ちいさな森のオオカミちゃん 🌳 Week 3 (The Wolf of the Small Forest Book Club)

The 十分で読める伝記 に年生 (Biographies you can read in 10 minutes) (Book club) for 2nd graders is working out really well for me. There are some pictures, about half a page per 2-page spread, though, so maybe it’s not exactly what you want. But I think I get what you want - I read Satori and pick up loads of vocab, and then reading the 2nd grade biographies with more friction for lookups forces me to learn in a different way. I tend to read a few pages, read it again (and understand way more despite no lookups). Then I look up the words that are most impeding my understanding. Finally (if I have time and normally only if I’m really unsure), I’ll look at the book club discussion.

I sideline (is that the word for underlining vertical text lol) words I don’t know, write the definitions at the bottom in pencil, and scratch out the furigana I already know so when I reread I get that practice. (I realise defacing the book might not be your thing! an alternative I use for books I don’t want to mark is to get a little school-age blank writing book of the same size ~12 pages and write in that) I’ll put a picture of how I do that for the 小さな森 in one of my next study log posts. Anyway, just wanted to throw that out there as it’s not obvious that reading with so much friction would be helpful, but I find it is helping me a lot in a very different way than Satori.

As another aside, after reading so much more now and the massive boost that is bringing, I’m also finding reading this way with my children’s JP dictionary is much more pleasurable than with a JP-EN dictionary. I don’t mind the paper friction - it’s a relaxing screen-free activity and I don’t want/need everything in my life or Japanese learning to be 100% efficient!

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