📚📚 Read every day challenge - Winter 2022 ☃❄

[rikaiwisdom]

Summary Post

January 4
君の名は , 10 pages.

Random words

• 神主 = かんぬし (chief) Shinto priest.
• 電動 = でんどう electric (as in a vehicle).
• 抗議 = こうぎ protest, objection.
• 盛大 = せいだい magnificent, prosperous.
• 巫女 = みこ Miko, shrine maiden. (I really like this word and its kanji.)
• ひたすら = doing nothing but, earnest, determined (works as an adverb and adjective).
• 老若男女 = ろうにゃくなんにょ men and women of all ages (I also love this word).
• 唾液 = だえき saliva.
• 放置 = ほうち leave as is, leave alone (the word is a noun and する動詞).

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@fustian_garb

I had this when I started reading the manga of March Comes in Like a Lion…it’s one of the reasons why I prefer to read things that I don’t already know the story of before I start.

Indeed . At the same time, so far it’s proven to be very nice to bind the memory with the Japanese descriptions of the scenes. Of course I know what is happening, but as long as I still put the effort into reading it all and looking up what I don’t understand, it’s good to be exposed to how it’s described in Japanese, regardless. I’m honestly enjoying it a lot .

@BadWeather

On the other hand, my experience with having furigana for every kanji is ambivalent: my eyes tend to automatically look at it even before seeing the kanji because it’s much easier, and then I only look at kanji to confirm or disambiguate the meaning. I’m a bit worried that this hinders my progress with internalizing kanji vocab by not getting me to apply the effort to actually recognize the kanji/words first. I do try to consciously stop myself from doing that, but that doesn’t always work, and it takes away some focus from what I’m reading.

This is literally me. I can’t help it; if there’s furigana, I’ll read it, no matter what. My eyes just drift there. Many people love furigana and find it really beneficial, but in my case I prefer to completely get rid of it because it didn’t feel super useful to me (other than your usual occasional furigana for specific words). Of course this might very well be because I already had a decent grasp on most kanji you encounter when reading, and knowing most of the readings makes the lookups much quicker and less tedious. But I also had concerns of not internalising kanji so I preferred the no-furigana route. I would say experiment! It depends on how frequently you look up things; if you do constant lookups, it can get extremely boring very quick, and in this case I’d rather have furigana than quit whatever I’m reading.

I’m also a fan of doing handwritten lookups when I encounter kanji I don’t recognise. Sometimes it’s kanji I’ve forgotten, and other times kanji I don’t know. It’s fun, and the Japanese IME on PC has a really accurate handwriting function.

Having said that it’s worth noting that I don’t know a ton of vocabulary, I just know a lot of the kanji readings so it’s often easy to look up things. But I still look up so many things, I have so much vocabulary to learn.