I picked out a couple things I don’t quite understand.
Page 4, Miura first panel -「今日でできるんだ」
I want to make sure I understand how で is being used here. I believe she is saying “We’re going to finish it today”.
Page 9, Yotsuba at the bottom -「じゅうがない」
At first I didn’t catch this, but she’s lamenting the fact that she doesn’t have her gun on her? 
Yep. This is definition 3 of で in the grammar dictionary, “a particle which indicates the time when something terminates”.
Yeah, I didn’t get this at all at first either (so many words read as じゅう) so I checked my ADV translation, which says “I forgot my gun!”. And, in hindsight, it’s clear she’s reaching for a holster on her waist.
Thanks - that is extremely helpful as I have the dictionary to reference!
On pg. 22 first (or maybe second?) panel (right before the mother comes in), what is the meaning of the kanji 賞? From WK, I know it means prize, but something about “I was made by a scientist who won an evil prize” seems off to me. Turns out I can’t read, that’s Nobel Prize right?
Also, Yotsuba then says でかー, which is short for でかい, which I thought was primarily used to describe size, maybe in Japanese one can describes prizes are large?
Aaaaa, I feel like I’m reading too deeply and I get the gist but my brain doesn’t like not knowing exactly what’s going on
On pg. 25 Danbo says やってらんねー, but I’m having some difficulty in figuring out what it could mean. I think やって is the て-form of やる, to do/perform and I know ねー is usually a shortened form of ない, but I can’t figure out what らんない could be.
すみません、たくさん質問聞いて…
She’s not describing the prize as large, she’s describing the fact that the scientist won the prize as a big thing. “My creator won the Nobel prize” “Wow, that’s huge”.
Yeah, I found that one tricky too. Think it’s やってられない, though I honestly could not break that into its components.
やってらんねー → やってられない → やっていられない
やっている - to be doing
られる - to be able to (potential form)
ない - not
I’m not able to be doing this. → “I can’t keep doing this.” → “I can’t do this anymore.”
I can’t stand it anymore!
Hi folks, what WK level do you think it would be not too painful to read Yotsuba! Looking for some words in the dictionary is fine but having to look at almost every word makes reading not so fun. I’m guessing WK level 10 or above. What do you think? I’m trying to climb fast as I can and getting grammar on the side so I can get my hands on reading material but having an idea of which should be my goal would help a lot. Thanks!
Hi (hola?) @sergiop!
I’ve seriously started japanese in february, discovered WK in may, I’m already level 13 (hoping on being 14 tomorrow afternoon ^^) and I can only talk for myself of course but here is my experience. I’ve started reading the よつばと! series on my own from tome one since one month ago (so I was level 9), but I’ve been also participating in the にゃんにゃん reading group for one month and a half (~ level 7?).
And to be completely honest, at the beginning with the にゃんやん reading group it was super difficult to me. I couldn’t get a single sentence (not only vocab but also grammar problems). So my first attempts were to take sentence per sentence, write it down, do some grammatical analysis to identify nouns, particles, verbs… Look in the dictionary a lot… So a single page was taking me around a couple of hours. At the end, if I was unable to make it on my own I was doing a lot of questions, and I gladly found a lot of people open to help and try to solve the riddles ^^.
And this said, I was only able to follow two pages per day.
About a month ago, I started to side projects: a few points of Tae Kim’s grammar guide per day and よつばと! in full speed. I actually took よつばと! really calmly: I was first reading it in french to know the story, and once finished I took the same tome in japanese and did it super fast without trying to understand everything nor making the same breakdown and detailed analysis as with にゃんやん. Why? First, fun. I hate getting stuck. Second, I was able to get new words from context because I knew the story. Third, I really think this is helping me reading faster (I see I’m much much faster with hiragana than a month ago, since now I can read a manga in a couple of hours 
).
And today I jumped into tome 5 directly in japanese, and I’m super happy of getting a lot of it!! I’m at page ~18 and I went to the dictionary maybe 10 times?
Personally, I think the thing that made the biggest difference to me was getting used to “non text-book grammar points”. Like the absence of particles like は, が, を, だ in a lot of places and the abuse of other particles like よ, ね, な… And that you will not get from WK, kanji or vocabulary list.
So, I cannot really tell you that on level 4 yotsuba will be super easy. You will probably suffer :). But you’ll probably suffer it on level 10 too :P. But, the earlier you get into reading, the earlier you will get unstuck with these kind of things that you learn by reading. And I can tell you is that you’re not alone and people in this forum will answer any question that pops into your head.
Page 18, 4th panel
ここみてみ
I understand he’s saying “look at this”. But I don’t get the grammar of the み at the end. I could have understood:
But I don’t get, why the み?
Salut! Thank you so much your insights and kind encouragement.
I took it as an abbreviation of the ～てみる “have a try” structure…
Hello there!
I think that, for the most part, Yotsuba! has pretty easy kanji. Talking about level 1-10.
(I’m not using Wanikani anymore, so I can’t exactly tell, but I remember the kanji past that being either useful and wondering why we didn’t learn that earlier, or kanji that I’ve probably never seen since.)
At the same time, there are kanji that even with level 22 (Which was my level prior to resetting, I think), I don’t have a clue about and have to look them up. Fortunately, we have the vocab list, done by the great folks in the community to help with that.
The issue with Yotsuba, as guille said, is the grammar, and perhaps the vocabulary, instead of the kanji.
But, even if you’re not familiar with informal grammar, I would recommend giving it a try!
It’s always starting late that’s the problem. 
I’ll add something: there are not too many kanjis in Yotsubato! Actually the speech and writing in the bubbles is adapted to the characters so
So, prepare yourself to not have so many kanji to grab yourself to…
What is with the funky ロ/ろ in panel 4 of pg.14?
I was confused by that, too. It looks like an R, but I don’t see why it would be a ℛボット. 
It’s what you get if you don’t quite lift your pen off the page when you’re writing a ロ.
On a similar note, one that confused me a lot recently was this:
Which, admittedly, is a little bit daft, since it’s written in Romaji right underneath.
I guess that’s true, but is it supposed to be like a cool font or something?
It’s hard enough to figure out katakana sometimes.
Wow, I was far of O_o
I thought the first one was Shi, before realizing the others are katakana, so all should be. Second two I manged to guess, but was unsure about the last one, an uncompleted ro? Shirorro?!!
…then I noticed your comment saying it is written underneath XD
I bet Japanese people are so used to these kinds of fonts that they could read it with ease, but I sure failed at first try =P
But now that I know I do see it =^_^=
)
