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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.
It happens to everyone! My friends' children are about 4 years old now, and they've already started asking me why I talk funny. Sometimes I have to ask them to repeat things or get their parents to translate. I still can't read children's books with perfect comprehension, either, but I remember not understanding lots of books when I was a child myself so I mind that less.
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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.')
This is similar to Scott's "Parable of the Talents", where he feels that his C- in Calculus that he had to sweat blood and tears for is more praiseworthy than his world-class essays that just appear whenever he has free time because he was born with incredible writing talent.
I... disagree? This kind of thinking is like the labor-theory of value for personal accomplishment. It matters the quality of the output you create, not how much effort you put in it.
Ah, but I am not talking the quality of the output created- I am talking about the characteristic of the type of person who tries to improve themself at something they are bad at.
If quality of output / task mattered, then no, I wouldn't select this person to be the person to do that task. And if I needed specifically someone who could improve in a certain way, I would indeed select for that person. But I am not- I have no task for SubstantialFrivolity, and am making no sort of employment decision on the basis of this skill.
I would, however, have a much better opinion of employing someone like SubstantialFrivolity for a task they are already good at, even over an equivalently skilled person who I lack any other insight into.
The capacity for self-improvement at the cost of personal shame, of things one doesn't already find fun or is already proficient at, is in and of itself a quality for a person, and part of that is their willingness to accept the possible humiliation of struggling to do things that other people find easy. Embarrassment at one's limitations are an easy out / excuse / reason for people to avoid self-improvement, whether it's the person who insists they are too fat to start running, too weak to start building mental strength, too dumb to start studying, to friendless to work on their social skills, and so on. This gets particularly obstructive if you justify it on relative grounds- there is always someone better, and always will be someone better, so why try when you will be inevitably embarrassed or humiliated or shamed?
SubstantialFrivolity is the type of who has the requisite mix of humility to face their limitation rather than ignore it, bravery to admit to it even on a forum filled with often high-IQ egotists who would cringe at being characterized as less capable than a child, and persistence to push through with it anyway. He also, if it can be believed, is lucky, and has found a partner with the grace to support him in his efforts rather than one who would belittle or shame or do nothing, which itself implies various other things- being the sort of person someone would want to spend time with, the sort of person their friends would go out of their way to help, possible multi-cultural comfort, and so on.
If I wanted to make a hiring decision, these are a lot of good traits that would immediately make someone more appealing over someone who may have the same or even higher posted skills but not the same commitment to self-improvement. Would that other person be as capable of relearning old skills for new systems when their previous metrics can't apply? Could that person learn a new skill set as the needed flexibility in a team? Would that person have the bravery to admit mistakes / failures / things that made them look bad, or would they let them stew for weeks and months until it becomes a worse problem?
SubstantialFrivolity isn't worthy of respect because he would be a preferred spanish reader for a job. SubstantialFrivolity isn't even worthy of respect because he could be preferrable for a non-spanish reading job. SubstantialFrivolity is worthy of respect for being the sort of person to internalize the value of self-improvement even when it exposes him to risk of shame, which itself implies other virtues worthy of respect.
@SubstantialFrivolity, keep on keeping on.
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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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