I’m writing this in English as my Japanese is very poor for expressing myself and I don’t want this lost in translation when I come back to it further down the line. Also, apologies in advance for the very casual and sometimes ungrammatical writing. I may be a native English speaker but English language grammar was never my strong point 😅
First off, it was a struggle to find a copy of this book in Japanese then I realised it was actually translated into 2 parts. I also got the Spanish version, because I’m learning Spanish (when I get back to it) and because “why not?”. I may as well have books I know in English also in other languages to help me work through reading them while learning my target languages. 🙂
Thoughts from Day one of attempting to read my first novel in my target language of Japanese:
Clearly, I did not think this through 😂
As there seems to be no ebook versions or audio versions (and no Furigana within these books) the kanji are a massive struggle for me as I’m not quite at the n5 (lowest beginner stage Japanese for anyone not familiar with JLPT grading). I’m not even close to this stage and a lot of the text is written in a casual format meaning I can recognise some of the sentence endings and some of the words but have next to no clue for the kanji readings. I have found a great iOS app to help with the Furigana for the kanji and that also gives the word readings/ meanings so it’s not just individual kanji it covers. Absolute god send.
I’ve decided that reading the section in English first then re reading it in Japanese is probably the best way for me to start (I have not read any books in Japanese before, just some sentences and short paragraphs tailored to the content I am learning). So this is going to be a challenge but I knew that from the start.
Me reading the whole 2 parts of this in Japanese is going to either take me a month of Sundays to conquer it or I’ll pass out half way through and come back to it when my Japanese is better. At the very least, it’ll be a learning experience.
There is one thing I will say, I absolutely love the size of these Japanese books 😂 They’re smaller than a standard novel, more compact, lightweight and the writing is clear but not too small considering the size of the book. I kind of want to go buy the other books in the series in Japanese just to have these mini books 😂
For how much reading I’ve covered today, the short few page long section “忘れられた本の墓場”. We’ll see how day 2 goes tomorrow.
Nice one! I've been currently learning Japanese too, other than having a passion for languages and cultural experience, I'm also working for a Japanese company. Japanese characters are quite difficult for myself, who use alphabetical systems all my life, yet the way the sounds uttered are fantastic to my ears. Working with Japanese is a fun thing as well. By the way, nice to meet you!
@Quande, nice to meet you too 🙂 Out of the 3 sets of characters I find kanji most difficult both to learn and find suitable material to help study them but that’s understandable considering the amount of them. The language itself is fascinating to hear in my opinion and I’ve only recently discovered pitch accent. There’s no native Japanese speakers in my area that I can find so my listening is limited to online audio or native level films and series. I can only imagine how it must feel to be immersed within the language at work as part of your job. Good luck in your language learning 🙂