Where do you guys buy those light novel ? I'm still halfway through RTK 1 (should be done by the end of october) but I'm starting to collect as much japanese material as I can.

'buy'?




*cough*

bk1 is awesome, bk1 is your friend: http://www.bk1.jp/

Xzbeat Wrote:Where do you guys buy those light novel ? I'm still halfway through RTK 1 (should be done by the end of october) but I'm starting to collect as much japanese material as I can.

Used bookstores. I've also used YesAsia for a few things, but though they look to have a large collection they never seem to have what I'm looking for light novel-wise (your mileage may vary).

~J

Looks like bk1 has what i was looking for. Thanks for the tip.

captal,

I might even argue that manga with no furigana (or very few) is actually better.
They force you to look up the words (which in many case forces you to write them down and is good RTK practice).

In a way, furigana can be a crutch. Sometimes, if you have furigana over everything, you'll just read the furigana and never look up the word. Looking up the words can go a long way in helping to remember it.

Ask yourself this: if you can't read the word without furigana, then do you really know
the word? I would say probably not.

Also, Kino no Tabi has furigana for all of the difficult kanji and vocabulary.

Which means Japanese people SHOULD already know the kanji compounds
that don't have furigana. So in a way, it's a good measure to see how well
you compare to native speakers.

I've glanced through other light novels at Japanese bookstores and Kino no Tabi is
by far the easiest to read from what I've seen already. Btw, I bought Suzumiya Haruhi
and "Spice and Wolf", but those are much harder to read..... :-(

You can buy light novels at Kinokuniya.
Just make sure to search either using the Japanese title or the ISBN number.

chamcham Wrote:Ask yourself this: if you can't read the word without furigana, then do you really know
the word? I would say probably not.

Obviously not - or at any rate, you obviously don't know the reading. But generally someone wants furigana because it's 20 times easier to look it up with furigana, and in many instances you also don't need to, since you'd only be looking it up for the reading anyway.

chamcham Wrote:Also, Kino no Tabi has furigana for all of the difficult kanji and vocabulary.

Which means Japanese people SHOULD already know the kanji compounds
that don't have furigana. So in a way, it's a good measure to see how well
you compare to native speakers.

Not really. It might be a decent gauge of what you could expect a middleschooler to read, but it's still a low bar since a lot of them take a 'better safe than sorry' approach. I see furigana over words like 眠る, 肩, 掛ける,　機嫌, even 違う based on what level they're expecting. That page of Kino no Tabi posted earlier puts furigana on 暗闇, 喋る, even 誰 and 奴. Any adult (and most probably those decently younger) is going to know how to read the vast majority of words in your standard light novel.

A better indication would be an actual novel, or a video game aimed very specifically toward an adult audience, where if they don't expect you to know how to read a particular kanji, they just use hiragana.

chamcham Wrote:I might even argue that manga with no furigana (or very few) is actually better.
They force you to look up the words (which in many case forces you to write them down and is good RTK practice).

In a way, furigana can be a crutch. Sometimes, if you have furigana over everything, you'll just read the furigana and never look up the word. Looking up the words can go a long way in helping to remember it.

As with many things, the learning seems to be self-reinforcing. When I first read through Arms, I barely glanced at any kanji more complex than about ten strokes and just surfed through on the furigana (this was before I found RtK, too), but when I went back and reread it, I picked up a decent number of new pronunciations from stuff with furigana.

~J

I frequently order from Sasuga. They are good for anybody in North America.

http://www.sasugabooks.com

I never have trouble finding whatever book I'm looking for on their site and the prices aren't bad. Also the shipping is lightning fast.

Wow, thanks for the recommendation of キノの旅! Really easy to read, and really interesting too =D