Hi all! I’ve been meaning to incorporate more Japanese reading into my routine, but haven’t figured out a time to block it out. I was curious as to when you all fit reading in your schedule, especially if you have a full time job/big commitments in life.
Do you do it in the morning? Before work? Evening? During breaks/commute? After your WaniKani/study session? When the mood strikes? If you’re too busy, during weekends?
In my case, since Japanese isn’t my main hobby, I don’t think I can incorporate it everyday. I had considered it in the evening. However, I suffer from a bit of insomnia, so I think Japanese reading might excite my brain too much before sleeping. I hope to get to the point where it puts me to sleep, but for now reading is a mental gymnastics
Doing mental exercises like basic math problems is supposed to help you fall asleep. In the same vein, reading in Japanese should also work. If it’s too exciting though, maybe a slice of life manga would be better to read?
As a working adult, I have mainly incorporated reading into my pre-bedtime routine. I’d love to read while commuting, but sadly I get motion sickness. I think those are the best couple of times to squeeze it in though.
Yeah, I also agree with those two times being the best times as a working adult. I would try morning in an ideal world, but I’m not a morning person so that’s off the table.
I’ve read short Japanese texts in the eve before, but I find my mind racing. When I think about it though, that might have more to do with the content itself and how it’s on a screen instead of paper. I’ll take up your advice for a slice of life manga!
i totally get that. I can’t read any non fiction books the last few hours before bed or my brain just won’t shut up casual japanese is fine, though for me. if you haven’t given reading japanese before bedtime a try, it might surprise you.
otherwise commuting is a nice, regular occasion. or if you have time in the morning, during coffee/breakfast.
Can second the commute and before sleeping times.
Morning commute is mostly blocked for SRS systems and general vocab learning. Evening commute I sometimes get some reading in. Oftentimes I do some podcast listen instead. Otherwise, I try a few minutes/ half an hour before sleep.
Additional study (Grammar/Writing/Speaking etc.) is not possible for me, though. I can currently only do that during holidays or on weekends if I don’t have other plans. I do enjoy reading more than actual study. So I take a hit to my progress for the reading enjoyment any day.
in bed, before sleeping. I often read for 45 minutes to an hour here, because I have no other distractions and it’s easier to get into an uninterrupted reading session. (I read physical books with a special purpose electronic dictionary, so I don’t have any internet connected devices in the bedroom to tempt me away from the book.)
over lunch at work. This ends up being a shorter reading session, but once I got into the habit it means another 15 to 30 minutes a day.
Ohhh do you have a recommendation for your electronic dictionary? Since I usually use my phone as a dictionary, that was the one fear I had for blocking out reading before bed. I fear I’d get distracted having my phone closeby.
It’s a bit tricky, because the good JE dictionary is the Kenkyusha, and that is usually only in the higher end expensive ones. I bought a Casio XD-SA20000 last year, which I like for its big dictionary selection, but it’s very expensive and I can’t really justify it as a recommendation because of that. An older second hand model might be an option.
I see! I did breifly look at some of the denshi jisho prices, and was surprised by some of them I’ll look into that thread a bit more carefully. Thanks for the info!
My guess is that the price is a combination of several things:
Kenkyusha probably charge a lot for their dictionary which makes it a premium-model only feature; cheaper models have JE/EJ dictionaries like Wisdom, Genius or O-Lex, which in my opinion aren’t as good.
the target market for them is Japanese people learning English, not people learning Japanese. So you end up paying for a pile of content (e.g. conversational English materials and TOEIC stuff) that you don’t want.
this surely must be a declining market segment, mostly students who can’t use phones in class plus older folks and the small group of people who actively prefer a special purpose device. There probably isn’t much incentive to price them competitively.
Yeah I really like my 電子辞書, but at the same time it’s a bit hard to rationalize the price when a smartphone does basically everything they do and more. It’s really something that you should only get if you have the disposable income for it, otherwise I’m sure that there would be much better ways to spend your money. It’s certainly not a “must-have”, but personally I get enough out of it that I think it was a very good purchase.
My quick one year review would be:
I was a bit worried that I would buy it, use it for a week and then have it collect dust somewhere. It fortunately hasn’t happened, I actually find it a lot nicer to use than my phone dictionary for most things. This very morning I was reading in bed when I realized that I left the e-dictionary in the other room and it was cold so I decided to use my phone instead and it was annoying enough that after 10 minutes I finally decided to brave the cold to fetch it.
If you know how something is read, the device is extremely fast and convenient for lookups. No need to unlock the phone and use error-prone touch controls, just press the dedicated “dictionary” button to start a search, then type away and get the result instantly. I was worried that the outdated hardware would be slow and laggy but it’s not the case, there’s very little latency overall.
If you don’t know how something is read, that’s trickier. The touchscreen on my device is an old-school resistive touchscreen (think Nintendo DS, not modern capacitive smartphone screens that feel just like glass without any give) which requires a stylus to write precisely and has poor feedback. On top of that the character recognition is a lot less forgiving than whatever smartphones use, in particular not knowing the correct stroke order will be a big disadvantage. So if your kanji knowledge is weak and you don’t read a lot of things with furigana it may be quite frustrating to use.
Probably wait to get one if you’re a beginner and are just getting into reading Japanese. Those devices are meant for Japanese people and expect that you will be comfortable with Japanese, even if you use the JA<->EN dictionaries. For instance the 研究社 JA->EN dictionary denotes the various nuances using synonyms or a short explanation in Japanese:
I actually find this extremely useful now, it helps understand how Japanese natives think about these words and it lets me associate various Japanese words and concepts together. It’s a bit like using a JA->JA and JA->EN dictionary at the same time! But yeah that’s only useful if you can actually understand these bits.
One small issue with my Sharp Brain is that I don’t like the keyboard very much. The keys are mushy and don’t have good feedback. Now I’m used to it but at first I would often press a key and not have it register. I expect that the higher end models have better keyboards. I also wonder if having kana input instead of just rōmaji wouldn’t be advantageous given that it would reduce the number of keystrokes.
I intend to buy a higher-end model when I travel to Japan and get the opportunity to play with the devices before buying.
Sometimes it’s just about prioritizing - I had the big problem last year that I wanted to read, and do WK and MM and listen to audio and learn pitch accent and all those things, plus all the life stuff and work stuff and all of that. I found myself ending up putting in the time pretty routinely on the reviews and lessons here because they’re numbers and getting the numbers to zero was a goal I could see and measure and really led me to have an unbalanced study plan.
At some point midyear I decided to reduce the number of lessons I was doing here to try to make reading and listening a bigger component of my studies, but I was also rushing through the N4 region in MaruMori to try to prepare for the exam, despite it not really being an important priority – knowing it wasn’t important didn’t make me actually treat it that way, and I ended up slipping on the reading still.
So for most of December, I evaluated my goals some more and decided that I was going to do what I always suggest and ensure that my plan is aligned with my goals, not with things that are measurable. And one of those things was deciding that I was going to read every day and listen every day. If I let the reviews slip or do fewer lessons and don’t level up as quickly, in the end, that just means it may take a little longer to recognize certain kanji or grammar points, but putting off reading and listening is just not on the table for me any more.
Of course, all of that is a long-winded and evasive answer because it doesn’t really say when to read, and really there’s no good answer for that. Even for me, I thought “Sure, I’ll read in the morning so I get it done” but in the two days in this year so far, it’s been lunch one day, end of work the other. Which is fine, because it got done.
But the other thing to keep in mind is if this isn’t your main hobby, it’s okay to treat it as a secondary/tertiary thing - and if you need more time to devote to the things that are most important to you, that’s what should come first. When you have time for Japanese, allocate the time you have for that to help you reach what your goals are for Japanese, and if that doesn’t leave time for reading every day, maybe just try to work it in once in a while.
If will power and self control are not sufficient, there are mobile phone apps available which you can use to disable all online access during set periods of time (daily schedule or for a set length of time). If you have a good dictionary installed on your phone, it would effectively give the same experience as a separate electronic dictionary device and save on the cost of having to purchase one.
Depending on the brand/model of phone and OS, many phones from the past 10 years or so have such features/apps built in. Of course, the disabler can be disabled (how easily varies). There are third party apps available which provide more resistance to help with aiding self control. It ranges from making it very difficult and/or imposing wait periods to re-enable access to making it impossible to re-enable access until the scheduled time, including even if the phone is power cycled.
Mmm, that’s pretty much my take on it. It sounds like the Casio and Sharp pluses and minuses are pretty similar.
Does the Sharp have something like a modern computer input method that would let you look up a compound word like 切手 if you don’t know the reading by typing きる to get 切る, delete the る, then type て for 手 ? The Casios do not have this, so you must either know (or have a good guess) for the whole word reading, or else write the whole word in kanji with the stylus. This is occasionally irritating when one of the kanji in the word is a complex one that’s a pain to enter but you know a reading for it.
The other lookup method I use a lot is that you can select a word on the screen and jump to its definition in this or a different dictionary, which is handy when you’re using a JJ dictionary and the definition includes a word you don’t know.
I started with my first 電子辞書 when I was just getting out of the beginner textbook phase and hadn’t yet started reading. I would say that if you’re OK with dealing with the device UI being in Japanese you’ll be fine. It’s true that the Kenkyusha separates out the nuances with short Japanese glosses, but if you are an English speaker you can ignore those, because you already know the meaning cluster that “feel; experience” is pointing at and that it’s separate in English from “learn; acquire; pick up”. I think some of the US based resellers of dictionaries even provide English language getting-started guides to tell you how the UI works.
Now that you mention it, I remember seeing some app time limiters on my phone, so I’ll look more into it! I’ve been trying to use social media and the internet less lately, so this is timely advice. Thanks for the suggestion!
Thanks for your in depth review on your electronic dictionary! After reading your post, I think I’ll just keep this info at the back of my mind and not jump the gun with getting one just yet.
I hope you get your hands on the higher-end model soon!
Today is my last day of break, so for the last week it’s been easy to find the time to read. I usually do it the first moment I get up after doing my reviews. My kids have been sleeping in lately so I have plenty of quiet time to do it without interruption.
Going back to work is another story because I work from 9-6, and there’s commuting time (driving so impossible to read) and getting the kids ready for preschool and the time it takes to get them back into the car and make dinner, bathe, go to bed, etc. So by the time our nightly routine is done, I absolutely must sleep with the kids or waking up is difficult and some mornings, I cut it close.
That leaves me with my 1 hr break at work. Sometimes I have to use it for planning (usually for prepping arts and crafts activities for the kids), but this year I’ve decided to actually use my break for myself. Since we don’t have a proper break room, it’s hard to concentrate because of all the chatter in the staff room.
But I ordered myself a pair of noise cancelling headphones for my birthday so I intend to use them no matter how antisocial it makes me look XD It’s really hard for my to concentrate when there’s background noise, so I could be reading several pages and have no idea what I read because my brain getd distracted by all the background noise.
(By the way, happy birthday fellow birthday twin!)
You got a pretty busy life! I’ll shake your hand on the 9-6 grind (I could complain about how 9-5 became 9-6, but that irrevelant to the topic at hand )
Thanks for your insight on your daily routine. Gives me some ideas how to squeeze in some reading, even if it’s for a short amount of time.
casual japanese is fine, though for me. if you haven’t given reading japanese before bedtime a try, it might surprise you.
I’ll give Japanese reading bedtime another go this year and report back
