Learning by reading books (advanced)

This post is for learning Japanese at a somewhat higher level: N2 and above.

It’s suitable for people who are half way between N3 and N2. If you’re below N3 I don’t think this is useful for you right now, although it’s worth keeping in mind for when you advance later.

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The only way I know of to learn Japanese at a higher level, besides watching TV, is reading books.

I mean actual Japanese books written for Japanese people to discuss various topics; not textbooks aimed for foreighers trying to learn the language.

Reading books can be more challenging than TV. With TV you can sort of guess words from context, gesture, tone, facial expressions, etc. Sometimes you can just skip words altogether and still get the gist of the meaning.

Books sort of force you to learn every word.

At least they do for me. I somehow have a hard time skipping words when I’m reading from a book.

The thing with Japanese books is they tend to be small, and there’s barely enough space for you to add some furigana.

However they have some whitespace, specially on the margins.

So I use them to add short notes on vocabulary.

The idea is simple: highlight the word you want to add the note to with a certain color, and on the margin write the reading + one or two word meaning and highlight that with the same color.

I use about four different color highlighters, and alternate between them.

Here’s a picture of a page from a physical book where I’m applying this technique: https://imgur.com/grTAj2L

The challenge/problem with this method is it is quite slow, specially if you don’t know the kanji and need to look it up first. I typically use some app to recognize kanji from you drawing it. Sometimes I feel lazy and try to use an app that lets you take a picture and recognize kanjis, but it can be quite cumbersome to use as well.

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I hope it’s not against the rules to mention, but I am working on some kind of application to make the process easier/smoother. It’s not ready yet for me to share it with the public. When I have something to share I’ll post in the weekly self-promo thread.

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Why do I think this method is great for learning? What’s the thinking behind it?

In my experience, in order to learn at the higher levels, you want to be able to read large portions of text with as little distraction as possible.

The problem is you will inevitable encounter new vocabulary.

Once you highlight all the new words, you can read the page again, this time with greater clarity. There’s hardly any furigana, so you can’t cheat, but also you don’t have to “force” yourself to “memorize” a large list of words. You just read, and if anything is new, you just look it up using the notes on the margin, and using the highlight color as the index.

The margin serves as a quick lookup that is easy to access if you need but is not in your face, and thus also easy to ignore.

Reading without furigana is also important. When you have furigana you learn to rely on it, and thus you tend to ignore the kanji. When there’s no furigana, you have no choice but to look at the kanji and recognize it. That’s how your brain works: if you train it to learn that it doesn’t need to remember something, it will not memorize it.

To summerize:

– Read books meant for native speakers around topics of interest for you

– Lookup new words as you go and use the margin and highlight colors as quick lookup dictionary

I hope people find this useful.