so so true, and that metaphor is really nice, good call to bring that in to the discussion. I wish I’d engaged more with this stuff a few years ago. Because I could have made that first step of solving the puzzle much much earlier. I had just wrongly thought that since it was so so hard, that I wasn’t ready. But it turns out it was going to be hard no matter what.
And this is so exciting and liberating right? Knowing it’s going to happen. That’s what I want people to get out of this. Keep going - this happens sooner than you think! I made my first attempts at reading alone years ago and didn’t get far. Over this last year of reading more plus having all these ideas and conversations - for sure that has increased my pace by a margin just because I’m more hopeful about what’s possible and I’m more open to try something new or do things differently.
Jan 20th!
A chapter of Teasing Master Takagi-san today.
It was a fun read as always, but the chapter title completely gave away what was going to happen so that was a shame!
Jan 21st!
Chapter 9 of Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie today. A slightly longer chapter than usual, but still a quick fun read.
I also read the final 2 pages of Chapter 4 of the Orange Light Novel.
Finished この美術部には問題がある!. After reading the last chapter, I decided that I won’t try volume 2 after all, I didn’t find any of the comical scenes to be funny.
Yesterday I got Yomitan working on my phone, with great success — this morning instead of getting up like I should have, I opted to indulge in some reading in bed
Since I commute by train, I wanted to be able to easily read on my phone. I briefly considered going back to Satori Reader, especially because of the detailed grammar explanations, but reading those stories feels like a chore…
Sometimes when I’m reading and come across a word I know, but not a full 100%, I skip looking up the word if it doesn’t seem important. Then of course the word appears again on the next page and I still don’t know 100% the reading or meaning and I can’t help but look it up after all. That has happened quite a few times. Today with 断末魔, 即席に and 猟銃.
I’ve started reading ふしぎ駄菓子屋 銭天堂 1 with the Natively book club. Slow going to start but that’s alright. Reading prose is a different mindset to reading manga, huh… I’m going to just take it slow this time I think and read the amount that is comfortable for me.
Might read some other manga today from my physical TBR pile
My first ever conversation lesson was really disheartening, I’d been learning for 3 years but with no speaking practice. I had a long gap after and then switched to a different teacher which made a huge difference. Being made to feel like a child (that was also my experience) was really unhelpful.
Essentially caught up with most of my book clubs on the flight back to Australia (except the intermediate dictionary), and read through the 本好きの下剋上 manga until I hit the end of the first light novel. I was a bit surprised since I thought it would correspond with the end of volume 3, not halfway through! My plan was to switch back to the novel there so I did. I’m a bit wary of having started it when I’m looking to join a new natively club next week and am likely to have a busy week when I return to work.
Also managed to finish an English language novel I’ve been reading (We Have Always Lived in the Castle).
I definitely agree ‘extensiveness’ of reading is on a spectrum and I’m just sort of playing around with what is reading at this point and what I enjoy doing. I guess there’s a few modes of reading I’ve got going:
Intensive reading - Line by line, lookup by lookup, for every word I don’t know and sentence I don’t get. I shy away from this as a ‘first look’ because it’s very exhausting. Much easier for anything you can get an instant lookup tool in (Yomitan, Mukuro, NHK Easy, Satori et al). I used to do this for most manga because a) I needed to and b) the density of lookups wasn’t that bad, but this hits a wall the less vocabulary you know in a piece.
Scan and read - Reading something first just for pure phonetics and then going over it again immediately afterwards (after a suitable chunk) doing intensive lookups. Again easier with an instant lookup tool (and/or furigana). Mostly employing this for reading prose at the moment.
Read and later lookup - Reading something and trying to understand it, but not bothering with lookups right now; then coming back to it after a certain time period and doing lookups (and adding them to a list, a spreadsheet etc). I do this for most manga at this point, at least the ones within my rough comprehension range (say about 22-24 on natively).
Pure scanning - This is where I just read something looking at the pretty pictures and if I understand the text I understand it and if I don’t, meh. The method I’m employing with Dungeon Meshi right now because it’s just too far out of my range to understand all the words but the art is good enough and I know just enough to kinda follow along (but also not really). Not my preferred method since you don’t really ingest ‘new’ vocab, but it helps reinforce older words/grammar and familiarise with the story.
It might also be time to stop my habit of timing all my reads - will probably just try and maintain the 15 min a day at least habit (or time my ‘main’ ‘project’ read only) and not bother for other reading. Certainly I don’t bother timing when I’m adding words to my spreadsheet, etc.
So if you’re not reading for comprehension, are you outside the intensive/extensive reading spectrum? I read without looking up the words but I only focus on manga that I know the general plotlines through previously reading it in English or watching the anime. So my main focus in reading is to learn the readings/pronunciations of the various kanji through encountering them naturally in books.
I consider this extensive reading, which likely nets you the following benefits:
You’re naturally expanding your vocabulary. Even if you’re not intentionally learning new words, you’re likely picking up common vocabulary along the way.
You’re improving your reading comprehension. While it’s true that knowing the context reduces the need to understand what you are reading, if you hit a situation where what you read doesn’t match up with what you know is happening, you give yourself a chance to reevaluate the words to see how they fit the scenario.
You’re developing fluency, allowing you to read more quickly and smoothly. This is essential to have a shot at reading more difficult material in the future.
You’re building reading stamina. The more you can read in one session, the more gains you’ll see, and this requires building up stamina through lots of reading.
You’re improving your grammar acquisition. While you may overlook grammar you don’t know, you’ll become more familiar with the grammar you do know, allowing you to understand it more smoothly each time you encounter it.
When I first got into reading native material (manga), after spending some time in the initial “I’m not reading, I’m deciphering” phase, what really helped me improve my ability to read was reading through a manga where:
I had seen the anime adaptation with English subtitles at least twice.
The anime adaptation was quite faithful to the manga source material.
I had read the English translation of the manga.
The manga had about seven volumes. (Extensively reading material by a single author was useful to me.)
The manga was targeted at a preteen audience, so I could understand much of the text rather than skipping over large difficult areas.
I credit this as what really pushed me into what felt like “reading” at a decent (albeit still slow at the time) pace, versus sluggishly deciphering, for all the reasons outlined above (improved reading speed, stamina, etc.) Generally, my only lookups were when a word I couldn’t discern the meaning of showed up three or more times and the occasional screenshot I took to look up when I had Internet access later.
Food for thought, one way I find that’s easier to “time” reading is to give yourself a certain credit per page, so you could do that by actually timing yourself or using a character count and just estimate what a book / manga has per page and use that forever after. It’s imperfect but close enough. I generally do: 200 characters = 1 minute for NHK News Easy article, 350 character/page Mysterious sweet shop (14 min every 8 pages), 100 characters/page for my 2nd grader book, 12 pages per 200 characters/1 min easy manga (小さな森のオオカミちゃん etc), 6 pages per 200 characters for a wordier manga like Slam Dunk.
Anyway, I’m suggesting just count pages, and then convert it to minutes - either based roughly on your real time minutes or character count per page. Actually, you already have a page count through Natively right? So you’re already doing this anyway, then you wouldn’t need to time, but you would still be able to estimate the time if you really wanted it.
Only 1 hour of reading today. Almost finished with chapter 3 of HP1. While reading on the computer make look-ups faster, it makes my eyes tire quickly.
New week, so new quotes from Stoics in my daily journal. Seemed to talk about improving slowly over time, basically self help/self improvement in a nutshell. So nothing particularly interesting to me since I have been working on that kind of stuff for the past few years.
Also read more Alice 19th, which I haven’t read for a few days, so was nice to get back to. I think I counted it as reading 30ish pages (can’t remember if it was 25 or 35, so split the difference ) and that seemed to be a comfy amount. Since the chapters are generally longer than a whole volume of manga, I have to find my own stopping points and I try to find one as soon as my interest starts waning (aka when I start feeling a tiny strain, I’d rather stop before it actually feels straining, because I’m happier to get back then) or when I get tired of looking up words.
May come back to read more, but this was a nice chunk for the morning
more more extensive reading stuff
That’s a good question! I think @ChristopherFritz already gave a really good response, and I’ll add on a few points:
What you’re basically doing is just parallel reading. If you’re already familiar enough with the manga to be able to “follow” it without looking anything up, what you’re doing is just cross referencing with your memory of what happens in a scene rather than directly cross referencing a text side by side.
Parallel Reading more broadly is a really good strategy, especially at earlier stages (although, it can still be helpful tool to have well into intermediate levels, and maybe even beyond!). But I’d count it as a form of extensive reading because it really is all about the 1st quality Day and Bamford highlight there: it helps you read as much as possible. You can read way more, way more quickly, and read the kinds of things that you’d actually want to read with a strategy like this, and really rack up that exposure quantity!
if it’s at all within your wheelhouse i really recommend an eink android tablet for long periods of staring at a functional screen without burning your eyes out of your retinas
I’ve read two chapters of Harry Potter which is a lot. He is now finally in Hogwarts!
The new chapter of Flying Witch was a bit heavier on text than the previous ones, but plot-wise it is light and calming. Which is a good contrast to the Fullmetal Alchemist and the Attack on Titan (which I still like more).
I’m a bit behind my Kiki reading schedule, and it’s because I’ve been taking too many painstaking notes. But I don’t regret it, it’s really fun. It’s also made me love Kiki as a character way more.
I could probably take even more time and effort to understand close to 100% of the text, but I feel like I won’t reach the end of the book this year if I do that. There’s 5 more books after this one! I want to read them too!
Anyway, shoutout to the word ニキビ (acne) which is sometimes written 面皰, the latter kanji being something I have not seen in any other word.
2024年1月21日 
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