I mentioned earlier, but I think they were legitimately harder chapters than the last few have been.
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Except barely anyone’s been filling it out. 
I didn’t even both adding tabs for the latest chapters since it seemed like nobody cared. If someone actually wants to add vocab, they can create the tab at that time though.
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Aaand 2 weeks later I finally finished the first 15 chapters, yay! Whew, that was intense.
I’m still pretty amazed at the fact that I’ve been able to follow the story quite well even if now and again there are some words, conjugations or even entire sentences I don’t get. But it is definitely a much better experience than I had trying to read Kiki. I can’t tell if it’s because I got better or this book is just simpler.
The last chapter (15) was nice for noticing progress because some dialogue from the first chapter was repeated and this time reading it was actually easy.
I haven’t read a single message in this thread yet because I don’t want to be spoiled but I’ll probably read chapter 16 later today so I might come back with questions… maybe.
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I grabbed the audiobook and read/listened to it mostly in one sitting, with a 30 minute break about halfway through.
Guess I have to wait to talk about it.
I’ll go back and review vocab and whatnot tomorrow… pretty tired now.
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Kinda. I didn’t mean to imply that I take a totally natural approach though, just a more natural approach. I still look things up, I use flashcards, etc. But at the same time, I’ve come to recognize that all the words and all the grammar that I really understand are the ones I’ve seen over and over in native material. So I’m more about just seeings things a lot > deep diving everything. I was thinking about this again somewhat recently when the word 結果 came up in wanikani for the first time, and I realized that if it wasn’t a word I already knew really well, it would be hard for me to remember via the kanji. But I’ve already read and heard it a thousand times, so it doesn’t matter.
So for me, when I flashcard words for example, it’s often to try to keep it in my mind so I don’t have to look it up when I see it again. But I often with these words (especially verbs) struggle until I finally just encounter them a ton in the wild.
tl;dr I personally am more about quantity over quality
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Hmm, I didn’t notice that the difficulty increased in the last chapters. I actually read chapters 18-19 already because I couldn’t force myself to wait one week for the continuation of the explanation. This is the first book I am able to read quite successfully (earlier I tried to read にゃんにゃん and なぜ？どうして？, but dropped out), and so far it is MUCH easier to read than the reading passages from the last third of The Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese Grammar which I’m really struggling with.
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This seems like such a common narrative (myself included, though I only got through chapter 1 of Kiki) that I’m really curious to know if anyone has read these two books the other way round and can comment!
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I mentioned this because I remember seeing a few people saying that a while ago. I’m one of those people who read 時をかける少女 first and still struggled more with Kiki 
I haven’t finished it yet, though.
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Ooooh! Okay yes, so that is very interesting. It seems it probably is a harder book for a beginner language learner to tackle then. My vague memory suggests that it included a lot more ‘meandering’ sentences; you get those longer sentences in 時をかける少女, but you’re not being hit over the head with them every other line, so you feel more able to expend the energy deciphering them when they do pop up.
I think that’s why I found chapter 16 hard, for example - it featured lots of winding sentences, and it just gets exhausting.
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I was making contributions but stopped because it looked like no one else was using it.
I agree. There have been some chapters recently where I only looked up a couple words on the last page as an afterthought, and it turned out I had already guessed what they meant from context. Chapter 16 is the first chapter that I read in two sessions instead of one, and I looked up a ton of words. Besides that I feel like it went pretty smoothly though.
I still have to read Chapter 17
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sentence from early chapter 17
どんなことでも信じようとは思っていたものの、あまりにも飛躍が大きすぎたのだ。
What’s the meaning of ものの here? I remember seeing it in an earlier chapter too.
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“Even though”
Kinda funny indeed 
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When i saw this image before reading the chapter i though that it displays the perpetrator. Little did i know that the time was frozen 
and it is not evident from the image, well because it is a image not a gif
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Stupid question but… how do you get the audiobook? I don’t listen to audiobooks in English, so unsure how to look for the equivalent in Japanese (don’t you have to sign up to Audible to get them via Amazon?).
Just kind of sunk in a day later that this might be a nice way to get some listening practice.
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Yeah, I just went to the Amazon page for the audiobook and yes, I have the Audible app. But keep in mind that regional restrictions might make it annoying depending on where you are. I’m in Japan, but on my phone I still use an American credit card, so I can’t sign into Japanese accounts a lot of the time without risking losing access to the stuff on the American account from before I moved. I used an iPad that is separate.
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Ah, I see, okay. Perhaps that will just remain a good idea for now then. Although I do have my parents’ very old iPad hanging around somewhere… Thanks for the advice.
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I do feel like this chapter 16 was harder. There was one really long sentence towards the beginning that killed me, and then some more.
Okay, first question:
あるいは、おどかしたり、すかしたりしなければならないかもしれない。
I’m not sure about the meaning of すかしたり. Jisho gives me to put on airs, or to look through for すかす but I’m not sure if any of those are this one. Is she saying she might have to stand up to the “bad guy”?
Fun fact: did you know I don’t know any grammar?
It took me a while of maximum googling to find out which grammar point could explain 思えば思うほど to me, and it made me wonder if you guys have some secret technique to find grammar explanations more easily.
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賺す すかす to coax. 
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Oh boy, I’m blind.
Aren’t kanji the best?
Thanks!
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