Last week I described my way of approaching the inevitable problem with Japanese script, when it comes down on reading a physical book. My goal was to a) read 10 pages per day and b) extract all words I don’t know how to pronounce.

But I ran into serious problems, since I have a fulltime job and time flies by as fast as a Shinkanzen. The 10 pages per day goal was simply not doable. So I shifted to a more planable criteria, which is time itself. The new goal is re-reading the part from yesterday as a review and to remember where I was in the story, and then 30 minutes of reading new pages. On average I get through 4 pages now. So, in total I almost get my 10 pages per day, summing up yesterday’s pages an today’s new ones.

After doing the 30 minutes, I import all new words into Anki and review them for the first time. Next day I do my reviews again, then start with reading the yesterday potion – now with much more vocab under my belt, context-specific vocab just for those 3 to 4 pages I did yesterday.

What I recognized is that while doing the rereading part, my comprehension on the re-read part is so good now. This is manly because there are almost no unknown words anymore. And on top of that, when reading a page for the first time I go into some kind of "analizer mode", where I focus on sentence after sentence or even only on a part or a phrase. But when re-reading there is less focus on one such detail, but the story is flowing by as it should to build up that scene or the flow of a conversation.

Overall I am very satisfied with this new approach. I am curious as well on how other people approach this project.