Page 7, Panel 3 -
お前らのお遊びに付き合ってるヒマは無えの
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
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”
It’s taken me 2 hours to go over 7 panels 
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
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
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
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…
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:
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.
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. 
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
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.
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”.
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
thanks, clear now that you pointed it out, I copied it out to my s/s incorrectly!
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
pretty sure it will if you keep on reading and asking questions here, your method sounds fine don’t worry.
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
Ah, good times indeed! And not so long ago either! To all of you who feel like you’re barely keeping up, keep at it. There’s no perfect method, and there’s no wrong way to approach this. Keep being interested, keep working at it any way you feel suits you, and keep asking questions (and follow-up questions if the answers you get aren’t enough). You will get better, and faster, before you even notice it. ABBC was for me like magic - the progress I made in Japanese in those few short weeks reading my first manga with the book club was far greater than in all my previous studying combined (and we’re talking years of on-and-off Japanese learning).
When read my first manga, I was putting in about two hours for four panels.
I remember struggling with 「verb＋て＋いる」. It would come up a lot, but something about the concept just didn’t connect for me. I had to look it up the grammar and thoroughly read about it every time, and even then I still felt like I didn’t “get it”.
Eventually, I reached a point where I was able to remember it, just from repeated exposure. (Sort of like kanji and SRS/WaniKani.) But it still took time to comprehend it each time I saw it.
I kept reading.
Without me noticing, the time to recognize that 「verb＋て＋いる」 slowly decreased, little by little.
These days, I recognize it without even thinking of it, because I’ve seen it so many times. My brain’s pattern recognition does its thing. Even if it did take a whole lot of repeated exposure for me to reach that point.
It really is being thrown into the deep end of the pool to learn how to swim. That’s where the book club comes in as a support system, to help keep your head above water initially.
I think this is the part that gets a lot of people to give up. While it’s easy to overestimate what one will learn from reading just one volume, it’s also very easy to underestimate what you’ll be absorbing over this time.
By the way, I fully support voicing one’s difficulties (or concerns). It gives others a chance to give a bit of assurance. My first attempts at reading, I had no idea what do to, and what would or would not get me results, and I ended up delaying starting reading by something like a decade, across multiple givee-ups. (Don’t be like that former me!)
We need a thread specifically for people to tell what their first ABBC club was like going in, and how things were at the end of it. I’ve thought about this from time to time.
One thing that might help, especially in a thread which has been active as this one, where responses get buried fairly quickly, is that the forums do have a built in search. At the top of the page is a magnifying glass, and when you click it, there is a checkbox labelled Search This Topic which narrows the search to specify this thread.
From there, type in part of the sentence you want to check, and it will show any replies within the thread that have that sentence. For the 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 sentence, for example, typing: “ま だから” without the quotes and including the space that the manga has, pulls up 3 (now 4 when this is posted) results.
I don’t recommend searching for an entire sentence, because somebody may have typed it out differently than you formatting wise. In this specific instance, excluding the space between ま and だから only pulls up the discussion you and @omk3 had, and not the previous one, for example, so if you don’t find it with an initial search, try picking a different part of the sentence and using that to search.
It’s not perfect, but still faster than manually scrolling through 100+ replies.
One resource I wish I had known about at the beginning to try and help get a start on breaking down structure:
You type a sentence into the bar on that site, submit, and it will attempt to break down the sentence structure for you. It’s not infallible, but helps, and it can help catch certain word combinations that are set phrases and the like that Jisho may not have listed.
Agreed, for sure! Great times, and not long ago at all. I’m turning into a bit of an evangelist regarding the book clubs. They have been the most significant catalyst for my progress, and helped me go from zero confidence in my reading ability, to a point where I’m regularly reading a number of things on my own, in addition to the 3 (soon to be 4) book clubs I’m involved in here. Sticking with it through the struggles really makes a difference!
What currently frustrates me is that, even beyond having trouble understanding the literal meaning of sentences (which is definitely the case), I struggle equally trying to connect the literal meaning of the sentences with what their function is in the narrative. I suspect that this is in part due to the fact that I have no idea about all the nuances between different sentence ending particles (of which there are a lot) and other “filler” words.
I’m really excited - got notice that my hard copy is set to ship out of Japan, and since it was sent via FedEx, I am assuming it is flying which means it might get here soon… I noticed that it came from Sennan-shi - which I just learned in Level 3 means Sennan City! I have been reading along with the comments in this thread and keeping up reading more about grammar, along with pushing my vocabulary along with WK (yes! hit level 4!) I have to say - I am looking forward to the end of week summary. I am already learning so much! I have to say that I have been at this for about 6 weeks and feel like I have learned more than in my entire college year of Japanese.
My plan (so as not to get too far behind) is to parse out a few of the sentence with notes from this thread and see if I can do some on my own next week