**What is reading like after seven books?**
Hi everyone. We were talking the other day about posts relating to progress. I hope what I am about to post is not too boring.
So far I have read seven books in Japanese. Here they are 🙂
I thought it would be interesting to share what reading feels like at this point.
I have taken a picture of some pages I am reading and color coded them.
* Pink = dictionary hit.
I will go into a bit of detail now. I had to ask one question online about these pages (I didn’t understand ～まい). On average I have to post a question to Reddit about every 10 pages or so.
Those pages are fairly average. I have some pages which are much worse and I have to do 4x the lookups, it kind of depends on who is talking.
**A book which is too hard: Guin Saga**
The books I read were a lot of fun, but they are still at an elementary reading level. I would like to move on to more difficult works, but I really struggle. If you want to see me fail at something, here is another book I want to read, and I randomly opened to page 117 in this book. As you can see it is much too hard:
The font is very tiny and I had trouble focusing the camera, but you get the idea of how hard it is. This is basically so hard it is less like reading and more like decoding.
If you scroll to the bottom you can see which book it is (there are two pictures in this post).
* Pink = dictionary hits
* Blue = words I could guess at their meanings (correctly) but I don’t know how to pronounce
Anyway, I have to go back to my struggle. Good luck studying and I hope you enjoyed this post!
–Chezni
**PS**
I know some of you want stats. I studied about 1850 hours so far and know about 7-8k words. I prefer to focus on reading currently.