My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread

(2016-04-23, 1:01 am)RawrPk Wrote: I tried intensive reading Japanese Harry Potter during my first year of Japanese classes and burnt out. But now I'm trying to pace myself instead of jumping into novels asap like I did before.

The Read Real Japanese Books remind me of Breaking into Japanese Literature book. I was weary that I might not be ready for those types of reader books but then again maybe not. Thanks for the recommendation!

I did Read Real Japanese before Harry Potter, and I think that's the better order. Having lots of notes to help you along makes things *much* easier. Having picked up a ton of tips on how to read common constructs in fiction writing, reading other stories on your own is then *much* easier than before you did Read Real Japanese.

Also I don't think you want to do 'intensive' reading with Harry Potter. I mean, you can, there's nothing wrong with it exactly, you'll get to the end of the books eventually. But the whole point of that path is that you have multiple volumes of a story that you're already familiar with. That makes it possible to do much more extensive reading because you won't get lost - you can skip over any given line that is giving you trouble and you still know where you are in the story. You can pick up words from context. Even better, there will be lines that you can understand perfectly *because* you already know the story but otherwise you'd be stumped by. When you know every word in a sentence and all the grammatical constructs, it can *still* be very confusing as a new reader of Japanese to figure out exactly who is acting in verbs without omitted subjects, or who is speaking in dialog that doesn't specify the speaker. Reading HP 'extensively' gives you a chance to just become familiar with which way seeming ambiguous constructs are actually meant to be interpreted (including recognizing sarcasm and rhetorical questions), and get a little experience matching speaking style with characters of both genders and varying status.

(For the same reasons, I don't think it makes sense to read Harry Potter in Japanese if you didn't already read it in English. They're not particularly easy books if you're not already familiar with the story. Not particularly hard either, but still, if you don't have that familiarity advantage you may as well read something that was originally written in Japanese.)

PS: Also, I went through Read Real Japanese between my failed and successful attempts at N2, so... I don't know, it might be a little challenging for you guys preparing to take N3. Still, the stories are in a pretty good order of building difficulty. Don't be surprised if the last one gives you a headache. It's a pretty clever story with the gimmick of using almost every possible meaning of かける. There are a *lot* of possible meanings. OTOH, the first story is a very straightforward story about a bear moving in next door and going on a day outing with him. Despite that precept, it's not actually a children's story, but nonetheless, it's very straightforward, simply describing events as they unfold and not dazing you with clever or subtle wordplay.