I’m looking to hear how others are approaching reading and whether it’s working for them or not. Here’s a bit of background. I’ve passed N4, currently studying for N3. In the past, I’ve done a lot of textbook study and frankly I’m tired of trying to memorize grammar rules. I’m still learning new grammar, but I’m trying to make it a smaller part of my routine so that I don’t burn out. Before, focused grammar / anki study was 90% of my study time. Now, each day I’m doing a small amount of Skinkanzen master grammar, Tango N3 Anki deck, and Wanikani. The rest of my study time (at least half) I’m spending on reading. I estimate that I’m probably reading around 4000-8000 characters a day and I’m looking to increase that substantially.
Can I get by if I spend 90% of my study time reading instead of drilling grammar / Anki? If I come across a word or grammar construct I don’t know, I’m only stopping to look it up if I feel the word is important to know or if the grammar construct is coming up repeatedly. I’m not sure If I’m not doing enough or if I’m doing this right. What does everyone else do? Should I be looking up everything?
4 comments
私は日本人です。一番の近道は、日本人と会話することだと思います。勉強の原則である、経験した後に学ぶということが非常に大事です。あなたは、いきなりハードルの高い知識という観点から入っているので、理解が難しいと思います。なので、知識の前に経験を重視すると今よりもできるようになると考えます。
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I am Japanese. I think the best way is to talk with Japanese people. The principle of study, learn after experience, is very important. You are suddenly entering from the perspective of hard knowledge, which is difficult to understand. So, if you focus on knowledge If you focus on experience before knowledge, you will be able to do better than you are now.
Yeah, its fine. Just one thing, I think you should look up every word and try to understand every sentence, especially with the ease and all the tools we have to look up stuff now. Move on if something is too hard.
What you are doing sounds like an extensive reading approach, where the goal is mostly to be reading a lot without interruptions. It will make you fast at reading and it will train your ability to get the gist from the context.
What some other peolpe here are doing and which may have you questioning this is the intensive reading approach, in which learners use text to get exposed to new vocabulary and grammar to study. The goal here would be to highlight what you don’t know and study it to quickly broaden your vocabulary.
See for yourself, which approach works best for you or if you would like to combine methods. I’ve been personally using an extensive reading approach over the last year with great success.
For me personally, i could not tell what was a grammar point (specially if a gramma point spans the whole sentence structure) just by reading….but I didnt spend hours drilling grammar…i just looked at new patterns daily on 日本語総まとめ book series to get familiar with it…then used anki to remember it…so i could recognize it better…i would only take 15 minutes of my day looking at grammar…at most 30..but i only started studying grammar after i spent basically a year of reading light novels….was a very painful year…but it got me comfortable with the language as before that year grammar was harder to understand.