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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   16955 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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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.

when I'm tired Spanish still is very hard to read

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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