Decided to give up on my reading goal this year. I overestimated my reading skills and now I’m planning to begin serious preparation for JLPT, so I won’t have as much time to read books (and honestly I want to take a break from books).
I think it’s a good opportunity to do some other stuff in Japanese: read One Punch Man, Aria, play some VNs (specifically Higurashi, maybe STAINS;GATE if I have time), so looking forward to that.
Also hope to get back to reading with Intermediate book club since the book I voted for got picked, and book club tends to read rather slowly, so I think I’ll be able to keep up with the pace.
Before leaving you guys until next year, I wanted to share an interesting experience.
I’ve taken JLPT 3 times (N4, N3, N2) and I always sucked at reading, I often always didn’t even have time to read all the questions. This time I’m preparing for N1 and I thought it would be great to be able to go to the test and actually be confident in my abilities. So I bought 新完全マスター books for reading and grammar. Let’s not talk about grammar for now, but I did try going trough reading one sometime around January. It was hard, I could understand texts, but only after I go through them slowly with a dictionary and this is obviously not how it’s going to be on the test. After around two weeks I was only 20 pages in and going through the whole book looked quite daunting. I decided that I wasn’t really ready for it yet and put the book off for the time being.
Fast forward to the middle of August. I’ve read 10 books, some manga, played some games, so I decided to give 新完全マスター another shot. I open up the book and wow, I can read this, without a dictionary, and relatively fast too. Sure, I don’t understand 100%, but I understand enough to answer the questions. This was a great feeling.
I finished the book in two week’s time, tried going through the mock test at the end of the book as fast as I could, got 21/26 in 90 minutes. Well, there is still room for improvement, but I’m quite pleased with the result.
Reading more is definitely the way to go.