Feeling reassured that it’s not just me! I know though that several people that hang out here are used to listening to audiobooks. They must be wizards or something 
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I’m one of them and I promise it’s not wizardry 
Just a lot of practice. I read books alongside audiobooks were possible, did listening drills (years ago), and also watch a lot of dramas and youtube. Eventually your brain makes the connections and you can understand.
I think this audio is probably harder to understand due to it being a bit exaggerated for effect. Try listening to something like the audiobook for コーヒーが冷めないうちに where it’s slower, non-exaggerated narration and you may find it more approachable
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How many years / decades is “eventually”? 
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Think of it more in terms of hours. Looking at my spreadsheets the year that I really drilled in on listening (2021) I clocked 380 hours. I remember feeling like I was “ok” but not happy and in 2022 I clocked 331 hours. In 2023 I stopped tracking partway through the year because it no longer seemed as important (and I was tired of tracking). So ~700 hours to reach a level of ‘I feel good enough about this I don’t see a need to strictly work to progress anymore’ 
Note that a lot of my listening was dramas and movies which have a lot of dead air. If you’re primarily practicing with more dense sources like podcasts or audiobooks you can probably cut that number.
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Nice, that’s very helpful thanks!
More than one hour a day, impressive. So one movie a month in average is definitely not going to cut it, good to know! 
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Listening is not that bad tbh, I would just start with easier books than this one (older, more difficult than the average children’s book). I found the best is books where I don’t care about the plot too much (like easy children’s novels) because then it teaches my brain to just continue listening and not try and ‘grab on’ to missing words/sentences that weren’t understood. The most important thing overall is the flow and not getting hung up on a word that was missed.
Although, if you continue listening to this book after reading the sections, you might improve by the end!
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Not planning to reread 
so we’ll see if it has any effect!
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Whoa! I didn’t realize we were starting this yet. Thought it was next week. I’ll try to catch up before Friday..
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I would second this. I can listen to easier LNs (school/romance plots) without any comprehension issues. This I can do, but because it’s older (and perhaps has some literary flourishes; I can’t tell the difference between old and fancy), I do have to pay a fair bit of attention to the audio. And I’ve also read this part before, so I have an ok idea of what is going on… I’m hoping I don’t need to go back to reading along once we catch back up to where I am
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I just read the first chapter while having this discussion in mind and I do feel that I would have no chance to follow along with a pure audio version.
In text format it’s a fairly easy read but there are long sentences with relatively fancy syntax that I have to read a couple of times to break apart. That’s would be very painful in audio format for me.
One that I found particularly tricky:
しかし、いくら血が嫌いだからといって、悪いことをする奴のことですから、自分の身が危ないとなれば、それを逃げる為には、何をするか分かったものではありません。
There’s nothing really complicated, just a lot of subclauses.
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しかし、いくら血がきらいだからといって、悪いことをするやつのことですから、自分の身があぶないとなれば、それをのがれるためには、何をするかわかったものではありません。
But what does it meeean? After having read it backwards and forwards, I think the very last clause is the one that I really don’t get.
another sentence I had some trouble with
いずれにしても、大胆不敵だいたんふてき、傍若無人ぼうじゃくぶじんの怪盗かいとうといわねばなりません。
Short on time, so I can’t make any further comments at the moment.
character notes
名探偵 明智小五郎 あけちこごろう
少年助手 小林芳雄 こばやしよしお
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Your transcription is different from mine and harder to read due to lack of some kanji IMO. You may want to check out the epub I have: Intermediate Japanese Book Club // Now Voting! // Now Reading: 怪人二十面相 (Jan 4th) - #4883 by simias
A somewhat clunky translation that attempts to stick to the Japanese structure:
However, no matter how much [he] hates blood, because [he]'s somebody who does bad things, if [his] own body is in danger, and [he] wants to escape, we don’t know what [he]'s capable of doing.
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You’re the saviour! I hope the next week I’ll read faster because of the proper amount of kanji 
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Hello, book club!
Just finished week 1 reading. I am reading on Aozora Bunko (I am hoping to get the epub working on my iPad 
) while listening to the YouTube reading at the same time. It’s already challenging – forces you to stay focused/go at a set pace – but I can see how it’s helpful! Unfortunately I think I will have to go back and just focus on reading to actually process most of what happened lol…I got the word “Romanov” but yeah…
I did love the intro chapter, though. As @mitrac said – you really don’t get these kind of sweeping, grand openings anymore! Definitely makes you feel like “okay this is a big deal!”
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I have finished this week’s section but I don’t have much to say that hasn’t be said already. The son coming back can’t be a coincidence, but I doubt it’s as simple as him being the thief. Too obvious.
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Any idea where to look for audiobooks? Would be interesting to try listening. I found some detective stuff on Spotify, but it was a bit tough to understand 
Since we’re reading mystery, it would be interesting to listen to a mystery audiobook as well to kind of review the vocab
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If you are done with this part, head on to week 2!
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I’m also just starting to play with the idea, but I like the youtube playlist mentioned in the host thread (the one with the female narrator), and the channel has a ton (all?) of 江戸川乱歩 books narrated.
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