As I’m trying to increase my reading ability in Japanese, I’m using NHK News Easy. Now, for some context: I’m sub-N3, but am trying to use my various resources to boost my ability.
I’ve heard that some of y’all just brute-force your way through something. Do you really have that kind of mental fortitude? Let me explain: yesterday I picked a couple of articles to read on NHK News Easy. I have a certain guideline: if I have to look up more than five or so words in something, it’s not worth it. Well… I tried a few articles yesterday, and I was looking up EVERY. OTHER. WORD. Though I will say that one article was related to NTT Docomo making more environment-friendly smartphones, and the other was about recreating an old movie scene.
Do some of y’all seriously just keep looking up word after word in the dictionary? As I was doing that to get through the articles, my enjoyment of it was very quickly being sapped way. I can’t even imagine doing this for something I’m actually interested in.
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I have a dictionary on my phone and read a manga series in Japanese (don’t read them in English anymore), I have my phone to search for grammar and my dictionary.
How long have you studied Japanese? Since that depends on the person too. I’ve studied for a little over 10 years.
I just Yomichan any word I don’t know. If it’s a word I’m really interested in, I copy it from Yomichan and paste it in [sentence search](https://sentencesearch.neocities.org/) for more example sentences.
For full translations, I have Simple Translate installed in my Fire fox and set to instantly show an English translation of any highlighted foreign text. Simple Translate also has an icon along the top of the browser. Open that and you’ll find abox with the original and the English. There are also icons to have a voice read out each version.
For me personally, I enjoy looking up every word I don’t know (most of the time) no matter if it’s Japanese or my native language. But I also realize that such a mindset is exhausting for lots of people.
One thing I would recommend for decreasing the amount of times a look up is needed is spending more time memorizing kanji. It doesn’t need to be a bunch more, even 5 minutes a day extra would work.
Japanese is a very context heavy language due to the relatively low unique sounds and relatively high number of homonyms. So learning kanji can help you infer the meaning of words you don’t know based on the kanji used and the context of the sentence without even knowing how to pronounce the kanji in that context.
In the end, though learning a language all comes down to repetition and exposure. There are many different methods that all help maximize both, so pick the one that doesn’t make you want to poke your eyes out and stick with it; even if people tell you it’s “wrong.”