- June 27th 高木さん chapter 4 page 11 panel 3 and ~30 minutes of working through Super Mario Odyssey screenshots I took during play over the other days.
Even though my surgery still means I can’t use my right hand much, I am finding that reading is getting easier over time, which is honestly just super exciting and way beyond what I was expecting this “early” into my Japanese journey.
A pleasant surprise:
On Friday I got a phone notification from Bookwalker in Japanese
Notification contents
[期間限定7/2まで] 全商品対象の80%OFF クーポンをあなただけにプレゼント
Notification readings
[きかんげんてい7/2まで ] ぜんしょうひんたいしょうの80%OFF クーポンをあなただけにプレゼント
My first instinct was to dismiss it as “I wouldn’t be able to understand it”. But at the last second I decided it wouldn’t hurt to try. It turns out that of the 9 Kanji I knew the readings for 8 of them =O. With a few quick Jisho lookups, I was done.
Then I wanted more, so I opened Bookwalker and poked around the online store (in Japanese).
To my pleasant surprise I was able to make decent progress, I downloading a bunch of free books, and bought チーズスイートホーム.
I was impressed with how much I could infer by combining context with the fragments I understood. I still relied on Jisho.org & Ichi.moe, but it was much less painful that it used to be. The fact I could read any of it was amazing!
What reading has helped teach me:
Brains are lazy.
Even now I still find my brain automatically skipping over Japanese text, either assuming I can’t read it, or trying to find an easier way.
It takes active intention to force my brain to go through the process, but when I do, it has improved so much!