Reviews
(3.96/5)Fairly good but repetitive
I have mixed feelings about this series.
The language is fairly approachable most of the time but then Nishikata will have a long inner monologue where he lays out his plans for how he's going to foil Takagi this time and I often found those hard to understand with a lot of exotic vocabulary, as well as monologues during a competition where he would weigh his options, and other monologues. Basically, when the characters are speaking to each other, it's understandable, but when Nishikata is talking to himself it's difficult. At least for me.
As far as entertainment goes, it's just very repetitive. Twenty volumes and every chapter is very similar with minimal plot. They were nice in that they showed me a lot of new aspects of Japanese culture, particularly in the sorts of games that children play and what their school life is like, but the actual chapter format was always the same and it got old.
I still recommend it but I don't advise reading all twenty volumes back to back. I imagine it's more enjoyable if you spread them out among other things.
Entertainment:
Uhh, well, i did not enjoy this one at all. For some reason i still read all the 18 volumes currently out, but i was not able to find this interesting in any way. The story does not progress at all, well, there is none, save for the few, actually interesting moments where it at least felt like something happens. I personally am not a fan at all of this "extremely oblivious boy" trope and i would have enjoyed an actual equal "teasing" much more i think? Also a lot of games they played, where he basically already won got twisted in a very weird way so that he still loses, which felt totally unrealistic and weird, and put me off. It's also way too long for the fact that nothing happens (in my opinion).
Language Learning:
For language learning though, on the contrary, i think this is actually well suited (Probably the reason i continued reading it). Basically every chapter is more or less the entire same. The same people, the same locations and the same actions. The vocab and sentences repeat a lot and it becomes quite easy to read over time. This has been my fastest manga to read, and i improved a lot through the 18 chapters. Even if you need to look up a ton during the first 2 volumes, you will then be able to use that same knowledge approximately 100 times on the other 16 volumes.
I liked it and think it's a good beginner manga. I won't say I was particularly entertained, but it's cute! Essentially the entire book is 髙木さん playing pranks on the hapless 西片さん, who is quite befuddled at how to get back at her. It's fun for the first few chapters, but I did think it got a little tired by the end - of course, they both like each other so there is a small romantic arc too (totally benign, don't worry). I'd probably recommend it if you don't mind rom-coms.
For the language learner, I think it's a pretty standard amount of colloquialisms - around the order of よつばと. The vocabulary was pretty straightforward though and seemed like it's all very useful - everything is about daily life. You probably could use this as a first manga, but I generally lean towards manga with slightly fewer colloquialisms like ARIA or ふらいんぐいっち.. maybe even 黒.
If you can read the first chapter however, I think you should be good. The book felt relatively constant in difficulty.
Cute, funny, and good for learning
I really enjoyed this series. I had watched the anime first, and when I started learning Japanese, I decided to read the manga as well. Its easy to read (relatively), but it does include slang/contractions that add some difficulty.
The story is about a boy (Nishikata) and girl (Takagi-san) that hang out together, and the boy is always trying to one up Takagi-san in some goofy game that he usually came up with, but he can never seem to beat her. Or he tries to prank her but she is always one step ahead of his planning. There is not much of an overarching story except for slow burn first-love story, but each chapter is fairly separate from all the others. If you prefer a story with depth, this series is not for you. Otherwise, I definitely recommend trying this series out (I am biased towards cute stories, though, as evidenced by my love of the clearly superior Yotsuba&! series lol).