I finally finished this week’s chapters! Nothing to add, just happy to finally reach a point where I could safely read this thread without worrying about spoilers. 
When I have time 
I’m glad it helped! 
Finished! Didn’t struggle too much with both of these actually.
On a side note, I almost wanted to weigh in on the そう discussion, but decided against it since it’s been chewed out a lot already
da*n that teacher is ruthless. (Can I safely swear in this space?). Even if there wasn’t any beam, let’s give her a heart attack, shall we?
I don’t know if that word is allowed, but…
Didn’t even cross my mind at the time that it might be a swear word.
Anyone else notice that we’re officially over halfway through the book? The weirdest thing for me so far is that even though the book has moved at a relatively fast pace, I still feel like very little has actually happened.
Welcome to light novels, where two-three episodes of an anime can account for about an entire book 
This is technically a novel novel though. 
I was just thinking about this the other day though, since I’m currently watching Bunny Girl Senpai. I realized that the whole season covers 5 volumes of the light novel which made me seriously wonder what the author fills the book with.
I’m not even at the halfway mark and there’s already been two earthquakes, two fires, two traffic accidents, and our protagonist was nearly committed to a psychiatric hospital!
A short one though.
I don’t think it’s that they’re filled with fulff, just that they have such a low page count and writing vertically can actually take up a lot more space on the page - in particular, early line breaks waste a lot more white space in vertical writing than horizontal writing. I feel like it adds up. Then, the uniformity of Japanese characters as squares means they take up more space too - out of curiostity I just grabbed one of my Japanese books and, in a vertical line, it has 34 characters. Then I grabbed a similarly sized English book and, in a significantly larger font, a horizontal (therefore a lot shorter!) line, it had 42 characters. This really adds up.
Actual Japanese book-books are thick. I have one here, and it’s divided into the (pretty common) 上 and 下 two physical books (while still considered one book), and each physical book is around 370 pages.
Edit: (The two books I grabbed)
I could be totally wrong about this though. It’s just been my impression.
I don’t think it’s the vertical writing, it’s the font size, as well as the fact that they always put speech on a separate line (at least in light novel and the like, I have read other books like アリス殺し that doesn’t do that).
But a single kana character or kanji is usually worth two or more English characters. Also the use of context can decrease word counts.
On the other hand, particles and formal conjugations increase the size. I think it’s pretty hard to compare.
大丈夫？ short
You okay? short
Are you okay? medium
大丈夫ですか？ medium
だいじょうぶですか？ long
Actually the kanji shortage might be a big factor in this case
Bunny girl senpai is probably a pretty bad example though, since the anime apparently skips a pretty decent amount of (not entirely meaningless)stuff from the light novels, judging from comments I’ve seen about it. Even if I haven’t read the books, some of the later episodes definitely felt a bit rushed. I think four or five episodes per book is a more common pace, judging from other anime I’ve seen that are light novels adaptions, and I know some of those skip stuff from the novels too.
@NicoleIsEnough Is someone catching up?
Heh, you caught me out 
Yay, actually I managed to read the two chapters yesterday and today, and so eventually today I could safely catch up on the thread (I did not dare to read it before because I did not want to be spoilered).
Also, on an unrelated note, although most of you are saying that these and the previous two chapters were not too difficult, I rather prefer to believe that I could read them faster because I’m starting to get better at this reading business 
I will post some questions tomorrow because I’m running out of time right now - got a Japanese lesson scheduled in 7 hours and would like to catch some sleep in between…
I think the chapters were actually easier, but that doesn’t discount how much progress you (and others) have made while reading. I remember having similar thoughts when reading the last few chapters of 魔女の宅急便. Getting used to this author’s writing style, and written language in general, has a huge impact on reading ability.
I just went back to reading some very modern manga recently after like a month of just readings books, and was dumbfoundedly having a lot of difficulty for a few pages before my brain, like, clicked back over to the manga author’s style and just modern young people’s speech. There was a moment of panicked “what the hell? I’m supposed to be better now!”
Heh.
Woo, actually posting questions in the active week! with two hours to go my time…!
Still haven’t managed chapter 13 though D:
Page 69
それなんだがね
Last part of the teacher’s response to Kazuko. I’m just being slow, but… what? Can I just ignore the が at the (almost) end and read it like それなんだ?
Page 73
もし、わたしが四日前にもどったとしてみても、みんなわたしに力を貸してくれるの？
Okay, so she’s saying “if I returned to four days ago, would you all lend me your strength?”, or something to that effect (?). I just don’t know what the として brings in the middle (and I’m unsure of the みても - even if I tried?).
Then Kazuo replies:
[blah blah blah]… とても信じる気にはなれないだろうね。
-
Is the 信じる気 kind of like the state or feeling of believing?
-
Is that なれる or the potential form of なる? The latter seems more likely: “we wouldn’t be able to reach that state of believing”. Damn, 気 and なる are hard to translate nicely. But it could be the former, I guess.
I… I think that’s it for chapter 12?! Guess I might as well crack on with 13…
It’s the same as それなんだけど, which is more likely for you to have seen before (I think) and it means more or less “about that”, or “speaking of which”.
Yeah, something like that. としても is a common construction to hypothesize something, and the みる (which becomes みても here), at least from the way I see it, reinforces the hypothetic factor.
としても: 仮に…であっても。(Something like: Even if … were the case)
Yeah. According to me, at least.
It really doesn’t translate directly very well, but that feels like an alright thing to say in Japanese. “I can’t really become so that I feel like believing”, or “I can’t really believe it”, in (slightly) better English.
Thank you as always!
Jeez, I know. It’s so hard to make sentences that don’t sound dumb but still convey that you got what the なる was doing. There just isn’t really anything with an equivalent usage in English, I don’t think.