How much does translating a book help?

10 comments

1. Imo you should read more, translating is a different skill.

2. I’d love to become a translator one day, but for now, my goal is to raise my comprehension. That’s where everything I’m about to say is coming from.

   I think seeing words repeatedly in context would still be a better use of your time.

   I’m not a huge fan of SRS. I only add new words if they contain a new kanji that I can add to my collection these days (I’m at around 6,000 cards now).

   With such a low number of new incoming cards, I’m able to put in all the time I didn’t use on SRS-ing into actually reading. I’ll still add new words to a custom word list in a dictionary like Shirabe Jisho on iOS or Yomiwa on Android, but that’s only to make myself acutely aware of what words I’ve had to look up for a given book. I don’t review them or anything. The reading still provides all the reviews.

   I also think that unless you’re fine with trying to parse long sentences in English first, learning to interpret shorter pieces of info making up one big piece of info as the info comes should be a higher priority, just because I find it harder to translate long sentences if I can’t understand (or at least *interpret*) it in Japanese. Understanding something in Japanese is, on some level, a lot easier just because nothing gets lost in translation (unless I happen to not know what’s going on in a given passage at all anyway).

3. It’ll build your translation skills, which you do need a high level of Japanese to do, but it’s not the quickest or most efficient way to build reading comprehension in Japanese.

   If you want to read and check if your understanding was correct via English translation, the Read Real Japanese books (fiction and non-fiction) are a great set of books since they have Japanese on the right hand page and an English gloss (not a translation though) on the left hand page.

4. Read don’t translate

   The pattern I’ve found most helpful is to read a chapter of a book without looking anything up, even if I miss a bunch, and circle words I don’t know

   Then I look up all those words and optionally put some in a flash card deck or at least write them on some notebook pages in order of occurrence

   Then I read the same chapter but in English, as this helps determine if I missed or misunderstood things and also fills in blanks so that I don’t move on to a new chapter with big holes in my understanding, as that’s an additional unnecessary hurdle that conflicts with trying to understand the text itself and judge my own comprehension

   Then I read the same chapter one page at a time english-japanese english-japanese because reading when you know what it’s saying for sure is a different experience, and I can follow the list of unknown words as I go

   Then I reread it one more time in Japanese only, also using the word list or flash cards if I like

   Then I move on to the next chapter

   This maximizes fluid reading practice as opposed to constantly stopping and starting, stopping and starting with a dictionary, and reinforces using the new words in context

   I also keep track of chapter specific unknown words per page because I’m a data freak and like to chart it and watch the number asymptotically decrease (its been at 4 for a couple books now, it’ll take a long time to get lower I think – im kinda pissed the last chapter was 5.5)

5. As others mentioned, translating is a different skill. In the JLPT only your understanding is tested, not your ability to translate. The same rule as with most skills applies, practice how you play. The foundational way to get better at understanding long sentences, is by trying, and failing (over and over) to understand long sentences.

6. If you’re looking to get better at reading, simply reading more is going to be significantly more effective than reading and translating.

   If you feel like you spend too much time looking up words and find that it’s having an adverse effect on your progress and/or enjoyment, find a way to read whatever book you’re reading inside your browser so you can use Yomichan or some other pop-up dictionary for instant lookups.

7. the first book I read, I translated the second chapter (first chapter was really short). It takes like 50x as long and there is basically no benefit to doing that

   would not recommend

8. The only solution to your problem is reading more. At the level you are currently in, the words you don’t know are likely to show up less frequently, so I do recommend you that you start using a SRS system that helps you compensating for that lack of frequency. Also, do use a monolingual dictionary, they are great at giving you the nuances that a monolingual one can’t.

   PD. Sorry for my bad English.

9. As someone who translated two Japanese books, I found myself thinking more about how to translate sentences than trying to understand the source text. It’s not much more effective for improving at Japanese than simply consuming media normally. But you will be forced to think about sentence structure, so maybe it will help you with understanding grammar.

10. I think the main issue with translation is that it just takes way longer. Probably at least 2-3 times but easily even more of just reading, even reading careful.

    The only real advantage of translation IMHO is that it forces you to think through the sentence, consider every word and grammar in it and really interpret the whole thing.

    In reading, it can be really easy to just speed through a sentence because you more or less get the gist especially with the help of the context and ignore a somewhat surprising grammatical component or a slightly unfamiliar adverb.

    So I think it can have its benefits actually but it’s just not really time efficient.