This weeks update on my experience trying to read 風の影 (La Sombra Del Viento) in Japanese.

I missed last weeks reading due to health issues with my eyes and sceeen usage. I feel Life apparently doesn’t want me to continue trying to attempt to read this book 😅. But I’m determined to continue with it for at least a bit longer.

This week I’m still struggling with the Japanese grammar in it as it’s way above my level of study, though I knew this before I took on the challenge.

When I took on the challenge to read this, it was partly to see how many words I could understand and what I could recognise from what I know, though I have found it increasingly more difficult to identify kanji as there are no Furigana characters (Ruby script) to help with readings and improve only just starting to recognise certain kanji (I only know about 80-100 kanji) and there’s very few apps that will give reliable readings in context, so when paired with other kanji or with hiragana to create compound words.

I’ve found it tough going trying to read even a page at a time so I’ve resorted to reading only a few sentences to a paragraph at a time. Even trying to understand that small amount by reading intesively, I’ve found it difficult and very slow going as it can take me up to an hour to understand first the words, then the context and the possibile meanings of each sentence before I think I understand the paragraph as a whole.

To try to boost my reading skills I’ve started reading short stories with Furigana intensively after reading them fully by just sounding out the words and sentences without looking up vocabulary or grammar. At times, I feel like I’m back being a 5-6 year old learning to read alone for the first time and just sounding out words without understanding fully what they mean in context 😅.

I think I’ve found a method of reading/listening that helps me to read in Japanese but unfortunately this novel doesn’t have a Japanese audio book version that I can source. I’ve found when reading short stories, if I read out loud the whole thing without checking words, then read again while checking words, then listen to it while I’m reading, I’m picking up words both while listening to it and I’m able to start then picking out compound kanji words so that I then recognise these in the sentences. If 風の影 had an audiobook version in Japanese I feel that would help me understand it better and quicker while attempting to read it at my level. From what I’ve found though, most novels don’t have Japanese audiobooks that can be bought from the UK.

Overall though, I’m happy with the progress I’m making as even though I’m still needing to look up a lot of the words, and even though the grammar is difficult for me to grasp, I’m still picking up the occasional word or recognising kanji meanings or readings that I didn’t before. 🙂

It’s been a learning experience that has helped me to figure out how best for me to read in japanese so that I can both learn to read and it still be fun for me to do so.