Mon Jan 1: 
ジャム屋さん episode 21? I think I started reading it and got interrupted, but giving credit for the intent!
Fri Jan 5: ジャム屋さん episode 21
Tues Jan 16: 
ホリミヤ p 49-52
Sat Jan 20: ホリミヤ p 53-55
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Congrats! Reading Harry Potter in Japanese is one of my big-time goals. I’ve read the series six times through in English 
Have fun 
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I read four N5 articles from Watanoc. The articles are fun to read because they’re all about Japan and have lots of pictures.
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Thanks. Since i havent read it in a long time, its really fun for me. Not new by any means, but feels fresh.
頑張りましょうね。
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Haven’t heard of this site before, thank you for mentioning it! Very nice readings 
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Ended up getting ‘up to date’ with Dungeon Meshi (back to where I had read up to in english, about the end of vol 4) through scanning/reading (no lookups, but I can’t in honesty count it as reading either, since I just skipped the bits I couldn’t read or just scanned the pictures and made some connections). A weird practice. I’m not sure if I should continue on or just stop here until I get the English version/the Netflix catches up (it should be here in two-three months I think), since I can’t honestly say I’m properly comprehending a lot of what’s happening so much as I’m relying on the words I do recognise and my faulty memory.
But holy shit I want to know what happens next lol
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Weren’t you just on volume 1 a couple days ago? That’s a pretty good endorsement of the series that you’re so interested you’re already on volume 4 despite it being super challenging. Way to push through! I wonder if a few spot checks of intensive reading to understand key scenes would keep you going? Not something I’ve done in Japanese but I remember that strategy working in German before I could get everything.
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| 01月20-21日 | Read: | Progress: | |
|---|---|---|---|
 |
小さな森の狼ちゃん | 22 pages | 142/175 |
Finished up chapter 6 of Okami-chan! Looking forward to wrapping this up in the next few days and ticking book number 1 off the list for the year
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１日２１月 (Home Post Link)
Since there’s a been a little bit of discussion about how to define and what counts as “extensive reading” recently, I thought it’d be a good idea to and go consult the tomes. Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom by Richard R. Day and Julian Bamford (1998) provides the following, which is the source for characteristics of extensive reading that I’ve most often seen other SLA research cite:
Just as it is hard to find a name for extensive reading that satisfies everyone, it is hard to reduce it to a dictionary-type definition. For teachers, a more useful way of understanding the complexity of extensive reading is through a description of the characteristics that are found in successful extensive reading programs.
- Students read as much as possible, perhaps in and definitely out of the classroom.
- A variety of materials on a wide range of topics is available so as to encourage reading for different reasons and in different ways.
- Students select what they want to read and have the freedom to stop reading material that fails to interest them.
- The purposes of reading are usually related to pleasure, information, and general understanding. These purposes are determined by the nature of the material and the interests of the student.
- Reading is its own reward. There are few or no follow-up exercises after reading.
- Reading materials are well within the linguistic competence of the students in terms of vocabulary and grammar. Dictionaries are rarely used while reading because the constant stopping to look up words makes fluent reading difficult.
- Reading is individual and silent, at the student’s own pace, and, outside class, done when and where the student chooses.
- Reading speed is usually faster rather than slower as students read books and other material they find easily understandable.
- Teachers orient students to the goals of the program, explain the methodology, keep track of what each student reads, and guide students in getting the most out of the program.
- The teacher is a role model of a reader for students – an active member of the classroom reading community, demonstrating what it means to be a reader and the rewards of being a reader.
(pg 7-8 in my edition)
There’s been a lot of focus on points (6) and (8) with regards to not using a dictionary while reading, but I think that is supposed to be taken into consideration with (3) and (4). You can use a dictionary and look stuff up while doing extensive reading, just only as much as you feel like doing. If it makes you a little bit slower, but you are still enjoying what you are reading while reading on your own for fun, that still counts as a kind of extensive reading. The “at the student’s own pace” in point (7) is another big indicator of that. You get to choose how fast or slow you want to read, and get to be the judge of whether your comprehension is ‘good enough’ to move on or not.
Really the crux of this is on that, I think. Extensive reading is reading that you do just for you. It’s for pleasure, you can stop whenever you want if you aren’t enjoying it, and the reading itself is its own reward. This is contrasted with doing intensive, close readings with follow-up and comprehension questions or writing assignments, especially as a group. So when/if you hear people talking about research that’s discussing extensive vs intensive reading, that’s more or less the distinction they’re talking about.
Importantly, because you’re doing it for fun and reading for its own sake, what it looks like from day to day might also vary! On one day you might feel good and read something a bit harder while looking up a bunch of words you don’t know, and on the next day you might be a little less patient and just want to skip over the ones that don’t look important or read something easier that you don’t need to look up much at all, but both of those would count as forms of extensive reading here. It might be helpful to think of it more like a scale than a binary distinction.
tl;dr - basically whatever kind of reading people are doing in this thread probably counts as mostly extensive reading, almost regardless of your strategy or approach to reading (unless you’re doing like, 新完全マスター or other textbook readings, maybe). The very nature of this thread being reading whatever you want, on your own time, for your own reasons, and at whatever pace you choose mean that it’s almost certainly going to be some kind of extensive reading (to the SLA research peeps, at least).
AAAAAANYWAYS. back to my own extensive reading 
Read:
- コンビニ人間 page 18 → 24 - about as much as I felt like doing
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2024-01-21
Previous
Home post
| Date | Name | Type | Amount | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024-01-21 |  本好きの下剋上第一部１ |
 Jr Novel |
 1 chapter 13 pages |
1h20m |
Another chapter of 本好きの下剋上 today. I actually thought I was going faster today, but then looking at the stats, apparently not. Lots of front loaded vocab this week that they ended up reusing through the chapter, so I guess I was just feeling the fact that I sped up over the chapter and forgot all the lookups I did at the start.
Anyway, probably going to give the novel a break until next Friday and do some easier stuff for a bit during the week when I have less time, so probably back to manga for the next few days. I may take a few moments to push through the archaeologist guy’s dialogue in Digimon also, but that’ll be much later so I’ll put that in tomorrow’s update if I do.
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21st jan
feeling kinda granblue’d out so i didn’t go on that today. i did, tho, do some bits and pieces on pixiv, plus some pages of 超ビジュアル幕末・維新人物大辞典 mouthful of a title (bookwalker link) cos it arrived the other day and i have no self-control.
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Extensive reading discussion
Nice, thanks for digging that out!! I find these different ways of looking at things and cutting them up helpful. Interesting, as you say, to potentially define everything we’re reading is extensive reading. It’s so hard for me to agree to that (in my head, extensive reading was the Tadoku method that was printed at the front of my graded readers, but I agree that is too specific and narrow a focus to define all extensive reading). But as you say, the definition you’ve put out presents a challenge to the binary intensive vs extensive reading paradigm.
I agree with how you put that and I’ll incorporate into my thoughts - it’s a spectrum. And it’s useful to see it as a spectrum to avoid being to rigid. For example, my reading on Satori, is highly intensive because it’s just so easy and trivial to see everything perfectly dissected, defined, and nuance discussed. My biographies are a bit in between. I look up all unknown words, but I don’t bother understanding every single turn of phrase/potential grammar point 100% if I have understood it well enough to move on. And my latest breakthrough with the Mysterious Sweetshop book where I can just read for pleasure and leave my study hat in a completely different room - pure reading bliss on the other side of the spectrum.
Anyway, the point is, I wouldn’t enjoy Satori as much if I didn’t “allow” myself to take advantage of the advanced features there to read it so intensively. I wouldn’t enjoy my biographies as much if I wasn’t looking up enough words to learn something surprising. And I wouldn’t enjoy or even read the Mysterious Sweetshop stories if I did 7-10 lookups or more per page.
What I hope has come across so far in my discussion about more extensive reading (by which I generally meant fewer lookups for more pleasure) is the possibility that is released when trying it. (Not necessarily rigidly sticking to it). I feel like previously (at a lower competence level) this wasn’t possible, but I wouldn’t have known when it would become possible until I tried. Does that make sense? So it’s something I would say, every now and then, for different resources - try it out until you pass your comfort zone, and go just a bit further to see if it keeps getting more exciting and rewarding, or less so. If it becomes more so - great! Continue if you like. If not, well, that’s ok, nothing lost, just continue as before with more lookups and eventually you’ll get there. The purpose here is to give yourself the opportunity to know when you’ve reached a higher competence level - I found it really surprising that I was already there and didn’t even know it. In a nutshell, that’s what I got so excited about that I think sparked quite a bit of these discussions.
According to the table of extensive reading guidelines you posted it is really illuminating just how many factors can be limited by reading according to habits dictated by a lower competence level: In order to get general understanding (#4) well within my competence (#6), this caused quite a restriction in variety of materials available (#2), which meant much of what I would rather read (#3) was out of reach or at least much less rewarding (#5) and less pleasurable (#4). Necessarily, then, my reading speed was rather slow (#8) and I was doing a lot of lookups (#6), which created a habit which was self-enforcing. Like - I didn’t feel like I had “read” something if I wasn’t doing it like that and felt resistance to reading more permissively. Not that every reading session felt like a chore, but it was certainly more reading for study than reading for pleasure. Although, of course I feel quite a lot of satisfaction getting further in my studies through that kind of reading.
Without trying to read without lookups (to see if I can maintain enough understanding), I wouldn’t have discovered just how many benefits (above) I can experience just by reading in Japanese for pleasure - I read faster, can access a greater variety of materials, will likely expand my competence even faster, and it’s significantly more rewarding pleasurable.
So for sure, this is not about rigidly forcing no lookups at all. For example, I got to chapter 3 in my book that I’m having so much fun reading like this - and things started getting hazy towards the end of that chapter. That’s where for me it’s going to be more fun to step back a bit, go back and do some lookups to figure things out, and then move forward from there with more clarity. I’m also really looking forward to that book club starting to go back to the first chapters I read to better understand some of the nuance (like all the cool sweets people see in the shop when they first look around, I’ll need some intensive sessions to figure that out). And each of those will be a rewarding in a different way than my first pass!
oops, I didn’t mean to write a whole essay in response. But @javerend started it! 
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Jan 21, Sun of Week 3 of Q1 2024
- JoJo Part 1 end, 7 chapters
- STEINS;GATE (VN) start Ch.8
Words of the day
- 拝領 = bestowment
- 疵 = blemish; flaw; bruise. Alternate Kanji for 傷, but more similar to 瑕 (from 玉に瑕).
- 実刑判決 = unsuspended sentence. No 執行猶予.
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Extensive reading conversation
Hahah, yess, javerend with the SLA research
This is a good point, I think probably all that’s happening in these conversations is that the technical terms of extensive vs intensive are being altered slightly to fit into a self study framework, since we don’t have classrooms to go to with comprehension questions and guided readings with a teacher.
I also would say that not all of my reading in these threads has been extensive according to these standards since not all of my reading has been whatever I want and for enjoyment, like mitrac said…
Plenty (most?) of my jpn reading so far has been limited due to being at a lower level with a smaller variety of material to choose from, and therefore has been less enjoyable. Some things I read only for language learning benefit, and some things I read for enjoyment. Is that intensive vs extensive? Probably not officially, lol, but it feels like there’s a meaningful distinction.
But then, of course, all of our experiences are going to differ from the research when the research is all classroom based. 
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And my reading for today (so far), Akiko 2 episodes. Tonight I’m planning on sitting with my biographies book, too
I had an idea to google 雪舟 (the person I’m reading about), plus “NHK schools”. aaaaah - this is gold! This has turned up some interesting lessons that are understandable and interesting since I’ve just put in so much time reading his biography!
The first video in the following link is almost word for word the first third of the biography, it’s a story from his childhood called 雪舟とねずみの絵
Then there is a more complex lesson that has a 10 minute video with a transcript on the side, and on another page, a breakdown of those scenes (I think, I haven’t gone through in detail yet!). I’m so excited to explore this!
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Jan 21st
So far I’ve only read a 10 page sample of a manga. Might read more later, might not. I think today have become rewatching/-binging Wednesday on Netflix. If you have Netflix and haven’t seen it, I’d definitely recommend trying it. I watched the first season when it came out, and felt like re-watching it today. I’m not usually for the goth-y doom and gloom, but I find this one really enjoyable. So I guess today I’m endorsing watching a TV-show in definitely not Japanese. 
Edit: just read most of another sample. Maybe that was the more later already.
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I only read 50 minutes of chapter 3 of Harry Potter yesterday since I was feeling horribly about my conversation class which affected my confidence and mental health somewhat (it was another proof that my grammar is atrocious, but the way it felt like I was being treated like a child).
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Home post and thread1月12日から1月21日まで
すみませんみんなさん!
I got pretty ill these past two weeks and I couldn’t follow your progress nor note your recommendations 
But I’m back and I’m ready to cheer you up again and ask for details on your readings ! 
As for what I’ve read during these harsh days :
|
Title | Source | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
 |
Kiki-Mimi Radio | Satori Reader | Episodes 19 to 23 |
 |
ジョンさんバス中で | Japanese Graded Readers | Pretty common but funny |
 |
可愛いだけじゃない式守さん vol. 1 | manga | 2 last sections along with the ABBC |
 |
ホリミヤ vol. 1 | manga | Few pages as it is difficult and I was very tired |
As I’m approaching the end of my first Satori Reader series, prepare yourself for a big party !!!
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more extensive reading thoughts
I am nothing if not an instigator 
That’s an excellent point! It’s still helpful to remember that there’s a difference between what the researchers are doing and what the common definitions are though, since people can and do use research to justify study methodology. (especially if they’re trying to sell you something… “9/10 dentists recommend” and all that )
I do agree that Satori stuff falls way more on the intensive side, definitely. But even then you can make it more or less intensive by changing how you decide to read it, like you said!
That’s also a good point! Especially at lower levels, you kind of have to read intensively in order to reach a high enough level where those options start opening up more and more. I’m going to shamelessly steal @ChristopherFritz’s distinction between Reading and Deciphering again
Early on in your “reading” what you are doing basically does has to be intensive. It’s more like solving a puzzle, seeing how all the pieces fit together. And, until you get at least some baseline of experience and see those common patterns enough, you won’t be able to fluently read anything enough for it to really count as “reading”. In those stages, you really are forced to read the kinds of things that are at a level where things are simple enough to do that style of reading.
The same is true for most skills (*calling language acquisition a “skill” is very academically loaded, but i’m gonna do it anyway), it starts with deliberate, conscious practice and eventually certain parts become automatic. Once you get some level of automaticity, your horizons really open up and you are more free to choose the kinds of things you want to read or are curious about reading 
Also like in skill acquisition theories, neither of these methods (deliberate, close practice vs broadly doing stuff you enjoy) is inherently better than the other. A mix of both is both possible and generally preferred! (at least, if your goal is skill improvement)
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