off-topic: about books, and what more advanced books can look like
Hahaha. That’s true. Books are far more wordy, and each sentence is usually far longer than anything you’d find in a manga, so you need to try to process the whole thing. Still, I think the fact that this book seems to use fairly simple sentences and grammar is something to be glad about. I tried reading the source light novels for some of the anime series I follow. One page of Kiki’s Delivery Service would probably take me 10-15 mins, maybe less if I simply stopped at the definitions and ignored the example sentences (because I usually read those to learn how to use the word myself). For those light novels… I think I read at a rate of 1 page every half an hour or more. E.g. I started Volume 18 of 盾の勇者の成り上がり (The Rising of the Shield Hero) using the sample pages online. I had to stop after 20 pages of text, because it was just too tiring: there were too many words I didn’t know! (I still have the tab open in my browser to remind myself to go back to it some day.) Also, those light novels have a tendency to use more advanced/rare grammar (like 〜ねば instead of 〜なければ) and chains of interdependent words (I think the technical term is ‘relative clauses’), so you have to keep the entire sentence/half-sentence in your head in order to understand. Here’s an example I just spotted while re-reading the first page:
毒料理 を 作っている みたい じゃない か
poison-cooking [object] make-progressive-present as-though be-not-present [question]
…as though [I] am making/have made poisonous food, no?
Another one (and this is a full sentence on its own):
出された 飯 を もりもり と 食べる 食欲 魔人 共 を 見習って ほしい もん だ。
take-out-passive-past meal [object] energetically [adverb] eat appetite demon [people-plural] [object] see-learn-TE want [strong desire/opinion] be
*[I] really want [them] to learn from (the example of) the demons with a huge appetite who energetically eat the food prepared [for them].’
When I first read this 8 months ago, my brain was doing this: ‘OK, the food is put out, and something happens to it. It… what’s もりもりと? OK, it’s eaten energetically… Eh, it’s eaten by “appetite demons”? OK… wait, he wants to learn from the ‘appetite demons’? OK, no, he wants the others to learn from them. Wait, what kind of ‘appetite demons’ again? OK, he wants them to learn from the example of the put-out-food-energetically-eating-appetite-demons. Phew. Got it.’ In essence, to translate the sentence into English, you have to start from the end and work backwards. It’s much easier for me to read now since I’ve got more used to such sentences in Japanese, but understanding it requires you to hold all that information in your brain. In other words, to really become comfortable with Japanese, we have to stop expecting information to arrive in the same sequence as it does in English: we have to start with a core, and then constantly add new ideas to it.
I kinda wish I had found nice books like Kiki’s Delivery Service before I got to where I am, because it looks like that book is going to help you ease into such ideas and sentence structure, and you get to pick up fairly important but not-too-complex grammar in context along the way. I… kinda just threw myself straight into the deep end because I wanted to know how the story continued after the anime. It taught me a lot, but it made me realise I might have to give up on reading novels until I became more proficient. (Since then, my only reading material has been textbooks, blogs and NHK news. NHK news tends to have that sort of sentences appear in their articles fairly often.)
Anyway, I hope I didn’t scare you or anything like that. It gets easier once you’re used to it. Just the other day, while watching anime without subtitles (I still check them once in a while though, or refer to a transcription), I noticed that my brain was changing its interpretation of what a verb meant as more syllables came in: ‘OK, it’s [verb]. No wait, there’s an A sound. OK, causative (i.e. make someone do something) form.’ I couldn’t do that before. I had to see the whole thing, or I would be stuck. We’ll all get there. We just need to give our brains some time to ‘think Japanese’. 