Reading in Japanese - update II
English

Reading in Japanese - update II

by

education
language learning
creativity
multilingual book club 01

This is the third article about my way approaching this project of reading an entire physical novel in Japanese. After recognizing that my goal was way too optimistic, I had to change the measurement from pages per day to minutes per day. By doing so the very precious resource “time” can be calculated more reliable for an average workday.

This is my workflow: I read for about 30 minutes per day and look up words I can’t read out loud (even if I can guess the meaning from the kanji, like 気泡風呂 - 気泡 Airbubbles and 風呂 Bath, or a whirlpool). Then I send the list to my mail account, from there I import the words into Anki and (using the Migaku Dictionary Add-on) complete the flash cards with a translation, the word audio and furigana. Now I can review the words in Anki. But when re-reading old pages, my problem was, if I did not remember the word I even had a flashcard for, there was no way other than look the word up again.

And here comes the next change: This week I went one step further and finally started using Notion. Now I export my new cards from Anki to Excel to get a nice table and create a Notion page for every page in the book with all the unknown (better: unreadable) words. When re-reading, I have the list of these words lying next to me.

In the long run I hope that my Anki reps will go down as well, as I review the words I made cards for more often if I spend more time in the actual book itself when re-reading, and not “waste” time in some isolated environment.

Here is an example of how my table for page 11 (the first page with actual text) looks like:

Vocab

溶ける

生涯影

連れ去る

埋葬

Furigana

溶[と,とける;k2]ける

生涯[しょうがい;a] 影[かげ;a]

連れ去[つれさ,つれさる;k3]る

埋葬[まいそう;h]

Translation

schmelzen

das ganze Leben hindurch, Lebzeiten

jmdn. fortführen sich mit jmdm. davonmachen jmdn. entführen

Begräbnis

I am on page 58. The book is really difficult, even for me. The translator uses many low-frequency words that are not worth memorizing if you are a beginner. The problem is, that a beginner does not know the difference between a word worth memorizing and one which is not. So one final tip for today, if you are a beginner, just read throug the whole book, and only look up words you remember from the book. That way you get some worth out of your time. But a word that comes up only once in the whole book should not be worth the time.

0