“That is us, the Colors”, then 
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Apparently I needed to sleep on it, but I now realize that a narrator wouldn’t randomly use 我ら out of all possible personal pronouns. That’s something the girls use for themselves. So, yes, it’s definitely the trio talking. Sorry for the confusion, @hiukan.
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Yeah, the priming is weeb/otaku culture in general. On YouTube, one of the top results when you search for “mitsuboshi colors” has “loli” in the title, as does one of the top comments on the video for the opening theme. The normalisation of the terms “loli” and “shota” is just one way in which the anime fandom has a problem with depictions of children, and I don’t think it’s weird to be vigilant about that.
edit: especially as my introduction to anime was from 4chan in the 00s, where “problematic” barely begins to describe it
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Thanks for picking the topic up and clarifying again
and no need to be sorry @omk3 - nobody’s perfect (:
As a side note… I just added some words to the vocabulary sheet (I hope that’s okay) the only thing I didn’t quite get how to do was the frequency stuff… seemingly I managed to copy the format for some rows (but not all? no clue why? but with some it just doesn’t seem to work…!? e.g. 似る) but it doesn’t actually do anything
I’m not sure if that’s because the frequency of the words are just too low to even show up (the only explanation I can think of) but erm… yeah… no stars 
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I understand your concern, and it never hurts to be cautious.
For what it’s worth, I’ve read this whole series, and nothing stood out to me personally as troublesome. It’s possible I just don’t see things the way some others do (as you say, a matter of being primed or not by certain aspects of the culture).
The frequency row should show a formula. If not, you can copy and paste it from another row, and it will return the correct frequency value. Occasionally I’m going in and copying the first frequency cell and pasting it down the whole column to ensure nothing is missing it.
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Page 7, Panel 3 -
お前らのお遊びに付き合ってるヒマは無えの
I can't quite put this sentence together
お前ら - you lot
お遊びに - playing at
付き合ってる - going along with
ヒマ - spare time
無えの - nothing
“going along with you lot and playing in spare time, it’s nothing”
sorry for confused mess
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お前らのお遊びに付き合ってるヒマは無えの
It’s more like this:
お前らのお遊びに in your playing
付き合ってる going along
ヒマは無え no free time
So basically “I have to time to go along with your games”
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It’s taken me 2 hours to go over 7 panels 
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adding to that
the clause お前らのお遊びに付き合ってる is modyfing ヒマ.
what do i mean with that?
if you think just about ヒマは無えの
“free time doesn’t exist” and you ask yourself, what kind of free time doesn’t exist?
お前らのお遊びに付き合ってるヒマ
the free time to be going along with your games
は
topic (“as for that”)
ない
doesnt exist
call me out if i’m wrong please
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This isn’t irregular if this is one of your first experiences with reading - you’ll speed up given time and experience. It can feel demoralizing to think that you’re so slow, but you’re reading something in a language you don’t know - no matter how slow you’re going, that in itself is an achievement. If you come back to these panels by the end of the first volume, I can almost guarantee you that you’ll be able to read them with much more ease - and likely future volumes with more ease
It will take time to get fast at reading Japanese - but it takes time to get fast at reading your native language, you just had that spread over the course of years and years and didn’t even take notice of it at the time
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Last one for me today…
Page ８, Panel 2
まだから捕まえようもんならこの街の平和は守られることになるかもな
blurgh.. mind melt..
まだから - ugh, too many meanings and combinations, still from, to because…
捕まえよう - let’s catch
もんなら - if we could
この街の平和は守られる - to protect this town peace
ことになるかも - might be the outcome
な - right!
if we could catch it then we might become this town’s peace protectors, right!
welp…
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I had more or less the same problem and got a very helpful answer from @omk3 <3 not sure if you didn’t see that or it doesn’t help you enough but there you go:
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Specifically for まだから there is a clue in the manga itself on how to break up the words. There is a visible space between ま and だから.
It’s worth paying attention to how a sentence is laid out in a speech bubble - it’s often divided in logical units, making it easier to understand.
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After reading all the questions in the thread and reading over the pages a few times I think I understand everything going on. At first I was like “one chapter over TWO weeks”. Then I read the first few pages and I understood the slow start. I have some reading experience outside of this, but it can still be overwhelming.
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Thank you for your honesty and to @VikingSchism’s reply.
I’ve spent at least an hour on each page and many things have been clarified by the comments and threads here. I found this pace painful, but I’m sticking with it hoping that by the end it will be lower as patterns start forming.
A big challenge I’m finding compared to textbook reading is just being able to parse the sentences. Compared to this I felt like in Genki 1 I could parse each sentence but in this just trying to parse the sentence to the particles and vocabulary
- Example one: どんなのだったか描いてみそ – Why is だったか in the middle of a sentence? Is this one sentence with a more advanced structure or two sentences without a period?
- Example two: まだから捕まえようもんなら… – I also struggled with this because I assumed it was まだ + から and didn’t even consider it could be ま + だから
I’m interested to ask how others at a similar beginner state structure their readings? What I’ve settled on is to first copy everything to a Google doc, and then for each sentence try to break it out into particles/words, take advantage of Yomichan to be able to quickly lookup each word without having to type it into jisho.org each time I want to look up each word (many of them several times!) and then write out the meaning of each part and hope it makes some sense together.
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You will often come across か in the middle of a sentence. か always marks a question, but that question can be direct or indirect. Regarding it as two sentences helps with understanding: “What kind was it? - Try drawing it.” Then it’s easy to recombine into :“Try drawing what it was like”.
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yes this! very similar experience, the example sentences on my SRS apps, the graded readers, the textbooks, parse in the same way… and then you can chuck all that out the window with manga…
so yeah, like you I’ve copied the japanese into a table, marking all the pages and panels such that I can ask a question here more easily. I even separate the text into the same lines, as I’m not confident where one sentence ends and another begins. There’s always some annoying kanji that refuses to be found, 無 with a ね furigana, couldn’t find that anywhere. Then it’s a case of forsenically translating bits which I put down, and then try to figure out how they go together. Typically that’s where I get stuck with interpreting the particles.
It does, unfortunately, turn it from reading manga into japanese translation homework… a series of sentences to translate… each sentence can take between 5 and 15 minutes using 3 or 4 different sites to decipher…
if it had of been a physical book, pretty sure I’d have launched it across the room at some point this afternoon…
thanks the help and patience
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thanks, clear now that you pointed it out, I copied it out to my s/s incorrectly!
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no, didn’t see, thanks for pointing it out. I did check the post near the top of the post and nothing was linked there. will endeavour to search better next time
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pretty sure it will if you keep on reading and asking questions here, your method sounds fine don’t worry.
interesting anecdote
this thread is for the absolute beginners book club half a year ago, where many who are explaining grammar points right now started reading for the first time, or were still fairly new to reading
Teasing Master Takagi-san 😝 ・ Volume 1, chapter 1
and here the last volume with posts saying how amazed we were seeing our progress (also notice the greatly reduced post count lol)
Teasing Master Takagi-san 😝 ・ Volume 1, chapter 9
good times
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