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Question for JP Novel Readers - Rotasu - 2014-09-15
How are you reading the sentences in manga/novels?
For example:
先週に図書館に行った。
Do you read this in your mind as,
せんしゅうにとしょかんにいった。
or
last week に library に went。
At the point I am at now, my mind doesnt even think of the kana reading and just goes straight to the English meaning. Is this a good or bad thing?
Question for JP Novel Readers - kfaerie - 2014-09-15
I think in the beginning when I was reading japanese (I would add sentences to my anki deck) I used to think the English meaning, especially for long sentences. But overtime I stopped saying the English in my head and more just accepted and pictured it in Japanese. Like I stopped translating and yeah I'll either read it as "せんしゅうにとしょかんにいった" or if I am speed reading or glancing over something quickly in Japanese I just absorb the sentence without thinking anything in English and understand it, without translating. I don't think I always did this, it just developed over time the more I read.
So in my opinion, saying the english might just be a placeholder for later when you won't need to say the english or translate the sentence to understand what's going on. So I wouldn't worry too much about it.
Question for JP Novel Readers - kameden - 2014-09-15
I read the pronunciation, and if I don't remember what it is I look it up. Even sometimes when I do remember, I will look it up just to make sure. I don't want to accidentally memorize an incorrect pronunciation.
Question for JP Novel Readers - erlog - 2014-09-15
It's hard for me to really know. Reading is an activity that involves many different areas of the brain, but not always. Comparing how you read in English to how you're reading in Japanese might help. I know when I'm skimming English that I'm generally not really verbalizing in my head, but when I'm reading slower or writing I do. My jaw actually hurts after long IRC flamewars or chat sessions because I'm verbalizing things I type on a subconscious level.
I notice this same trend when I'm reading in Japanese. I can skim faster if I don't try to remember all of the kanji readings as I go, but it's something I like to do anyway. I'm not thinking in English, though. I just have a direct link between Japanese words and their meaning that doesn't involve English at all.
You generally should try to murder the translation part of your brain as early as possible. It creates weirdness and barriers as the grammar becomes more complicated. Reading out loud or verbalizing the kanji in your head as you go might help you overcome this, but it will make you a little slower at first. You probably will get used to it, though.
Once you gain familiarity with and build up your Japanese vocabulary this kind of weirdness should go away. Reading is similar between languages, but you've spent your entire life training your brain to read your native language. It's natural that it take some time to teach your brain how to deal with reading in a foreign language. As you practice you will develop new habits for reading in Japanese.
The main thing you're doing correctly is that you are reading manga/novels. It's real hard for me to say "you're doing it wrong!" if you're spending time interacting with native material. Unless you feel like you're hitting a wall somehow then my advice would be to keep pressing forward, and keep increasing the difficulty of the things you read.
The one piece of advice I have with reading is to treat reading more like listening. Verbalize the kanji, and push to the end of paragraphs even if you're feeling like you don't quite understand the sentence structure precisely. Mark words you don't know or can't pronounce, but don't waste a lot of time on them as you're reading. You can always go back to review those words later, and the human brain is really quite skilled at taking disparate pieces of information and building a narrative from them based on context.
Reading shouldn't feel like you're decoding some kind of encrypted spy message from WW2. Let your subconscious do the work it can do for you. It's likely you'll be able to pick up more than you think you will, and you can always go back to confirm things later. I had a lot of trouble with reading until I started doing timed reading exercises that forced me to read like this.
Question for JP Novel Readers - Arupan - 2014-09-16
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Question for JP Novel Readers - Bokusenou - 2014-09-16
I read it as it was. That is, I don't think of it in terms of English anymore. Sometimes I see a picture of the kanji, or a picture of the meaning in my head as I read, but mostly I just understand it. Think of it this way, when you see "Stop" on a stop sign, you see it & know what it means in a fraction of a second. You can't not understand it. You can't look at the sign and just see the shapes: S. T. O. P. like before you learned to read. Maybe if you stare very hard at it for a while, but the point is just by glancing at it you understood it near instantaneously. As you get better at reading Japanese, it gets quicker, and it becomes like the stop sign example.
Granted, it may be different for others, but that's what it's like for me.
Question for JP Novel Readers - Rotasu - 2014-09-16
Thank you for all the quick replies. This was very helpful. So I should try and focus on just picturing the kana readings? Like when I find a new word, I should learn the meaning and then focus on learning how to read it for when I see it in the wild
Question for JP Novel Readers - Aikynaro - 2014-09-16
I subvocalise in Japanese. Doing it in English sounds weird and ass-backwards, to be honest. Not sure why you'd need to or want to.
What happens when you get to a word that doesn't translate neatly?
Question for JP Novel Readers - Arupan - 2014-09-16
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Question for JP Novel Readers - cophnia61 - 2014-09-16
I think a good thing to do is to read as you listen to the same content (i.e.: japanese movies with exact japanese subtitles, or podcasts with transcriptions etc..), so your mind get used to build a natural connection between the written word and its spoken counterpart in japanese.
Question for JP Novel Readers - drdunlap - 2014-09-16
I read the words as Japanese and rarely receive any interference from English. This is probably because of the way I studied to get to this point (don't translate too much and let things work themselves out). I do the same while talking and even thinking in Japanese mode. I recommend this but there are clearly people who can continue the split-second translation without any trouble on up to the highest of levels (like Arupan).
However, as a result, I sometimes find myself unable to translate well between the two languages despite having no trouble *using* them. Or rather, I sometimes find that I've learned a Japanese word without ever consulting the English so the best I can do is an approximation. Not that I have any problem with that. I also sometimes find myself jealous of people who can do this more easily. I guess this is one reason I decided not to go into translation. I hear they value precision and things. Maybe.
I'd say just do whatever feels natural. If the English is popping up in your brain and this bothers you then feel free to try and fix it by keeping it in mind while reading. Or if this is interfering with your ability to remember readings and so with your ability to use the language for conversation. That could be bad. Otherwise just keep on doing what works for you?
Question for JP Novel Readers - sholum - 2014-09-16
It depends on the word for me. For most of it, I just read the pronunciation, but I actively translate some new words in order to get them worked in. I switch to just reading as soon as it's convenient, which means I can even skip the translating stage entirely (usually for words that don't translate nicely in the context or that I learned through context; recent example being 要石; typing it just now was the first time I saw the translation and thinking 'something like that huge stone at the temple from the beginning of that VN that got blown up' every time I read it is a pain, so I don't bother. Strangely enough, the use in the VN wasn't anywhere close to the translation, so I guess I need to look it up to make sure).
Actively translating things slows you down, but it will work its way out as you progress. And if it doesn't, it's not a big deal, unless it really bothers you. Extensive reading has worked wonders for me, so maybe try more of that, if you want.
Question for JP Novel Readers - yogert909 - 2014-09-16
Aikynaro Wrote:I subvocalise in Japanese. Doing it in English sounds weird and ass-backwards, to be honest. Not sure why you'd need to or want to.That's what I do, but I thought I was in the minority. It seems like that's just how people find it comfortable to read.
What happens when you get to a word that doesn't translate neatly?
The only time I think of an English word is when it's a long sentence with a lot of words that I don't know too well. I find that translating a few words into English frees up some mental bandwidth to make sense of the sentence. Most sentences however, I just read in Japanese.
Question for JP Novel Readers - yudantaiteki - 2014-09-16
I think it's good to force yourself to read as Japanese when you're still in the learning phase -- I feel like my reading was slowed down until I trained myself not to be switching between Japanese and English.
However, I still do the thing Arupan does where sometimes I just skip over a long kanji string -- in my research the names of commentaries and manuscripts are sometimes very long because they contain the title of the work, the manuscript writer, and the location. i.e. (国学院大学図書館蔵伝藤原為家卿筆「源氏物語 花宴」), and I just process that as "manuscript X" and move on, or just go with the "tameie" part and ignore the rest.
Question for JP Novel Readers - erlog - 2014-09-16
Yeah a few people have posted about their "skipping" behavior while reading, and I don't think it's really that big of a deal. What we think of as Reading is actually a set of different skills that we apply as needed without thinking about it.
Some reading is information search where you're skimming for a single piece of information. That's different from regular skimming which is trying to discern the main point of a piece of text quickly, and without necessarily reading every word. That again is different from reading for pleasure where we subconsciously change the pace of reading depending on the part of the story we're reading. Then finally at the end of it we have full attention, every single word, subvocalized reading which is actually the minority of the reading we tend to do in our native language.
Most people tend to think of reading as being only that final style of reading because they just don't think about it. That's the kind of reading we started to learn to read with in our native language. So when we start to learn a foreign language we approach it from the standpoint of what we think reading should be. We read every word. We look up every word we don't know. We treat it like a puzzle to be solved.
That might actually be necessary at first, but it's also important to move into other reading styles. The reading styles that involve skimming are actually higher level reading skills. Skimming works because of the application of assumptions about the material and language involved. It requires a working knowledge of basic patterns in order to digest text accurately without parsing all of it.
So some people have talked a bit guiltily about their "skipping" behavior, but I really think they shouldn't feel so guilty about it. Reading is a set of many different kinds of skills, and reading always has a purpose. If you're interacting with text in a way that is fulfilling your goal then that is successful reading. It's natural that you move to higher order styles of reading as your reading ability gets better.
If there's a passage in a book you're reading about a specific kind of moss growing on a tree in a forest then it's most likely not so important to figure out the English name for that moss or look up a picture on Google Images. The same goes nearly every piece of information within a text. Some text is more important than other text for achieving your goal.
Most of the time when I'm reading a novel I'm trying to keep track of the overall plot and character interactions. Most of the time when I'm reading an essay I'm trying to figure out what the main thesis or aim of the author is. If I find myself failing at these goals then I start looking up words or re-reading to figure it out. If I'm not failing at these goals, though, then I pretty much just push forward and look up words that seem to be common.
Those of you who are guiltily skipping should just kind of lean into that unapologetically. It's the beginning stages of your brain being able to skim text in Japanese. You are getting the meaning without having to parse, and that frees your brain up to parse the actual important bits.
The JLPT actually tests skimming and information search behavior more than it tests deep reading due to the time constraints and question style.
Question for JP Novel Readers - yogert909 - 2014-09-16
Of course skipping difficult or banal information creates habits that are hard to unlearn. I have a hard time remembering proper names and dates because I glossed over them as a kid learning English. So, even now, if I don't make an effort to pay attention, I reading things like "in the year such-and-such, so-and-so conquered the so-and-sos".
Question for JP Novel Readers - buonaparte - 2014-09-17
Rotasu Wrote:At the point I am at now, my mind doesnt even think of the kana reading and just goes straight to the English meaning. Is this a good or bad thing?I haven't read the replies.
To my mind, there are two problems:
1. not enough exposure to personaly relevant content
2. you start from elements (kanji) and try to get to the meaning. I did it the other way round: from meaning to elements - that means AUDIO + transcript + translation. I read the translation to get the general picture and listened and followed the written text at the same time.
Didn't you start the Heisig way: kanji + weird mnemonics in ENGLISH? That might be one of your problems.
Question for JP Novel Readers - yudantaiteki - 2014-09-17
I also think there's value in doing various things with reading. It's definitely good to try to read a lot and not get bogged down with details, but it's also good to go for the details every so often -- if you feel like it, look up every word and grammar point now and then, or even try to translate something. What you don't want to do is get in a rut.