I feel like at a certain point it’s all arbitrary. Like is there really anything special about ～たところで that’s not just past tense + ところで?
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Well, enough of a difference that you asked about it I guess? I dunno. I supposed at the end of the day, a ‘grammar point’ is anything that seems unintuitive to enough people learning a language.
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Honestly I feel like 90% of “new grammar points” I come across which are made by combining grammar points I already know are like… okay I already intuited that and have encountered this several times why is this listed as a separate grammar point?
But then there are those 10% of cases where the meaning is something totally different than what you would expect or it can only be used in certain situations or something and you wouldn’t have known that if you hadn’t looked it up.
So I never know if I should bother to look everything up or not lol. Or sometimes I am confused about the meaning and searching it up just yields the grammar points separately. 
#languagelearningproblems
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I feel your frustration.
I thought that ばかり meant ‘only’, but then i double checked, and it is only for noun or te form verb. For dictionary form and だ at the end it means ‘to continue’ and there are like 3-4 more with different suffixed and/or prefixed particles:
[ばかりだ (bakari da): continue to]
[ばかりに (bakari ni): because, on account of]
[ばかりか (bakari ka): not only… but also]
[とばかりに (to bakari ni): as if, as though]
[んばかりに (n bakari ni): as if, as though]
For which you could infer from the grammar you know already but you could get a miss if for example ばかりか would be assigned as “only” + “question particle”.
I guess it is something you have to get used to when transitioning from basic grammar points.
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Why does she have an otome game haircut 
?
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You know, flicking through the book, I thought this was illustrating her leaning against a corridor wall feeling all sad, perhaps after somebody had not believed her, or she’d confessed or something. That is… not what is happening 
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There’s a whole genre I never knew existed!
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Guess who finally caught up 
I may or may not have binge-read like 8 chapters this weekend 
Which is kind of a weird achievement in itself, I’ve never read that much so quickly in Japanese :o
All I really have to say about these chapters is that I really want to read the next chapter xD I was kind of annoyed by the pacing of these last two chapters tbh. Like…just get on with it and explainnnnn 
I’m putting in all this work to read all these words, and you’re telling me nothing! xD
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Oh heya there! \o/ I, too, caught up recently, but I got sooo tired because of the pacing of the 16th chapter, so I haven’t read 17th yet It’s shorter, it seems, but oohh boy was 16th hard to read D:
I love when there’s a lot of dialogues:DDD
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Yeah, chapter 16 was probably the worst to get through tbh xD At least something kind of interesting happens in 17, but it still feels like we’re just stalling to get to a specific word count or something sometimes xD
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Getting over the 100 pages count to upgrade from 短編小説 (short story) to 中編小説 (novella). 
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Imagining 歩くかっこうをしたままで makes me laugh for some reason. 
Question end of chapter 17:
「なあに、理屈なんかわからなくったっていいさ」
Is this even a remotely normal way of speaking? Is this たって or something weird that I’m not seeing because of the speaking style? I get the sense that he’s basically saying it’s okay if she doesn’t understand the theory, but I can’t really break down this (seemingly simply) sentence.
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Oh I didn’t see this question because it was an edit! Yeah, たって can get an extra っ after い adjectives.
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And now I saw it because of your answer! Did you and @seanblue just ally against me or something?
But on a side note, I don’t think that’s the problem, so I’m going to answer too 
sue me
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たって can sometimes mean more or less (or exactly) the same thing as ても. Like if the sentence was
「なあに、理屈なんかわからなくてもいいさ」
It would essentially mean the same thing. I guess the extra っ is just there for the lulz, I don’t think it’s necessary.
If you want to see some examples:
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Sorry if I’m just jumping in and this is obvious or something, but I own 時をかける少女 and I’ve read some of it, but it didn’t really strike me as beginner’s material. What am I missing. Not that it’s incredibly difficult, but just not “beginner’s”. I do want to go back and read it at some point though.
EDIT: Yeah, a quick scan of the first few pages includes ためらう, りくむ, しょっちゅう… fairly high level words.
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I’m not really sure if it’s beginner material or not, but I just ended up reading it while I was a beginner with very little experience and it kind of worked out. I guess at that stage you aren’t going to know a good portion of the words anyway, so you can’t tell if they’re high level or not (at least I couldn’t).
At least grammar-wise, it’s probably on the more beginner-friendly side of novels (or novellas). But I just don’t really know many other examples. There’s 魔女の宅急便, which I feel uses simpler words overall, but some people, including me at that beginner stage, have found hard to follow due to other factors.
Naph made a comment about the length above too… I don’t think it’s all that short. I think like 250 pages or something. Seemed like a proper book to me, but maybe I’m mis-remembering.
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Mine is just 115 pages, maybe you’re counting in the other short stories that probably come in the same book?
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