Hello to all Read-Aloud session participants! We’ll meet in Discord in 30 minutes 
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I’m afraid I have to drop this as I won’t be able to keep up. While Flying Witch was great, this is (for me) a significant step up both in language (eg. the hefty use of dialect) and page/sentence count. It’s frustrating me more than I’m enjoying it. I’ll definitely get back to this book in the future, though.
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Don’t worry…depending on how this goes I might have to drop it also…it may end up going to fast for me…I’m hoping with the holiday weeks that I can get through this hard stuff with the extra time off work and then get back to normal things… (fingers crossed)…
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@Kappa420 As I have been reading through this…I realize that w/o the reading on skype I’ve been doing with my 先生, I wouldn’t be able to do this book…BUT also thinking so what happens if we both just keep going? The thread doesn’t close for a long time and the book goes through the end of March right?
So what happens if we fall behind…there’s no punishment from our overlord the evil most awesome crabigator (ducks and misses the lighting bolt)… so depending on how far behind we fall…there are several months to catch up… see if you can stick with it…By that time a lot of the dialect should be sorted out… (if not, then maybe flying witch will be coming in Feb). There’s also the possibility that the club could actually slow down the pacing if it ends up being too fast for everyone…I see other folks struggling too. I wouldn’t count on this but it wouldn’t be out of the question.
You can also order the English version of the book. The translation is really well done from what I’ve seen. Haven’t read ahead (no cheating), just enough to ensure my understanding is ok or if I’m truly stuck! Haven’t needed to yet but also figure if I’m really drowning I can look at the English and reverse engineer the grammar so I can understand the sentence construction.
Anyway…頑張って！
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It really is a massive jump in difficulty from comics and children’s picture books, isn’t it? I was hoping the latter (Kitty Detectives) would prepare me a bit more than it actually did.
So far, my focus is reading through the material to get used to big amounts of vertical reading (it feels very different from Kitty Detectives!) I don’t worry too much about understanding the sentences just yet. When I find a sentence I can understand but for one or two words or a bit of grammar, I’ll look it up.
Then, I read everyone else’s comments on the story and say, “Wait, did something like that happen?” and I’ll re-read it, and sure enough, there it is.
I’m not even bothering with dialect dialogue yet.
As a final stage (so far), I’m looking over random sentences and marking up the grammatic parts of speech, and adding translations of words I’m not familiar with to help out. It is time-consuming? Yes. Am I getting anything out of it? Too soon to say.
There are some other children’s novels I hope to read in 2020, so I’m forcing myself to push through this one until the end.
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Last part of the first chapter!
@NicoleRauch - is the read-aloud going ahead at the same time this week?
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Yes, we will stick to this time slot for now. The cool thing about it is that it covers a broad range of the Earth - we had 7 (iirc - or maybe 8?) participants ranging from California (7 a.m.) to Japan (midnight) 
So if anyone is interested in joining the next round, please feel free to hop into the Discord channel on Sunday!
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That’s some dedication right there. 7am is way too early for a Sunday.
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I wasn’t home for the last one, but I’ll definitely try to be there for this one! How much did it take for you guys to finish last time? Just to know if I should have lunch before or after or during lol.
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The first week’s reading was very short, so we finished in about 20 minutes But of course it will take more time each week because the reading portions gradually get longer.
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For some of us the alarm clock goes off at 430am and have to be at work by 7… So it’s not impossible… Tho I’m hardly caffinated at that hour haha… This time I’ll be more ready!
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I wake up relatively early five days a week. I don’t need to do it on Sundays too! Granted, the new 10am time isn’t bad at all (compared to 8:30 for コンビニ人間), but I don’t particularly want to read this book out loud anyway.
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The dialect is pretty fun though. 
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Sleep science compares effect of different wake-up times on weekdays vs weekend to jet lag though,
pushing the idea of “same time every day”
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But that probably doesn’t account for me not getting enough sleep on weekdays.
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It’s time for another Read Aloud session! See you in the Discord channel in 30 minutes
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Keeping up with the club and reading the same pages while others do so too at roughly the same time is one of the main reasons that keep me motivated. But it’s no good if trying to keep up causes too much frustration and headache. It needs to have a reasonable difficulty for me.
For now, I’ll just read something that I’m more interested in to read on my own until なぜ？どうして？科学のお話 starts.
It definitely is, but imho it feels more like a jump to intermediatey book club or something compared to Flying Witch. But I guess I’m still closer to an ‘absolute beginner’ than I’m to a ‘beginner’ 
, which is totally fine.
I thought about doing that, too. But I don’t see why I should do that if I can just read something easier where I have enough to look up, too. And I don’t really want to jump over lots of sentences, because I think that would just make eveything more confusing.
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As someone who’s read novels from both beginner and intermediate book clubs, this definitely feels more on the beginner side (dialect aside). This shouldn’t be too surprising since this book is targeted toward native elementary school kids while the intermediate book club books have been targeted toward teens and adults.
My first real Japanese book was with the Beginner Book Club two years ago (魔女の宅急便) and it was also quite difficult for me. At that point, I’d only read two volumes of manga. I felt a lot of what I suspect you’re feeling right now, where you feel lost half the time and everything is overwhelming. For me, sticking through the book was absolutely worth it and I learned a ton, though it took almost half the book for things to really click.
Whether or not it’s worth continuing for you, I obviously can’t say. It’s highly dependent on your current abilities, your tolerance for pain, and how much free time you have. If you have any questions let me know and I’ll help if I can.
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If you haven’t decided to give up yet… you should join the reading channel… there are all sorts of various reading levels… some are fast and slowing down and some are somewhere in the middle and some folks are brand new…but afterwards of if anyone is stuck the helpful durtles can answer questions 
Thanks @NicoleRauch and everyone…those might have been silly questions, but broke the log jam and I’m progressing again with this weeks reading.
want a nodding head gif… this is the same thing for me… I’ve only read Girls Last Tour and Flying witch… and yeah this (3rd book) is definitely painful… but I figure if I can just force myself to get through this I’ll learn a lot! Couldn’t do it though without the bookclubs moral support!
that and your purple level 60 circle…
haha… now I know for certain you are in cahoots with the crabigator
After girls last tour I did stop and realized I was in the deep end and couldn’t manage it, but this time I feel like it’s really pushing my abilities, but that’s the only way to learn… no pain no gain and all those clichés…but I was also level 10/11 in WK at the time and still lacked a lot of grammar.
This book, overall isn’t as bad as it appears…the challenges aren’t really grammar for me personally (which tells me it’s geared towards younger readers)… it’s new vocab, the lack of kanji (parsing) and the long sentences…with a dash of dialect thrown in just to torture us…
If it’s truly that difficult then postpone and read something that you’ll enjoy…there is no need to push yourself if you are just going to get discouraged and demotivated…I think the whole group just wants you to do well and succeed! (at least I think they do… )
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They key for me here is the discussion here covers everything I don’t catch with the dialect. I do read the dialogue, but don’t worry if I don’t understand the dialect. I’m probably only hurting myself for not learning how to parse out the dialect, but if the dialect (mostly) goes away after chapter one, it won’t be an issue after that.
Worst case scenario for me, if no one asks about a specific sentence of dialogue, I ask about it here, and it’s pointed out to me that all the dialect bits were covered in discussions on prior quotes
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