to obscure vocabulary the way most fantasy does (‘prince’, ‘dragon’, ‘enchantment’, ‘crystal tiara’ etc).

So although past me was rather unhelpfully brief they didn’t seem to be struggling too much (or else I was just accepting a ton of vocab and grammar lookups and skipping over the hard stuff because I knew the plot…). I think looking at the book again now I agree it’s not super easy.

My copy (岩波少年文庫 paper version) is moderately high furigana (eg furigana on 穴 and 夢 but not 本, 夏 or 金色). It says on the back 小学5・6年以上 so that’s probably where they’ve set the furigana boundary.

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@cat thx for the link!

It’s interesting that there’s different versions wrt furigana. I’ve read the original in English many years ago, which is part of the appeal. I’m a bit curious about how the poetry sections come out in Japanese. I haven’t really read any poetry yet.

In any case, I’m currently paying through Final Fantasy X, and only on book 6 of 19 in 灰と幻想のグリムガル. I’m probably gonna continue with FF IX after that. So if I do end up reading Alice, it won’t be anytime soon lol

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Can you share how you’re playing the Final Fantasy games in Japanese? I’ve only played them on consoles where English is the only option on the versions I have.

I’m playing on Switch. Most of them have full Japanese available on Switch (digital or physical) and Steam nowadays. Also I think FF 7 remake on PlayStation does too. FF 9 doesn’t for some reason, but 7, 8, 10/10-2, 12, 14, and 15 all do (I haven’t confirmed 15 on switch). You might have to change your region or console language, but don’t have to buy a copy from Japan specifically.

Idk about pre-7 since I’m not really interested in those

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Okay, thanks. Unfortunately I don’t have a Switch or a computer powerful enough to play on Steam (I’d guess), so probably not an option for now.

By the way, if you don’t mind 2D graphics, FF6 is totally worth playing. Many (including me) consider it the best game in the franchise. FF4 is also pretty good. The others pre-7 games aren’t worth playing in my opinion.

Ah gotcha. Fwiw you can use a service like https://shadow.tech/ to play via remote computer. I had to do that to play FF14, since I also can’t run Steam on my computer (it’s a cheap Chromebook that’s not compatible… Ironically if it was a proper Linux distro I could).

Honestly I have trouble with the 2D and the older style gameplay, especially the ATB system. I’ll keep that in mind tho, and maybe watch a playthrough on YouTube someday.

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switch emulators exist, but if your computer can’t run steam, it will probably not be able to run the emulator. :smiling_face_with_tear:

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I would be surprised if you can’t run 7,8,9,(10) unless your computer is 15 years old. I was also emulating ps2 with a crappy computer over ten years ago. What kind of computer do you have?

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Might want to move the convo to the video game thread, guys; looks like it’s gotten sufficiently off-topic.

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Oops, I thought this was the “what are you reading” topic :laughing:

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