Novel-Reading Progress
A while back, I started reading a Detective Conan movie novelization.
I made it about 40% of the way through when I stopped reading. Why? I felt I wasn’t getting anything out of it. I’d seen the movie previously, and the more I read, the more I remembered what comes up in the latter half.
Thus, I’m still at zero completed novels.
I don’t mind, because I still have a long way to go learning kanji and vocabulary.
But it’s still nice to give novel-reading another try now and then. Anything I start but don’t finish, if it’s interesting enough, I’ll pick it back up later when I can read it with fewer look-ups.
Kobo’s Recommendation
Every now and again, my e-book source Kobo forgets that I pretty much exclusively buy manga, and it suggests I might be interested in the novel 「かがみの孤城」.
And, time and again, I ignore it, knowing it’ll get pushed back off the recommended items list the next time I buy more manga.
Then, a book club thread for it popped up.
Well, now I need to look into stats on this book, to determine if it’s something I’d want to try reading (and potentially add to my list of unfinished books to get back to later).
Kanji Stats
Overall, the novel looks to have 1,572 unique kanji. Of these, 864 are covered in the first 29 levels of WaniKani (where I am), leaving 532 covered in later levels, and 169 not covered by WaniKani at all.
This means that I’ll recognize about 55% of the individual kanji used.
That’s not much, but thanks to frequency, I’d actually recognize about 88% of the overall kanji used.
That’s lower than I’d like it to be for reading, but it’s fairly close. And that’s not factoring in any kanji I’ve learned outside of WaniKani, which might inch it closer to 89%.
Word Stats
Based on my incomplete log of “words I know”, I should be able to recognize about 18.3% of the unique words used in the book. (Or “books” when considering it was re-released across two books.)
However, again, frequency. My recognition of the overall words used would be closer to 75%. And that’s not including words such as これ and その, or こんにちは and ありがとう.
Short-Term Goals
At the very least, I suppose I can put my Bottle Fairy kanji-learning on hold, and start learning the most frequency kanji I don’t yet know from this novel. I’ll be learning the kanji from both either way, so there’s no reason to do so in any specific order.
Of course, the highest frequency words I don’t know yet, containing kanji I don’t know yet, are for words such as “nod” that never come up in manga.
I wonder if it would be better to jump right into reading the novel and see if I can keep up, or if I should check out the manga first to build up context to make the novel easier to follow.
(Yes, I do jump around from thing to thing a lot. But so long as I keep moving forward in learning, and I’m always doing things that interest me, I think it’s okay.)