Yeah I’m very happy I gave it a try. I was reluctant to give up my music at first, but I got used to it pretty quick and even looked forward to listening to some of my tracks.
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Same, I’m also trying to increase my reading speed and wanted to know what a reading pacer is. Is it an app or something else?
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This is the one I use, but theres a lot of them online. I have the calculation rate for steps per minute to characters per hour in my post
Again though I would be careful. I remember you saying you mined like 1500+ sentences in the past few weeks recently, and I didn’t start reading speed practice till i was consistently mining less than 30 words per book for the stuff I was reading. I think you’re probably at the stage where you still have a lot of speed to gain purely from getting more familiar with the content and trying to go fast may do more harm than good.
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That’s fair. I’ll keep that in mind. I am still hovering at about 80-100 words a day rn, so probably in a couple months that’ll come down.
How many days does it take you to read the books you’re currently reading?
Depends on how focused I am on finishing. I can finish a LN in about 4 days (8-10 hours) if that’s the only thing I’m doing. No listening.
I was more asking so I could get an idea of how many words you were mining a book. But ok, so it seems like ~400 per book. A bit early for reading speed focus imo, but I felt like that period around ~300 mined words per book was where my reading speed and ability really started to pick up, so if you’re like me you’ll be seeing a lot of progress soon on that front.
I remember you talking about the n1 and being nervous, but if you’re at 400 words mined per book now you’ll be fine for reading and language knowledge btw.
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Yeah I am 5 years in and I had phases where I would mine things haphazardly but this year I finally buckled down and got all the tools up and running to do it right. Before I just read a lot and looked up as I went. So I have a decent vocabulary currently.
Like some people have these vocab goals of ##K words in their deck but I’ve been doing this for so long I know I don’t need to hit any set milestone. I just wanna get the new words. But like you said theres always new words.
So I guess I’m just kind of taking the approach of if it’s new let’s learn it anyways.
Sorry for the rambling. 
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I’ve seen some places suggest that the first book of a light novel usually contains about 98% of the vocab that’s going to be used in the rest of the series and even suggest only mining the first 100 pages and after just reading. What are your thoughts about that? I am going through Spice and Wolf and basically got to the point its just reusing the same vocab and I am curious about using the pacer for that now that I am about 45% of the way through and got enough cards from it I am thinking I should just enjoy the rest of the book at this point unless something really gets me confused and not knowing a word crushes my understanding of what’s happening (which is kind of rare).
In the specific case of Spice and Wolf, jpdb says the whole series (up to vol 19) has 24144 unique words, and volume one has 6222 unique words. So volume one has a third of the total vocab. That’s a lot less than 98% but on the other hand it’s a lot more than one nineteenth of it…
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damn so I can get fluent just off mining Spice and Wolf with an extensive knowledge in commerce and child slurred Japanese. O_O
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Its actually closer to 1/4th right? Either way yeah 98% is a crazy number that someone pulled outta nowhere.
At the same time, as PM pointed out, V1 does disproportionally introduce new words and is almost always going to be the hardest volume to read of a series as a result. If you don’t want to mine anymore, I’d say to stop by all means. I still wouldn’t be using the pacer if I were you, though. Pushing your limits of speed is a tradeoff for the ability to notice and digest things for practicing reading speed. In my own opinion, at your stage, noticing details, forming better understanding of the language, and taking time to digest the language thoroughly is extremely valuable while reading speed is almost completely irrelevant. I would never sacrifice the training of those highly valuable core skills to focus on something thats not even particularly relevant to me yet.
Your reading speed will greatly improve on its own just by increasing your understanding of the language. I’d not worry about it until you feel like you’re running out of stuff to learn in your content. Using a pacer before that kinda feels like me using a timer on my students as they’re learning to write the alphabet. If they feel rushed at all, they will likely make bad habits and have poorer handwriting overall. But if I let them write slowly and get used to it, their speed will naturally pick up anyways as they become accustomed to writing English. Then, when their english writing is rock solid, then we can worry about making it faster if need be.
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Thanks for the advice.
I think youre 100% right and I should probably spend some time in the next few months just making sure I comprehend what’s being said more than speed. Speed can come later and will come naturally over time.
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@Vanilla What consists of new vocab? Because I often have similar items show up as new in jpdb, which I usually mark as “I know this, but may forget”. The words I really don’t know or don’t know well are the ones I learn then. I’m now going through some of the backlog before I pick up a book again.
I’m getting to the point where I can read whatever I put my mind to it even if it takes a while to parse. I don’t read as often as last year, where I pushed myself to read daily, but I’m able to read longer, more volume and hifhgher difficulty texts than I was at last year. I think roughly I’m around the upper intermediate stage, where intermediate levels feel pretty comfortable to read, but more advanced stuff like nausicaa still feel difficult to read. Although with each volume I feel I get a better grip on it. On the another hand I haven’t really been training my other skills yet, so I wonder if I should put more focus on that instead.
That’s really where I’m at the moment. Go deeper with reading or branch out into other areas. I’m visiting Japan in November, so I am hoping to find my answer at the end of my journey there, but I’m open to suggestions and any advice you can share atm.
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The definition varies person to person and wouldn’t worry too much about any specifics of it. If you want artifical repetition of a piece of knowledge I would add it as it’s own word, and if you don’t I wouldn’t.
Its really as simple as do you want to get better at reading or other areas? I probably would have never gone to listening or speaking had I not moved here, as I (correctly) thought that practicing those things wouldn’t really alter my enjoyment of vacationing here. It’s really just a matter of asking yourself what you want to be able to do. Do you have any sort of idea as to what your answer is for that?
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I typically add like 25 words per day if I’m not actively following along with a book/game/series or in between reading sessions. Some of those words are like yeah I know this and others are really like I can see where it comes from but it’s good to see it more often and then there are a few that I have never seen before. In the end I’m just depleting the vocab decks till I move on to the next. If I’m actively reading then I’ll add the words afterwards till I find I’m caught up again. That’s really when I go through the most vocab in one go. Atm jpdb gives me a range of 55-75% known of the material I still haven’t read.It’s not completely one to one, but that does give me a good indication which ones are gonna be more difficult than the others.
Maybe it doesn’t really matter whether I go left or right in this case, as in the end I’m still improving my Japanese anyway. I’ve not yet found a complete answer, but I did think things through and I think for me it makes the most sense to use reading to expand my comfort zone. So I’ll just continue and maybe get properly into light novels and visual novels. This year I’ve been replaying some more games in Japanese, which has worked out pretty well so far. Definitely wished I watched more anime and other series, but I’ve not been feeling that lately and I don’t want to push it too hard.
I’m definitely looking forward going back to Japan for a while now. Even just being out there and discovering new things by myself.
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I just finished watching your video, before I realised it two hours had gone and I had a smile on my face from everything, especially the closing remarks of the video.
Definitely way more constructive and useful hearing your journey, reflection and advice than “How to learn Japanese!” videos on youtube that only showcase their achivements and feels more like an “aesthetic” showcase of the language than actual tips on how to learn. I personally have a clearer plan in mind on how to keep improving after hearing your point of view, many of the views you had were aligned with mine considering this is my second time coming back to Japanese studies. This time because I genuinely enjoy it.
Words can not express how happy I am putting aside two hours for the video. I’ll keep it short and say thank you, genuinely.
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Performing some necromancy here, but I wanted to talk to you about getting better at reading because I am doing a lot, but I feel like I kind of just accept what I’m reading and not comprehending the way I should be, if that makes sense. Any advice to keep myself from just kind of going into mindless mode where I know what I’m reading (kanji, vocab, grammar) but it’s not sticky like it should be.
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I think I know what you’re referring to, but just to make sure could you kinda expand on your problem a bit more? When you say you just accept what you’re reading and not comprehending the way you “should be” what do you mean? And what does not being sticky refer to in this context?
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So, I guess the easiest way to explain would be, for example. I read a sentence, “He went to the park.” I understand it, then move on to the next sentence “He started playing basketball.” Ok, understood that, then by the time I finish the page I have still have a super vague sense of what’s happening, like I skimmed a page in English.