February 9
星の王子さま, p. 40-45.
I swear this book is work for me. I find the language much more poetic rather than purely descriptive and I’m definitely not used to it. It might have been the reason I didn’t look forward to reading it the last previous days, and I kept postponing it today too. I don’t like that I’m starting to put it off unconsciously…
Otherwise the book is pretty nice, the vocabulary seems beautiful. Perhaps it’s also the sentence structure that I have trouble with, but it’s definitely because of the amount of hiragana words I don’t even know in kanji, and it’s so uncomfortable encountering them first in hiragana, all together with particles and so on. It’s like I sometimes don’t know where the unknown word starts and where it ends, or if it’s two unknown words together, or a word + a grammar point. So in the end I lose a lot of time just trying to know what’s going on like… structurally, before even trying to comprehend it semantically. So many constant lookups.
I hope this is not too pessimist a take for anyone deciding whether to read it or not. The book is nice, and it’s only my second book in Japanese, so it was natural and expected I was going to encounter a lot of struggle. I guess I’m just venting my feeling of shock after discovering that this book isn’t as easy as I thought it would be, just because it has pictures and it seems like a children’s book. It’s not super hard either, which makes it worse because sometimes it makes me think why am I even struggling in the first place, it’s a bit of an invalidating feeling.
I hope the work I’m putting into this pays off in the end.
Damn you, hiragana words.