Beginning Week 2 of reading my first novel in Japanese
English

Beginning Week 2 of reading my first novel in Japanese

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reading
language learning
multilingual book club 01

(written in English to note my progress due to my Japanese being weak)

If nothing else, the book club and attempting to read my first novel in Japanese has shown me that my Japanese language skills leave much to be desired (not that I didn’t know I was still very much a beginner when I started reading this book).

The first week was a disaster. It took me several hours just to read three pages in Japanese and I only knew a few words (probably less than a dozen not counting particles like out equivalents of “and”, “the”, “father” etc).

My approach was not helpful in the least for keeping tabs on my progress as every time I came across the same kanji for the 20th time, I still looked it up and hadn’t a clue what it was 😂

It’s been an experience, but not necessarily a bad one. It’s shown me that the things I do know, I can recognise and understand at least in part and the things that I don’t know are things I can work on when I’ve found the right way to add them to my studying so that I’m actually learning something.

So far, I’ve read more of the book in english on the first day than I have in Japanese through the week. Deciding to read a novel this early in my self studying (6 months in after starting September 2020 and only since December has my studying been properly structured) was a large leap of faith knowing full well my skills were not up to the challenge.

Instead of finding this fully disheartening (I will admit I was ready to give up that first day after several hours of no progress) it’s actually made me think of different methods to use to tackle this and see it as a way to help continue my studying in a different manner.

In short, finding the right way for me to tackle this has taken some effort and researching but has made me more determined to continue even if I don’t finish it along with everyone else. It will take me quite some time to finish this book in Japanese, least of all because of the fact it’s across two volumes in Japanese and more to do with the fact I’ve still not completed the prologue in Japanese yet. Almost but not yet 😅

Hopefully the methods I’ve learned in this so far will continue to help me tackle more difficult texts while reading to help improve my skills further. There is always the hope that continuing to strive to improve my reading and by measuring my progress I will get to a stage where I can read and understand more of the language thus improving my overall level of skill. 🙂

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