Welcome to the rest of your life. 
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You’re good to go. Just use the thread here to help you out. It’ll be painful, of course, but if you like reading Yotsuba, keep going, and if you don’t stop and find something else. Simple.
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My first manga, I easily would spend two hours getting through four panels. This includes often looking up kanji by hand, and reading up on the same grammar I already learned and forget a few days earlier.
There’s a lot of very basic, extremely common grammar I kept re-learned back then that I thought “I’ll never grasp this”, and today I comprehend it in a split second while reading. It constantly doesn’t feel like you can get there until you’ve built up enough learning and repeated exposure to the material (pattern recognition) that suddenly you realize you’re then. (Then you start a new manga series with its own writing style, and you feel like you’re back to square one.)
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The pain is real. I’ll get to the point where I think “hey, I’m pretty decent at reading novels!” but then I switch to a different author and it’s like
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After 3 weeks I finally finished Vol 1 of this manga.
I feel like I could’ve been done with this much sooner, but I am just so very easily distracted 
I remember trying to read this ~4 months ago and feeling completely overwhelmed and giving up as a result.
Having to look up literally everything was quite tiresome and my method of looking stuff up back then wasn’t terribly efficient either.
(Thank god for stuff like Mokuro!)
But now, after having studied a lot more since then, I was able to read this stuff at a fairly comfortable pace.
For those curious, here’s what I got under my belt when I started seriously trying to read this manga:
- Level 24 on WaniKani
- Completed 3/4 of N4 on Bunpro (A total of 268 grammar points (N5+N4))
- Learned ~3’000 unique vocab words across WK and Anki (Core 2k)
- Moderate amount of reading using NHK/Satori (~20 minutes a day)
This has for sure improved my reading speed prior to reading yotsubato.
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I enjoyed it a lot this time. I first tried reading this volume by myself circa 2018 and struggled way too much and gave up.
Today, on a rainy day I finished the volume having actually laughed a couple of times and enjoyed the chapters quite a lot.
Thanks to everyone that asked questions and for the extremely detailed vocabulary list! See you on volume 2.
晴れた~
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Same as @Pitapi, first time I tried it was way behond my reach, and now I can read it 
The vocabulary list is amazing!
Also laughing a lot, Yotsuba herself but also the interactions between everybody are a lot of fun.
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Just want to post a celebratory comment, because I managed to finish the first Yotsuba&! Volume as my first ever read in Japanese, and to my great surprise, it was quite comfortable.
Took me 5 days to read (twice). I read each chapter once without translating and a second for unknown words and a few grammar points.
I have a couple of books to read before I get to the second volume, but I’m very excited about that 
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Awesome! I had so much fun reading the whole series, I hope you will enjoy too 
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Finally finished volume one 
The only things I’m still confused about:
223: After she’s done playing in the rain, Yotsuba says “ふーかもとーちゃんもくればよかったのにー” “It would have been better if Fuuka and dad came too.” I just don’t know what のに is doing at the end. What’s the difference between ばよかった and ばよかったのに?
224: Yotsuba’s dad says “とーちゃん長靴ないからさ無理だ” “I don’t have (rain) boots, so that’s not possible” Yotsuba says she understands, then Fuuka mumbles some words: “納得してる!? 長靴イミないし” I’m pretty sure the first part is “You understand?” But then the second part seems to be: “boots, meaning, without” which I can’t make any sense of…
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It adds an air of… regret, I guess? “If only…” or “I wish…” sort of thing.
She’s so utterly drenched that gumboots wouldn’t have made a difference. “There’s no meaning to the gumboots”.
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Thank you! I never would have been able to figure out that last part on my own 
Why are you calling them that. 
I have mentioned my first language is Strine, right? 
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is it just me, or the memrise yotsubato link doesn’t send me to anything related to yotsubato. and i can’t seem to search for it on memrise manually
Yeah, looks like they overhauled their website. You can find it on the Wayback Machine here (though complete functionality is not guaranteed).
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Looks like we can still access it by adding “app” and “community” in the URL; unfortunately, it looks like we can only access it via browser - i never got to try it in the Memrise app as I just started to look at this material a few days ago. The creator of the Memrise Yotsubato page might be looking into moving their material to another platform from some post they made somewhere I can’t seem to remember.
https://app.memrise.com/community/course/476653/yotsubato-vocabulary/
Does anyone have the Yotsubato vol 1 word list but not as a PDF? Like Excel / Word or something? <3
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Give this a try:
https://manga-kotoba.com/volume/よつばと-第01巻
Note that this is sorted by frequency. The site doesn’t yet have an option to order by page of apperance.
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Oh hello!!! I have been meaning to try your site for a while. Thank you!
The vocab list for the bookclub has the translation for that specific word in that context, and I was hoping to turn it into a dictionary so I can just shove it into Yomitan and use that 
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