Bunpro Book club (Beginner)

Sadly I don’t think I will be able to participate in this since it’s not available digitally, I’m away from home these days and prefer to buy Japanese books digitally since I can easily read them on the way on my phone/kindle and bring them everywhere… I think I will still follow the discussion to see what kind of questions pop up maybe

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No worries mate! I think in 99% of cases we will end up going with something that is available digitally. It’s just an unfortunate coincidence that よつばと happens to have no digital version despite being one of the most popular manga for beginners :man_shrugging:

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I must have been on that section of the internet where the recommended beginner stuff is actually more along the lines of “once you’ve lived in Japan for 5 years and know 50,000 kanji, you’re all set”

Edit: I also wanted to ask about that tool that automatically turn the vocab from the book into a deck. Since it says it’s in a trial phase, do we need to be opted in to test beta features?

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im in! :3

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While I believe youtusba doesn’t have a purchasable ebook in japanese I do believe it is readable online. In a legal way I mean. Kadokawa group hosts several of the chapters of it online in japanese, or at least they have their company name all over on the website. Kadokawa is the publisher for Evangelion, so presumable they own the rights or have an agreement with the creators of yotsuba. They don’t host all of the chapters so it might not be worth even mentioning but
I’ll have to review the website owners demands for link sharing before posting a link to make sure it complies. If I am pretty sure it does I’ll provide a link. Either way I’m very confident that at least some of the book can be viewed digitally and legally.

Edited: I do believe the links comply with the " or any other legal source" part of the rules.

There is the website, it has the sample chapters which you can view. It’s primarily a store but it does link to a few of the starting chapters.

@Asher Please verify I’m not breaking to many rules here

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Yep, looks fine to me!

I’m in!

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How fun - I bought this last year. I’m in - I bought this about 6 mo ago, optimistic about my progress in Japanese. If possible, I would vote for a very slow pace to help people get acclimated.

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Oh, that looks great, thank you!! If it has the first few chapters I think I should be able to follow along online at least until I manage to get home in the next few weeks and try to order a copy!

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I’ve already read Yotsubato Vol 1 a couple of times, but every time I understand more it’s easier to read. Nevertheless, I think I’ll join the next book club as I have some deadlines this month :frowning:

I’ll be happy to read your opinions though!

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Also feel free to chime in if anyone is struggling with something that you remember learning from last time :blush:

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Wow, this is really exciting stuff! I just saw one of these book club topics pop up on the Bunpro homepage dashboard, so I had to pop in. (Picked a random club to post to, but my sentiments go out all all three equally~) I probably won’t be joining in unless one of my current TBR books pops up, but I’ll definitely have fun watching everyone read neat stuff.

Small plug if that’s allowed (and if not I’ll edit this out!), but for those who haven’t heard of it, Learn Natively is a great place to keep track of the books you’re reading and find other ones, whether it be based on difficulty, tag, a certain service provider, award, previous book club book, etc. (LN also tracks TV shows/movies, and should eventually add visual novel and games as well.) The forums are also quite helpful; we have a lot of veteran readers since the site was originally focused around reading. Plus there’s plenty of on-going book clubs there as well for those looking for more!

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Yotsubato discussion thread now up. From now, please move all Yotsubato related chat over here -

よつばと discussion (Beginner) April 2024

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I’m in! I have a copy of よつばと at home that I have not read yet so this is perfect :slight_smile:

How does this book club work? Do we go chapter by chapter and discuss them?

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Hi @Nath.king93, glad to have you reading with us! As the book clubs are new, we are yet to figure out any solid details about the pace, but for the time being, we will be setting the pace to 5 pages per day (probably with a day off once a week).

In regards to discussion, you can discuss anything that it is expected that the group would have read already. For example, on day 1, you can only discuss the first 5 pages, on day 5, anything in the first 25 pages would be fine. The only real things to keep in mind are to be careful about spoilers (use the hide content function of the forum to hide the question), and if you want to read at a faster pace, that’s 100% fine, but please save questions about future chapters until the main group is at the pages that you want to ask about :blush:.

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Thanks @Asher , I just found the official thread :slight_smile:

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Would probably be useful to add this link in the main post on the top as well. Right now the current book link is only to the amazon page. A link to the Yotsubato Bunpro thread as well would be nice

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Good idea. Shall do :ok_hand:

I bought my copy of よつばと - besides constantly seeing it show up on the beginner level on learnnatively, I know nothing about it so 楽しみにしています!

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I am no where near ready to join you all but I love the decks accompanying the book club picks. It’s the reason why I signed up for a lifetime membership and I can’t wait to read with everyone eventually!

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