January 16 update:
Read 10 pages of 時をかける少女 today. Halfway through there was a scene (lasting about 2 pages) that I could barely follow, to the point that I tried returning to looking up every word – which didn’t help much, so after a dozen or so words I just gave up. I think I got the general idea right, judging by the ensuing discussion between the characters, but I feel like this particular bit was wasted for me in terms of both educational value and entertainment.
As a general observation on my experience so far, I think this book is really too much above my level, at least vocabulary-wise. I’m still enjoying the story, so I’m going to finish it, but once I’m done, I’ll either try reading something a lot easier, or maybe play with the idea of pre-learning vocab with Koohi.
Oh, and there’s also an upcoming book club on Death Note, which I’m looking forward to. Not sure yet how participating in a book club feels, but from what I’ve so far, clubs seem to aim for the middle ground between the two reading approaches that I’ve tried with 時をかける少女, i.e. thorough analysis vs just reading lightly without trying to understand details that are not immediately clear. Since these two are pretty much the extremes, I bet there’s a lot to try in the middle of the spectrum.
Congrats! That sounds like an important milestone. I’m nowhere near the level to effectively use monolingual cards yet, but I think they must crank the immersion level up a few notches 