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> Mangajin magazine
That looks interesting. I tried to buy a set from eBay, but it’s a reserve auction, and I couldn’t match the reserve price. If anyone else feels like they can do better, here it is. In case it helps you, my maximum bid was $157.50, which represents $2.25 per issue, or 50% off the price on the cover.
It is difficult to figure out what a fair price should be. There are listings for individual issues for $6 from another seller, but those are fixed-price listings, so there aren’t any bids. So it isn’t clear whether people are actually buying at that price, or if maybe that seller has unrealistic expectations. Also, I’m not a collector, I’m just trying to learn Japanese. So I am extremely reluctant to buy used materials anywhere close to the original brand-new price.
Another problem is that it’s not clear how much actual Japanese content you get for your money. I can buy a volume of Bakuman for around $8 over at Kinokuniya, and there are English translations available online for reference. So I can sort of put together my own “guided manga reading” experience. It says Bakuman 1 is 194 pages, and I think it’s basically all content. That comes to around $0.04 per page.
The Mangajin volumes aren’t totally full of Japanese content however. From browsing a little on the Web, it looks like there are articles in English, and then there are the notes pages. So what do you get– 20 or 30 pages of actual manga per issue? If it were 30 pages, then at the price of $.04 per page, each issue only has $1.23 worth of content. Even if it were 45 pages– basically evenly split between the content and notes, that’s still only $1.80 worth.
Maybe the notes and articles in English make the Mangajin issues worth a lot more. It’s really hard to say. At the moment I’m most concerned with getting as much Japanese actual content as possible, because I feel like explanations in English aren’t really doing a lot for me. They just get stored in my brain as “facts about Japanese in English” rather than building pure, native-like understanding of the language. I think you can really only get from massive amounts of exposure to the language itself. But what do I know?
Hope it’s ok to post this, but you can have a look through the first 30 issues here: http://www.thespectrum.net/features/mangajin/
That would let you decide whether or not it’s for you. It might be that you’re beyond a point where such guidance is helpful, and would benefit more from just pure Japanese. But I’d still thoroughly recommend it to anyone looking to break away from textbook Japanese into real Japanese.
Anonymousstudying my 3-stroke kanji! :D
@Tsetycoon13: Is that Justin Bieber’s Japanese cousin in your profile pic, or am I seeing things?
Starting 2012 with Season 4 (^_^)v
Hoping to pickup the pace with studying on TextFugu a bit,I completed an hour of study tonight, finishing right before midnight. In 2011, I studied 400.02 hours. Just barely made that 400 hour mark! I like cutting things close. ;)
In 2012, I plan on being much more intentional with my studying. Even though I put in a lot of hours, I feel I need to challenge myself with more difficult study plans and concentrate more on native articles/websites/etc rather than textbooks. I could be much farther along in my studies if I challenged myself with harder material.
Happy studying!
NAKAMA 2 AND READING STUFF LETTTTSS GOOOOOO
Finished Japanese for Busy People II last night :) Onto book III tonight, I think – borrowed them both from my uni library :D
I finished Read Real Japanese Fiction. Next up is Exploring Japanese Literature, which has the same format as Breaking into Japanese Literature.
In other news, that Mangajin complete set was re-listed, and I bought it this time. It turns out that it was the former publisher who was selling it, and it was his last complete set.
Very nice! I likely would have put in a bid on the first auction, but he was only selling to the US :(
I really do like it a lot as a resource and it’s quite a hidden gem. It’s a shame that there isn’t anything like that still going these days.
Thanks for mentioning Exploring Japanese Literature, I wasn’t aware that the author had done a follow up to Breaking into Japanese Literature. I’ll be getting myself a copy of that! How is the difficulty in comparison to the stories in the first?
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This reply was modified 12 years, 10 months ago by
Elenkis.
> Exploring Japanese Literature
> How is the difficulty in comparison to the stories in the first?I’m about 4 pages into the first story. I think the difficulty of this story is comparable to the last story in BIJL, Rashomon. Much of the story so far is built from long descriptive sentences, and I end up looking down at the vocabulary list a lot.
The only other book I have at the moment is Short Stories in Japanese: New Penguin Parallel Text, but I think I’m going to put off reading that one until after I finish Mangajin. It doesn’t have phrase-based translations like the Read Real Japanese books or the same-page vocabulary lists like Giles Murray’s books. It’s just Japanese and English on facing pages. My guess is that at my current level, it’s going to be really slow to get through.
I haven’t studied too much in the last 2 days because I installed an SSD in my PC which then had to be set to AHCI mode, after that there was a problem with 1 of my hard drives no longer working and in general Windows was just being very temperamental. Now it’s all sorted and working dandy, aside from my optical drive not working under AHCI, oh well, I don’t see the point in DVD drives on computers anymore. Unless you have a really bad Internet connection or want to pirate 360 games.
But yes, back to studying, doing roughly 1 lesson a day on RTK and now I’m at 16/56, should definitely have this finished by the middle of February which is the goal I set. Will be free of RTK by the time Mass Effect 3 comes out, that’s the important thing!
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This reply was modified 12 years, 10 months ago by
Luke.
Somehow, with the use of JParser and ITH to look up kanji/words I didn’t know, I finished reading the 魔法使いの夜 (まほうつかいのよる） demo. Pretty much abandoned Textfugu’s kanji pages, using RTK instead along with vocab I encounter through reading, though I’m still studying the kanji vocab lists to keep up when they’re used in the lessons.
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This reply was modified 12 years, 10 months ago by
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