Might be rambly. Don’t mind me; just doing some self-reflection. Tips would be appreciated though.
I’ve been learning Japanese for just under nine years now , but due to a mix of being busy, being lazy, and just not knowing enough in the beginning, I didn’t really develop a strong cosistent habit of exposing myself to the language. I’ve mostly fixed that in the past couple of years, but I still wasn’t all that happy with my reading speed. For the record, I have enough vocab to follow and carry on a conversation, and Anki has about 2,700 known kanji on record, and an estimated 6k-8k in actual vocabulary, but I still feel like the lack of speed specifically is what would kill my scores in an N1 or even N2 test environment (which I’ve never officially taken lol).
I want to improve my speed by reading daily with zero exceptions. I had decided initially that I would no longer add to my Anki decks, partly because it took too much time. I thought the most I would do is bookmark unknown words on lists for specific books, and the reading would essentially be the review. I ended up going back on that decision though, just to make myself more familiar with rarer kanji that are new to me.
I started myself off this year quite easily, just to build a foundational routine of reading every single day. I did so by reading the original manga for anime I already knew my whole life (Dragon Ball and 幽遊白書). For better or worse, it took virtually no time to get through the cumulative 61 volumes in a month since my understanding isn’t really predicated on language more than just knowing what’s happening. 幽遊白書 was a bit better at keeping me on my toes though, because the anime cut out a lot of content at the start and end of the story.
We’re a week into February now, and I’ve decided to slow way down, chipping away at 三秋縋’s light novel 三日間の幸福 at a single chapter a day. I expected to have plenty of unknown words, but in my arrogance, I was surprised to find that at 90 pages in, I had just shy of 200 unknown words. That was a shock coming off of the ego stroke that was 村田沙耶香’s コンビニ人間, for which I had a total of 217 unfamiliar words for about 150 pages.
I’m not too bummed though, because I do notice myself reading faster and faster. I don’t time myself, but when I get into a good groove, I’ll just keep reading. I don’t skip words I don’t know, and I take the time to hazard educated guesses before looking things up, sure, but it wasn’t like when I read 新海誠’s 君の名は, which took me a full month to read at about three hours per day.
I probably could have beaten my record of six days reading コンビニ人間 with this current book by now if I had read more than one chapter a day, but hey, I’m also trying to make time to clear some of my anime watch list. I slowed down mostly for the sake of not burning myself out, but on some days, I genuinely feel like I read too little, not because of some potentially misplaced sense of duty to study a certain amount of Japanese a day, but because I’m really curious to see what happens next in the story. This leads me into the conclusion that it might be better for me to focus on one story at a time, rather than trying to make time in the day for both anime and novels. If I need a break from *long* reading to get through longer anime, I have some episodic manga to fall back on where each storyline starts and ends within three chapters max.
5 comments
Great ramble. Its interesting hearing different perspectives of when people started applying themselves and against results. We are all very busy people and sometimes learning Japanese is not even fifth on the list of things to do in life.
Recently, I jumped from Manga into trying out novels. Through learnnatively.com I picked out 「また、同じ夢を見ていた」and found it extremely accessible. I was prepared to go in to get wrecked because the jump from Manga > Light Novels I heard was rough and Manga > Novel would be rougher.
Of course, I had to use word lookups plenty of times, and I had to look up some grammar (which was great it reinforced it) but I was surprised by how accessible it was.
I guess what I’m saying is I recommend the book to anyone trying to dip their toe into Novels. It’s not the most engaging story, but I think the messaging as well as the plot gives a lot to think about. It uses very straight forward and a lot of Keigo, hardly leaving out grammar particles which is great for someone who wants to make sure they understand the foundation of the language.
Not sure what I’m going to read next, but I’m going to try and stick with Novels from now on as my main reading tool. I think what you’re doing helps in a big way, reading that is, it has for me. I find it has helped me grasp the language better in all the other segments as well. (listening/speaking/writing)
>I had decided initially that I would no longer add to my Anki decks, partly because it took too much time. I thought the most I would do is bookmark unknown words on lists for specific books, and the reading would essentially be the review.
I did this last year, it helped me to lose that fear over large expanses of Japanese text and to parse the characters faster, but this year I’m coming back to Anki because I ended up learning a lot of new words and only the reading stuck for some reason, so for example if you say したう I would know what it is, but if I read 慕う I would end up having to look it up again for the bilionth time. Additionally, it just makes the vocab grind much more streamlined for me, so as much as I don’t want to, I’ll have to stick with Anki for a while longer.
Anki is boring so I understand the will to ditch it. Funnily enough I feel now like my thoughts on Anki are almost reversed – that it seems more useful at an advanced level and less useful early on.
My thought process is that early on you are learning simple words, and those simple words are going to be seen over and over and over again during normal study / reading time. Hence the additional Anki reviews aren’t really all that necessary.
At a higher level though, you don’t often see those new words as much, so they are easy to forget without the Anki reviews. Also at higher levels you are seeing far less new vocabulary, so the number of reviews don’t so easily spiral out of control.
I’m normally able to keep up with a 20 new card a day pace in Anki, but these days its hard to find 20 new words a day every day on average. So now I just add a card for every new word I find every time, and reviews never feel out of control and I feel like I’m making good progress still.
If Anki is still fun by all means do it, but I think at your level you should just continue reading. Using Japanese is what you learned it for after all!
Also if what you say is accurate I’m pretty sure you’d pass N1 no problem.
One tip I have is to have two kinds of reading sessions. One where you rely on your guesses and just read over words you don’t know, and one where you take the time to look up every word (and potentially add it to Anki as the sentence it appeared in).
I only did a past test at home, I haven’t taken it formally, so take a spoonful of salt, but I think you might be surprised at how easy N1 is if you know ~3k kanji and read (visual) novels. It’s only like 20 pages, including the questions, and you get almost 2 hours.