It started as an innocent little “I want to combine my editions/entries with the more broadly used editions/entries so that they show up properly as a series in my catalogue!” and then I started going “man all the charts graphs are mucked up because they don’t have the proper publication date/genre tags/author info entered…” and. well.
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Yeah, I don’t have publication date but I did put in main author info, tags and a series tag. Most of my series have the book number in the name but the ones that don’t have a tag with the book number.
I am slowly going through and adding them to their series in the meta data as well but some of those were getting mixed up with English volumes and other series due to other people adding multiple series by the same author to the same list even though they aren’t connected (like the author who wrote The Deer King having that series plus about 40 other series mixed into The Deer King meta data). That wasn’t fun trying to fix 
just popping in bc i have nowhere else to say this but you know the author of FMA is a truly skilled story teller when
spoiler
Hughes’s death
made me cry in the staffroom at work despite knowing it was going to happen because I’ve read it before
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LT shenaniganery wall of text
Honestly this was the majority of what I was doing at first? Like, my initial sweep was with the intent of combining my scanned Japanese editions (many of which were only combined with one or two other entries or were even entirely new) with their better established English-titled “work” pages so that they would show up as me owning the series.
And also so my recommendations would clean themselves up because they were a confused mess, lol.
But in the end the ones that gave me the most difficulty were actually my English danmei and Japanese translations of YA novels from when I was a kid? But for two very different reasons.
The danmei gave me issues because I own Dinghai Fusheng records volume one of the novel…AND of the manga. And if I didn’t explicitly include that information in the title - if I only tagged them - they were auto-combining into the same edition, which obviously they’re not. That took some futzing.
And also because they have like, authors plus multiple illustrators and unfortunately that data has to be added one by one from the book edit page atm and can’t be changed en masse using power edit…yet. I’ve brought the request up with Tim so here’s hoping 
The YA novels were a whole other can of worms, because half of them are divided into separate volumes for publishing (i.e. “The Hunger Games” is divided into 上 and 下 volumes in Japanese, but obviously in English that’s just the one book) and I had to do some research and forum-asking to figure out the best way to be both accurate and still reflect that they were part of the HG series.
Of course, once I had that mostly sorted out that’s when I went “but man the data is so funky on like 80% of my entries, wouldn’t it be cool if I fixed that and could actually see my genre ratios and other stats??” and that’s what REALLY ate my brain this week.
It turned into going through and entering/tweaking/fixing authors, publication dates and labels (which, that one will actually be useful when I’m out and about because I can check what section to be looking in for missing volumes, but publishing date and author and whatnot is pretty much just to make stats look pretty), genre tags, etc.
In fact, I think I wound up combining/tweaking the ダンデライオン edition that you’d initially set up? Unless there’s another CatDQ vibing over on LT. I was trying to fix the series so it didn’t have a duplicate volume 2 listed, but I hope I didn’t muck up any data on your end
I’m right up there with you 
I actually got to watch a stage play covering part of FMA a while back, and the way they did…a certain character reflecting on the event you mentioned…was extremely creative.
spoilers ahoy, alchemists
It was a scene with Roy standing in front of Hugh’s grave, but they HAD HUGHES’ ACTOR ON STAGE WITH ROY’S ACTOR but Roy’s actor just. Stared through him. The whole time. Never acknowledged, never interacted. Hughes came out initially very quietly without any fanfare or spotlight or anything so it took a second to notice him at first, and then he just…lingered through the whole scene. It was, in a word, haunting.
It sounds less impressive and creative when I describe it, but viewing it in person it was extremely well done.
Update: nada. Got through my reviews but I actually had to do work today, sadly. How’s everyone else faring?
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I am doing some odd and ends reviews however I recently book a book worth about 100 bucks that Im currently reading through. Its just on that edge of difficulty so Im learning a LOT which is good.
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They are here…
I´ve ordered Into the Wild and Philosophers Stone purely because I thought it could be interesting to read something where I know the source material so intimately. There will be lot´s of suffering involved in reading them.
So far I have knocked out 1 manga from my unread pile this week
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Just read an article about Tsundoku on Todaii Japanese and found myself into this thread, what a timing. I find myself guilty on this too but also not… On one hand I’m a really fast reader for novels and I go through hundreds of pages daily (or more like when I was younger I went through Fantasy Novels a book a day and visited the library once a week or more to get new reading materials. Even their catalogue wasn’t enough so I have so many books I read like 3 or 4 or 5 times and cycled through them once a year.
During covid I found out about WebNovels and it only went downhill, now I can access novels online on my phone anywhere I am. I also hoard open tabs in the dozens with novels like a stack that I might go through, but I’m only actively reading about 5 to 10 of them and the rest I just don’t have time to.
For real books though I really am guilty of buying and never touching and every day I want to change it and then procrastinate on actually doing it. I got the book of Abroad in Japan two years ago and it took me until last month to finish it. Not because I’m a slow reader, but because it’s just sitting for months until I get myself to continue reading. Because the new one came out last month I kicked myself in the arse and finished the entire second half of the book in about 2 days and it was really fun. I immediately bought the new book when it came out and its now been sitting next to my bed and I haven’t touched a single page yet.
Even worse, when I was searching for it in the bookstore I found three other books about Japan that I also bought and I also have had two more in my pile beforehand that I also “planned to read”… Now I’m at 6 and I should really get going 
Also… Japanese Textbooks… I use one in language class but I should really study more and use the other examples and grammar descriptions to study further besides using Bunpro and I have that on my list since a month ago but never actually do it. Now I also have a tab open with Imabi to deepen my understanding and help learning more than just the surface but I never actually started reading…
So I hope this rehab and accountability here will help me a little to get going
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I read book 4 of read hair snow white.
I started it like a year or two ago (I guess I could scroll up to find when).
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Mine weren’t foing that just with tagging, only when I accessed the series tab and started adding them to the rest of the series but it was getting time consuming to fix the issue with wrong series being listed together.
I found book type and correcting the ISBN to work (think some of them default to ASIN maybe?)
Yeah, that’s what got me too before I put the breaks on and just used tagging. It doesn’t give the accurate stats but I try my hardest to ignore that (not like the app lets me see anything like that since it glitches out and shuts down if I check anything other than the sections I’ve set up - can’t even check authors books across different series or any tags without it going haywire).
That was me 
I got peeved with seeing muddled entries and wrong info so started creating a few series using the Japanese names to see if that could fix the issues I was having but I couldn’t fix that one. It kept showing duplicates and I don’t know why
Don’t worry if it doesn’t fox, I use a different system now to keep series together and have them show up in my lists in order (most of my book names have their number in the title or my tags).
I have fallen off the Japanese reading bandwagon and my reviews are just idling away atm
I did manage to read a book in English I borrowed from the library; Where the crawdads sing.
Was recommended by someone at work and had a twist I didn’t quite see coming at the end (I have not seen the film so went into the story blind). I also checked it out in Japanese and apparently it got a decent write up from its Japanese readers and won 1st place in their translated fiction category in 2021 so considering adding the Japanese version to my bookshelf to encourage me to read it again further down the line though I wonder if anything was changed or if they will use a specific dialect for the speech in it.
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Back again much sooner this time, having just finished 鬼滅の刃 (Demon Slayer) volume 1. The benefits of an action manga is that there are whole pages of no dialogue, so I was able to read it much quicker than Doraemon. There were a couple of new terms, but for the most part, I was looking up less than one new word per page! The only thing that tripped me up were a few vague subjects and a little sprinkling of formal/archaic word choices/conjugations. This was my first time interacting with the franchise, despite seeing images everywhere, so it’s nice to see what the story was all about. Not a whole lot happened beyond setting the stage, and I am really annoyed by that cliffhanger. All you needed was a couple more pages! Oh well, I guess I’ll have to pick up the next volume sometime. My library has up to volume 5 in Japanese. But first, I think I’ll try Spy Family.
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Almost done with DGM volume 17, though I have been mostly putting reading time into getting through Hakuoki ~Sweet School Life~ which is certainly taking a while. I decided to do Hijikata’s route first even though Okita and Kazama are my boys because I’ve been craving the grumpy older man trope lately and jfc, his way of talking takes me a while to parse through.
I’m really feeling like I’m not getting any real progress while reading though which has been a disappointment.
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Im rushing through FMA rn so I can give it back to the person again HAHA… I borrowed vols 3 and 4 last wednesday and I’m gonna give them back tomorrow. I also started reading fushigi dagashiya 3 bc it was on my shelf and I wanna reduce the stuff on my shelf… aka the original purpose of this thread LMAO but yeah. Actually it’s been really nice going back and reading something easier, and because it’s easier I feel like my grammar recognition is greatly improved bc I’m not struggling so much. I think I’d also recommend this method to other upper intermediate learners - don’t feel bad to read something “easy” because actually it’s really good for knowledge consolidation
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This is something often spoken about in Language classes. Because classes are designed as a “Point A to Point H” the student is constantly learning something new, and this can feel like progress isnt getting made. But also going back to something “easy” in a class can feel like a “Im paying you to learn forward and this feels backward”.
Tldr; Yes, ideally you should switch between already read/studied content and new content. I dont think Ive seen studies on burn-out though.
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What!!! What kinda fancy book is it, to cost that much???
This was my thinking when I ordered a bunch of YA novels I read as a kid last month! I haven’t gotten to them yet, but honestly I think it’ll be a lot of fun when I do.
Welcome in! I’m kind of the same way - I read soooooooo much as a kid (perks of living next to a library!) but nowadays I just have tabs and tabs and tabs of like, ao3 or other online reading. I think spending so much time reading on my phone has kinda hurt my ability to focus as well on a paper book… I can feel it coming back when I sit down with a print book, though!
more LT backend gobbledegook
Oooh I’ll have to take a look at that - I don’t even know what ASIN is, actually. Something to research as I continue futzing 
Honestly at this point I just open my list up in the web browser, because I think it also loads faster. The app is just useful for the scanning XD
Well, if I understood what I was looking at/what I fixed correctly, someone had entered a copy of volume 2 that hadn’t been “combined” with the existing work for volume 2, but they had both been separately added to the series overall. I combined the two to fix it! And for now the series only has volumes 1-3, but I figure as you and I buy more one of us will get around to adding the last few, lol.
Well, at least you’re reading! That’s still a win in my book 
Congrats! Yeah, shounen and other action-y type stories do make it a little easier to roll through without quite as much painful vocabulary. It’s a fun series overall, although I didn’t get quite as into it as some of my friends did.
Have fun with Spy Family! I tried volume one at one point, but it had a lot of political/governmental specific vocabulary right from the start that had me pretty cross eyed so I didn’t wind up continuing.
The dreaded plateau feeling…頑張れ！！！
Biiiiiiig agree. I know you’ve tackled more difficult stuff than I have, but even among the things I’ve been reading the difference is palpable. The challenging stuff can be really good for introducing new vocabulary/grammar/etc but the easier stuff is more than just a confidence boost - it’s the low-stress practice that actually helps everything feel really solid and learned. At least imo, lol.
Update! Not a big one, but I knocked out the last chunk of 地縛少年花子くん vol 6 that I’d been sitting on for a bit. Gonna try to do the same with the second half of アトリエ, although I might not finish before I need to head home.
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It is the ever infamous “The Grammar Book: Form, Meaning and Use for English Teachers” 3rd edition".
Since my semester started again, I am required to read oh so many things and articles to hopefully become a better teacher.
It’s called みにくい遊郭の子! I’ve only skimmed read the first bit of the web comic, but I liked the art and characters (I have a thing for white haired wife guys it seems ). I was surprised when I came across it at Bookoff, as I don’t think it’s super well known, so I instinctively just grabbed them.
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I think the regulars in this thread may have started to become a hive mind.
Coincidentally, I also decided to read something a little easier today because I wanted to give my brain a break. It’s honestly been so nice! While I wouldn’t say I’m necessarily reading difficult stuff, a lot of the other manga I’ve been reading this year have been very keigo or fantasy heavy, so was refreshing to just read without having to look up super specific terminology.
Admittedly, I’ve been in the same boat as others recently — very little reading since my last update. Had a deadline at work and some personal errands, so other than N1 prep I haven’t read much. CMOA also got hacked and has been offline for over a week, which is usually where I would read web comics when on transit.
I did finish vol 18 of ニナ, like I said I would after my last update, but that’s about it. Started Kamisama Kiss this morning, which is the easier read I mentioned above. About halfway through? We’ll see if I can keep up momentum.
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Big +1 for this. In language learning fluency of comprehension is also something that needs to be trained, and easy or familiar material is the best way to do this. There are also many common words which are used in ways we may not expect as learners, so seeing easy words in new contexts is extremely efficient for naturally inferring the nuance of what you already “know”. Other than this, if a good extensive reading comprehension threshold is about 98% then that material will be easy by default. I could go on.
I’m personally someone who feels guilty if I don’t struggle, since then I (falsely) feel like I’m surely not learning, but if the goal is a native-like intuition for the language then the first step is finding something easy.
Stomping some easier books also does wonders for motivation sometimes, so that doesn’t hurt as well.
Keep enjoying your “easy” books guilt free 
(imagine saying to yourself, who once knew no Japanese, how you now have books you consider easy to read!)
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Yeah I just googled it and I see what you mean about the price. Oof.
stares at my 地獄楽 collection, which I picked up specifically for Gabimaru being A Wife GuyTM
stares at 幸せな結婚
stares at Qifrey, Noe, Allen Walker, and my other white-haired anime guys
stares at ホタルの嫁入り, which I picked up specifically in the hope that the male lead will be A Wife GuyTM
stares at my Danmei, half of which have male leads who are definitely Husband GuysTM
stares at the fact that your pic of みにくい遊郭の子 caught my attention
Yeah. I…don’t think I can throw any stones on that one. Ahem.
stares at my extremely fantasy and supernatural heavy library
Ah, was that part of the big PHP issue that was going on?
Kamikiss my beloved-
I may have ordered the rest of the Kamikiss volumes I was missing last week…and then realized I missed volume 5 so I STILL need that. >.>
Residual update from yesterday: I didn’t quite finish the Atelier volume before I needed to head home, but I DID finish it off before I went to bed! So that knocks out Atelier volume 5 
Today’s options are the first volumes of Dandelion and Hotaru, so I can try them and see if I actually like them, and volume 10 of 魔男 my beloved <3
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Best tip I can give you as an active teacher is to keep those books on you for future reference, you’ll probably forget everything until you’re teaching it regularly lol, also start writing out grammar explanations super short in your own words with a handful of examples, it does a world of good both for teaching and for understanding something you forgot if you have it written in language you understand rather than the often stuffy textbook language.
There was one book in my required books list that my class didn’t touch once that was out of print so you could only get it second-hand at inflated prices lol. I’m convinced someone messed up putting it on the list because it was the very last one on the list and it disappeared halfway through the year.
On the bright side, because it was out of print at least it wasn’t one of those ones where the teacher wrote it and is getting the students to buy their book. My teachers did write some books and I bought some of them, but they never forced us to, they were just that good at their subjects I always found what they had to say interesting. Maybe I was a teacher’s pet though.
Anyway, on the subject at hand I’ve been holding off on buying a particular special edition of the final volume of 日常 but I may crack soon, I know I’m going to enjoy the series when I actually get round to reading it and I’m worried it’ll disappear before I get round to it. I’ve not watched the anime, saving that for when I finish the series because if I watch the series I’ll probably not have the willpower to push through on reading it.
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