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This right here is the load-bearing part. I read in Japanese at maybe 10 pages/hour. Not only does this mean that books take (at least) 5 times longer but they aren't designed to be read at this pace. It's much harder to stay immersed in a plot when you can only read about one scene an hour and each book takes 20/30 hours i.e. more than a week of reasonably focused effort to complete. In English, on the other hand, I blaze through most books at easily 100 pages/hour with little or no perceived effort and I've always been a voracious reader.
Lee Child (a bestselling popular writer) once wrote that the most common compliment he got from ordinary people was 'I finished your book'. To get ordinary people (i.e. slow readers) through a full novel requires a level of page turning suspense that most writers can't achieve.
Personally, I would sell one of the less-important organs to double or triple my Japanese reading speed but none of the suggested tricks seem to work for long.
(Any advice very welcome!)
Mad respect to you man! I don't have any Japanese advice, but I know with Spanish, as I kept reading my speed increased quite a lot (I was reading around 10 pages an hour when I first started out). So I would imagine the more you read in Japanese, the easier it might get. Something I've been trying with learning Italian is using the audiobook alongside the print book. You can set it to 0.75 or 0.8 speed and read much faster than by yourself. This might help a lot with Japanese, where I imagine a lot of the difficulty is with the association of Kana/Kanji with the sound of the word and thus the meaning.
My wife was very nice and got me some children's books in Spanish when she was visiting Mexico last year. It's very humbling how I can't even make it through the back cover blurb without being stumped on things I'm reading. I took Spanish as my language requirement in college, and I started practicing again with Duolingo a year or so ago, but it turns out I still would be put to shame by a 7-year-old in my grasp of the language.
The first three books are going to be very hard. I took some highschool Spanish and basically took a break for ~7 years before starting to get serious about the language in 2020. The first thing I read was Harry Potter and it was decidely not fun until book 3. If you're interested, I keep a pretty detailed log of my spanish learning here. Here is the first post in the series, which may be the most useful to you.
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But you try, and that is worthy of respect, just as it sounds like she is if she gave it with the spirit and intentions you received it with.
Bi- or multi-lingualism is something many people do, but it's always worthy of respect all the same. Especially if you could get away in your life without it, or move too often to justify it, and even more so if you try later in life than earlier. Deliberate learning after your formative years is even harder, but putting in hard work to improve yourself is always meritorious.
To paraphrase a parable- a polygot who picked up every language with ease is less impressive than a bi-lingual who did it with much difficulty, because what impresses are things that are hard, not easy.
Kudos to you, and feel no shame.
(Plus, sometimes you get some funny dynamics if you try to learn via media you already somewhat know. Think 'spanish Harry Potter,' or 'Mexicans love Dragon Ball Z.')
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Thanks! I’ve read, or perhaps more accurately ‘skimmed’ about 70/80 books in the last 5 years but something just won’t click. I’ve actually got slower as I get better, because I understand more of the characters now and I can’t just skip over them the way I used to. That’s why I wonder downthread if it’s not an effect of formative training.
I will try your suggestion re: audiobooks :)
So I had a similar experience with spanish where my reading (and percieved language level actually) went down as my language ability went up. You notice a lot more detail and words that you just skimmed over before you now have the ability to try and parse out because you understand the surrouding context. Luckily at least for me this effect seems to be temporary, my reading speed has rebounded and continues to get slightly faster (although when I'm tired Spanish still is very hard to read). For context I've read ~86 books in Spanish all the way through. I would imagine this would all take a lot longer for Japanese, which is a langauge much further away from English.
Tell me about it, lol.
Thanks, really, this is interesting to hear. The vast majority of learners I know are either too new / too bad to give applicable advice, too Asian, or near-fluent but uninterested in reading anything longer than an essay comprehension passage.
I spent the last couple of hours trying your audiobook + novel tip and it worked a lot better than the last similar thing I tried a few years ago. I’ll keep experimenting with it.
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Has Japanese the same information density per page?
Roughly. Novels are 250-400 pages as a rule, like English ones. I think I have some kind of block or that I screwed up my formative training somehow - not everyone seems to have this reading-speed problem. Certainly the average Japanese reader goes far faster than I do as per Amazon Kindle stars and private conversations with friends.
My pet theory is that reading speed depends on how written words are originally conceptualised: as visual transliterations for sounds or as unique conceptual objects. This would explain how someone can be an unusually fast reader in one language but slow in another. It might also explain why the whole-word people are convinced their approach is better: the (fraction of) children who can learn the whole word way become much faster and more effortless readers even though phonics (sounding out the words) teaches more children to be literate overall.
This theory also explains why speed-reading instructors try to teach their students not to subvocalise, and why in my experience this doesn’t actually work: true fast readers don’t conceive of the written word as being auditory and don’t subvocalise, but slow readers who force themselves not to subvocalise are just impairing their own cognition. True fast readers get effortlessness+speed+comprehension and don’t consciously skip, while ‘speed’ readers get speed only at the cost of significant skipping and comprehension loss.
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