[2024] 多読/extensive reading challenge

I’m not saying that you should. Just saying that what you said about not learning anything at 95%+ comprehension seems to go against the philosophy of extensive reading. By all means, I think it’s best to read whatever stuff you most want to read :+1:

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I’d always recommend finding something you’re actually interested in and reading that instead of something you don’t really care about that you think is better for learning for whatever reason. If it’s too easy then oh well, you just read something you wanted to read anyway. If it’s hard (within reason obviously) and you have to look up a bunch of words and your brain shuts down after a few minutes then great. You’ll gradually adjust and be able to read for longer if you keep at it regularly. And if it’s something you’re interested in then it will help you stay motivated despite the difficulty.

I don’t really bother following 多読 or anything exactly the way it’s “supposed” to be done. If I see a word I think is important, I’ll look it up if I feel like it. Or maybe I’ll just keep reading if I think I understand enough and don’t care about the details enough to slow down. It all depends on my mood and whether or not I want to understand a bit more.

For reference, I took the N2 2 years ago. I could barely read well enough to pass and it took a lot out of me. 2 years of semi consistent reading later and I can read for much longer now without feeling drained. You have to suffer through it at the beginning no matter what I think but it only gets easier.

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Well, the idea of a ritual is that you integrate it into a full routine, so that you can keep actual decision making out of the equation.
As an example, I had WK as my default page in my web browser. At the end of a given day, I would connect, see WK, do reviews, and then read. It was part of the flow. I had to adapt once reviews became sparse, but that’s the idea.

The past few months, I had just converted most of my evening to reading, so 2-3 hours a day.

It is, but I feel (like @seanblue and @brrricane said) that it’s more important to be able to keep going rather than just stick by the rules. It’s probably best to find a balance between interest and “level appropriate” reading.

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My reading focus has gotten way worse in recent years though even in my native language, unfortunately. I’m hoping it’s something I can build back up like a muscle since I used to adore reading. We’ll see.

Hmm well fortunately my comprehension level is fairly high with native material so maybe it’s just a matter of finding a book I can really get into :thinking: I’m also wondering if it might help to have a physical book I can write in.

Thanks everyone for the advice! I’m going to try a few things to see if any of them stick. Maybe I’ll come back to join in on next year’s thread.

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Completely missed my goal of 25 books. It was a ridiculously high goal, but I wanted to try it anyway. Well, only managed to read 12 books, but even that is a great achievement for me.

My favorite book was 月の影 影の海 from 十二国記. I watched the anime back in 2011 and really loved it. Since then I wanted to read original novels to learn more about the characters and that strange but beautiful world.

Second place goes to 夏の庭. Very touching story, made me cry at the end. At the beginning I thought that it was a book for kids and didn’t expect much from it, but it turned out to be very deep and philosophical.

Also this year I started playing Japanese visual novels, finished the first episode of Higurashi, half way through the second one. Tried playing STAINS;GATE, but it felt a bit too hard at that time with all those explanations about time travel and their geeky stuff. Want to go back to it as soon as possible though, from what I’ve seen that’s a really high quality VN.

2020 goals:

  • Read 12 books.
  • Finish at least half of Higurashi (up to episode 4 inclusive). Play some other VNs (which I have loads of).
  • Catch up on ワンパンマン manga.
  • Participate in bookclubs.
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I’m playing it now in English because I didn’t want to suffer by playing it in Japanese.

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Glad to hear there’s someone else enjoying this little book here. Now I’m even more curious how the story will develop.

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I just finished やがて君になる, which makes three full manga series I read this year (after 放浪息子 and 聲の形). It was definitely my favorite of the three. I liked pretty much everything about it, from the story, to the characters, to the art. If anything it just kept getting better, and it ended really strong too. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this author, starting with this short story collection coming out in February.

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I’ve been updating the spreadsheet I have for my Japanese reading, and just realized that I’m planning to start 4 books and 1 manga series in January for the various book threads I want to take part in alone. :joy:

What even is this. :joy:

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You’re going to say that, and not mention which ones?

I want to know how I compare

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Why, what’s your prognosis for January? :joy:

My 4 books are 霧のむこうのふしぎな町 (which the book club admittedly started already but I’m postponing till January), 氷菓, リゼロ4 and 獣の奏者, the manga 美少女戦士セーラームーン.

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If you add jojo to that, I think it will be my list :slight_smile:

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I suspect that means you win this one. :stuck_out_tongue:

Are you pausing SAO for a bit then?

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Oh, no, that too!

I just forgot to mention it :sweat_smile:

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Haha, seems like you assimilated that one already.

And here I thought I was gonna be busy~ +2 books still seems far. :smiley: Maybe in February.

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Got my latest manga haul. Hopefully some good ones to fill in for ご注文はうさぎですか and Aria the Masterpiece.

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As a final little update for the year: I finally embraced the spirit of 多読 in the last two-ish weeks. I’ve been reading a lot on Pixiv Comics. I’m not really looking up much of anything. If I get it, I get it. If I don’t get it, I’ll only look things up if I really want to know. Otherwise I just move on to something else.

I’m not opposed to paying, but I’m first reading around at random, and mostly combing through the newer offerings that don’t yet have any pay-gated chapters. If I run into anything I really like, I can then keep following the story from the beginning.

With a lot of different topics, styles, and intended age-demographics, it varies wildly on how much I’ll understand. So there is an amusing oscillation between “Hecc, I can read this quite easily. Yay!” and “Whelp, I understand nothing and clearly know nothing. F.”

But it’s nice to have something easily available on my PC and phone that lets me binge on written content. I’m somewhere between a 100 and 200 pages read at this point. Especially nice during public transport commutes. Fun times. ^^

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Nice to find a thread like this! I want to read more, it actually irks me how I used to read way more books than I have done lately! So. I came up with an idea. Tomorrow is the start of not only a new year but also a new decade, right? So I was thinking why not a goal for the decade instead of only a year. It feels cool to think about 2030 and have somekind of idea what I want done by then. So, my plan for the 2020s is this: to read 100 books in Japanese, before the deadline of 1.1.2030. And it feels weird to type that number. :joy:

This year I read two books in Japanese: Murakami’s Pinball, 1973 and Norwegian Wood (上). I have already started Norwegian Wood (下) to give myself a headstart. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

There are just a few rules I have decided on:

  • The definition of a book is “from cover to cover”. So if a book is divided into 上 and 下, that means two books even though they are the same story. And The Lord of the Rings would be three books, for example.
  • A book is a novel. This means manga does not count. Short stories also don’t count, unless they are in a novel-sized collection.
  • “Novel-sized” = 200 - 400 pages. Any longer than that and I have to start looking if there are versions split into 上 and 下 somewhere. If there aren’t and the author has vehemently insisted on releasing their masterpiece as a 800-page single volume monstrosity and it’s interesting enough to read, then well, that’s not against the rules. But I’m aiming for 200 - 400 pages / 1 book.

Let’s see what happens! :grin: This should actually be pretty easy goal to achieve: with an average length of around 300 pages (what the books I have seem to be) it would take reading 10 pages every day to read one book in a month. This would mean 100 books in 100 months, which is 8 years and 4 months. That would still leave me with 1 year and 8 months, a leeway in case it seems I can’t reach the goal.

And 10 pages every day is little. 20 pages wouldn’t be much either, and that would bring the goal down to around 4 years. Something challenging would be 40 or 50 pages every day, but I don’t want to turn this into work. Instead the idea is to build a reading habit and to have something else to think and talk about than what social media and the news are providing.

Happy 2020s everyone! May we become 上手 in Japanese! :partying_face:

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2019 WRAP UP

Finally, on the last day of 2019, I also get around to doing a little wrap up of my reading.

With a little bit of hustle, I reached both my goals (book and manga) this year. In fact, because this year was more or less the start of my Japanese reading journey, I set my target at manageable 5 for books and 10 for manga. Turns out, with book clubs and my own (granted quite sparce) reading, I had read those 5 books somewhere around August if I remember correctly. So I double my book target. I wasn’t expecting to hit this target at all, but I got ambitious when it hit November, so upped my reading and here we are. After squeezing in 3 more manga volumes this month (aka last week), I hot both my targets, yay! :partying_face:

What was hard
I think this was mainly just life. A lot changed for me this year, particularly in the last half (which is also the reason for my general absence lately) and it made it incredibly hard for me to sit down and read properly. Plus, like so many others, I only properly started reading in Japanese this year (or late last year, with Natsume and Non Non with the book club), so I think the hardest part was to stop being intimidated by a whole book (le gasp :scream:) in Japanese and to stop trying to devise these fancy strategies on how to deal with it. Just read it. End of.

What helped
I think this thread helped keep me accountable. And the book clubs helped take the scary out of a Japanese book/manga. It made it seem less like a mission I think. Plus, I started realising that I generally quite like Japanese writing (whatever that may be).

My favourites
In terms of books, I don’t have one favourite, but my top three (in no particular order) are コンビニ人間, 君の膵臓をたべたい and 世界から猫が消えたなら.
As for manga, my favourites were probably Death Note (because it will always be a favourite for anything), Tsubasa (For the exact same reason) and Flying Witch and 一瞬間フレンス (because they were really cute). Oh and 放浪息子 because of it’s approach. (Okay, so maybe I loved most of the manga I read, help.)

My least favourites
For books, it was probably Haruhi. It’s not something I’d probably particularly enjoy reading in the first place, but it also turned me off with some of the already plenty discussed scenes.
For manga, I didn’t really dislike any of them, but のんのんびょうり was probably least up my street.

For next year, I think I might keep my goals in place. I want to focus on passing the N1, which probably gonna take up a lot of my time. Plus new job with much more working hours is killing me already. But I’m hoping I exceed my targets next year by a mile. We shall see.

On to 2020, hope everyone has an awesome NYE, drink responsibly. :wink:

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So no Brandon Sanderson for you for English books? (His longest book is over 1200 pages long.)

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