It’s time to gear up into some n1 reading.
No I didn’t buy a new book what are you saying
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My trying to read anything as a mid N5
What the hell 
As you bought another book, you now have to wear a mowhawk for two days 
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Finished Vol 8, now onto Vol 9! Also joined the WK ABBC for よつばと！ vol 1, that will start soon and help me get started on my set… why do I own all 16 vol and haven’t read a single one yet? 積読あるある（笑）
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Looks like the same style as RPGMaker stuff, maybe? But that’s so neat!
Sounds like you got through a whole bunch of stuff, congrats! I can’t make badges like cafelatte does but I’m giving you one mentally.
pushes some new One Piece and a Zelda: MM’s volume behind me
How coullllllld you…
You’ll get there!
I think this question defines all of us in here, lol.
(Also would you recommend ゆびさき？My friend recommends it all the time but all she can tell me is “It’s so good!” so I’d be curious to hear if you have any more detailed thoughts XD)
Not a lot of progress, but the couple of 魔りました pages on Saturday did at least turn into finishing the rest of the volume.
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yo wait i kinda dig this…
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Bit of a different reading update, but I’ve finally started on the N1 Shinkanzen Master book for reading, and v pleased that so far I’ve gotten every question correct (9/9). Im doing it without lookups until after solving the question, so my understanding feels horribly hazy, but it seems my intuition isn’t so bad!
I thought my main bottleneck would be vocabulary and grammar, but I feel like I can get by quite well just from what I do know (which is well under the recommended 10k words). It seems like my main bottleneck is actually speed… ofc vocabulary will help with that tho
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I would absolutely recommend ゆびさきと恋々 to any beginner wanting to start reading manga! (and non-beginners too 
)
The romance genre typically isn’t my style, but this one is very sweet and cute. The story revolves around a deaf college student named 雪（ゆき）who happens to meet a fellow student 逸臣（いつおみ） on the train one day who isn’t thrown off by her disability in the slightest. Instead he attempts to strike up a brief conversation with her.
The pros are that the setting is modern and conversational, so if you’re using it as a tool to learn Japanese a lot of the dialogue is everyday situational vocabulary. Itsuomi speaks very simply to Yuki at first since she’s reading his lips so early on, some of the conversations are very easy to understand. MOST of the kanji have furigana (the only time there isn’t is when a character is using an electronic device to send a text/message), and there is an anime (if you’re not in Japan it’s available on CrunchyRoll) that matches much of the dialogue (for the first few volumes at least), albeit sometimes scenes happen a little out of order. So there were times I was able to listen to the characters read out the same thing I was reading.
The cons are that, like any manga, there’s a lot of inner dialogue broken up and spread throughout boxes or even pages, so if you’re not used to that it can be confusing trying to figure out who the words belong to… are they out loud? are they inner thoughts? is it an overall narration? And, because it’s casual and modern language, there are plenty of colloquialisms and casual conjugations that a beginner might not understand easily.
So it’s one that I’ve enjoyed working through because I picked up the first volume through a WaniKani Absolute Beginner’s Book Club and it was immensely helpful to follow along with others and ask questions about the chapters we were reading. Eventually, with any manga, if you get used to the author’s style it makes it easier to continue progressing so I’ve stuck with it and it definitely has gotten easier to read!
You can read the first four chapters online for free if you want to check it out!
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I’ll second the ゆびさきと恋々 recommendation! Besides being cute, it’s a romance manga with adult main characters which I would say is fairly rare among popular series. I also read the first volume with the Wanikani book club and I have volumes 2 and 3 on BW, but I haven’t got to them yet. Since I have vol 1 as a physical manga, I would like to get more of the series to match (and the covers are cute as well!)
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Yall youre gonna make me buy manga
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I thought this was Chinese for a solid minute. Good luck on your N1 studies! I have a couple friends studying for it and they fear the the study materials. One girl I know, her study schedule is something like
Sun- Politics
Tues- Biology
Thursday- higher end light novels
And then those days in-between are grammar and vocab specific study. There might be another topic in there but Ive heard that the N1 is pretty tricky about trying to give you a topic you will know nothing about and then you have to read around not knowing the word. So she is trying to hit all those weird, not daily convo topics.
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Nice!
IMO the reading in that one (and maybe the N1 test??) really isn’t too different to N2 reading passages, other than just more rare kanji, fewer terms explained in notes at the bottom & more use of very infrequent words you’re expected to figure out from context.
None of which are in anyway easy, but slightly reassuring to know there is not a similar jump as eg. N3->N2 level texts.
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You’re not really seeing any hiragana because it’s just a bunch of names. 
but yeah, that many blocks of pure kanji can feel real intimidating.
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haha it does look like it doesn’t it, with all those names!
tbh in some ways I think this isnt bad! The test is checking your ability to follow an argument, so sometimes an unfamiliar topic is better. If you think you know what theyre saying already, you might answer wrong…
ohh that is a relief. I definitely felt the gap before! Mostly what I felt was the difference in length tho… even with 6 months left, I’m not sure I can get up to speed…
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Dooo iiit!
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Did you happen to give this a try? I’m thinking that I need to work on shadowing
Yes! I liked it tbh! I have already integrated some phrases into my life, but I kinda fell off with it recently, so I am hoping to pick it back up soon.
I would advise to start with the chapter you feel is most applicable to your life 
(I started with “family” when I should have started with “work” - I dont have any Japanese family aaa!)
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Thanks for the detailed reply! I am actually a fan of romance, at least certain flavors, so with my friend always saying how much she enjoyed it I was getting pretty curious. Maybe I’ll see if my friend can lend me volume one…
I’m not gonna lie, this has also contributed to my 
at the series whenever my friend picked up a new volue XD
I’m not real confident about being ready for N2 next month either, but let’s 頑張りましょう together!!!
No reading update today BUT. I think! Deskwarming! is! in sight!!! Which will hopefully let me start knocking some stuff out again!! It might still be like two weeks but once it kicks in…booooooks…
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Speaking of romance, I got absolutely destroyed recently by a new manga I found: やわはだに春雷
I’m not usually into pure romance, but do like it when it’s mixed in with other genres/plot.
Anyway, I discovered this manga by chance the other day and it felt like the author somehow reached into my brain, discovered all the tropes I like, then wrote a manga based off it. I may have read the first three volumes all in one go. . . I’m also very upset, as I usually avoid newer releases because I hate waiting for new volumes to come out.
Since this is a thread about book hoarding, I don’t recommend anyone buy it. . .
But if you are interested in what it’s about
First chapter spoilers:
Basically main character is a super hot ninja guy who is sent on missions to seduce people/make them fall in love with him to get info and cause general unrest. Due to some childhood trauma he swears he’ll never love anyone.
He’s sent on a mission to a neighbouring state to seduce and steal their priestess-princess, who is sequestered away from the public eye and is supposed to have powers that make her state more prosperous and powerful than others. But when he meets her, she doesn’t give a fuck about him despite his attempts to charm her. She also tells him she doesn’t have any powers and doesn’t mind if he kills her, because she’s been locked up most of her life and has nothing to live for. He takes pity on her and happens to give her a daifuku. Having been deprived of desserts, she instantly falls in love with the daifuku. Ninja boy is real upset that she’s more interested in sweets than him.
Anyway, she decides that life is worth living if it means she’ll get to try more sweets, so ninja boy tries to kidnap/rescue her, chaos ensues.
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Back to report I finished 「ゆびさきと恋々」の９巻 and started vol 10!
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I suspect I wont have any time for reading for a while as I’ve just started a course that seems like it will take up most of my current study time (I study about 10-12 hours a week rip). So. I guess I’m not going to be able to check out of rehab any time soon.
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