[RawToast]

LukeG Wrote:Though I have no idea how people have hit over 300 points in two days...

You don't have to worry about me, I was horribly ill last weekend Struggled to get a quick NHK article in between my usual reviews and coughing. Also managed to install PSO 2 without referring to an English guide

I just realized my reading speed has improved when I got carried away and read half a novel to the end today. I also realized that if I'm going to participate in this competitively I'm going to need to hit up the book store...

Also jealous of people who play the visual novel games since apparently that's where it's at in this Tadoku thing.. :x
I had a friend in uni who loved those but I never could get into them.

[Zgarbas]

yeah, I think most people have something to count the lines with (lordsilent told me about it after I complained about counting screens on the blog, but I'm not tech savvy enough). I did it the old fashioned way... Just kept a piece of white paper under the keyboard and whenever I'd press space I'd draw a line, then counted them at the end. It was... somewhat time-consuming.

I wouldn't be so quick to judge the visual novel people. Each format has its own pros and cons... personally I realized it takes longer to "read" in visual novels, especially if you want to actually enjoy it as opposed to just read the screen obsessively. Reading books gets me the highest page count/time spent ratio, manga comes second, and visual novels third.

I can't imagine any reason to be jealous of someone enjoying something you're not interested in, VNs are just LNs with more pictures.

It's a joke. ._. I just noticed people getting a lot of mileage out of games. I'm reading novels because I like novels and this is a good excuse to push myself to read lots of novels.

novels.

Quote:It's a joke. ._.

Oh ._.

I got into Umineko up to volume 6 but the writing ended up being so terrible I feel too scared of being let down again by an amateurish VN authors who don't know how to write a real plot..

[Zgarbas]

My problem with VNs is that they're never-ending... and the options are quite often nonsensical*.
I think Kanon is the only VN I actually finished, despite liking some of the others I played, since it just took sooooo much time. And you have to replay to get the full story (Clannad is notorious for this... you only get access to the True Story on your 6th playthrough, which have to be done in a certain order; makes sense story-wise but is too much of a hassle). I like Chaos;Head but I've yet to reach chapter 2 after months of occasional play. Got fluent in 2chanese though.

*or irrelevant. Played an eroge once, took one choice favoring one girl and another choice which I thought was random, the dialog was boring so I kept fast-forwarding, and next thing I knew I accidentally impregnated the girl because I reached the next decision without noticing >.< Talk about *ahem* quick escalation.

drdunlap Wrote:What are you all reading?
I'm currently reading「手紙」by 東野圭吾 + newspapers.

I'm currently embracing my childhood (oh, who am I kidding) and reading a ポケットモンスター manga. Also going through FMA as I have quite a few of those, along with NHK News Easy. I tried reading the normal versions of the articles today but it's too stop-start at my current reading level.

RawToast Wrote:You don't have to worry about me, I was horribly ill last weekend Struggled to get a quick NHK article in between my usual reviews and coughing. Also managed to install PSO 2 without referring to an English guide

That's no excuse - illness is for the weak! Get to work on improving that score! (Nice job on PSO! Is the game in Japanese or just the installer?)

I was on YesAsia last night ordered a bunch of manga that should arrive as a good mid-competition 'care package'. Incidentally, are ye members of divine knowledge aware of any other 'Easy' news sites?~

drdunlap Wrote:I also realized that if I'm going to participate in this competitively I'm going to need to hit up the book store...

Tell me about it. At this rate I'm probably going to finish most of my materials before mid-June. I'm gonna need to order more and improvise I guess. :X Or I could break into the stash of OreImo books that my brother brought back from Japan, but I have my doubts on how much I'd enjoy them...

Zgarbas Wrote:Reading books gets me the highest page count/time spent ratio, manga comes second, and visual novels third.

I've found the opposite, with manga being more efficient than books. Maybe I just don't look at the pictures enough. Seriously though, I feel like 5 manga pages doesn't usually add up to one whole book page in languages other than Japanese.

Regardless, I prefer doing books for Tadoku; there aren't many long manga series that I like enough to read for hours on end. In fact, I only have 3 manga lined up, and I only have one book of each to read.

[Zgarbas]

I guess it depends on the manga =/. I'm on 宇宙兄弟 (only have 3 volumes left still haven't decided what to read next) and since it's pretty text-heavy it takes me slightly more than an hour to read a full volume. I average out at about 30-35 pages/hour with books, so it's not considerably slower, though.

I don't know why I'm so slow at reading

I passed JLPT1 2 years ago, my entire life nowadays is conducted in Japanese, my vocabulary is native level, and I read a fair amount, but I'm stuck at 20PPH or so, unless I stop worrying about understanding every sentence, which I don't consider acceptable.

I wonder how many more books I need to read to fix this

[RawToast]

LukeG Wrote:

RawToast Wrote:You don't have to worry about me, I was horribly ill last weekend Struggled to get a quick NHK article in between my usual reviews and coughing. Also managed to install PSO 2 without referring to an English guide

That's no excuse - illness is for the weak! Get to work on improving that score! (Nice job on PSO! Is the game in Japanese or just the installer?)

The whole game, which is rather useful

I accidentally obliterated 手紙 and have moved on to 村上春樹's new novel, 色彩を持たない多崎つくると、彼の巡礼の年.

Also, srsly requesting a new #legaldocuments tag.
The amount of not-awesome.. stuff.. I'm getting to go through at the moment is making for GREAT reading "practice"...

@dizmox While reading a lot will help get you reading faster eventually, there are also a couple exercises you can do that can help you break a few bad reading habits. I took these from some speed reading guides (I wouldn't actually suggest learning to speed read. To me it seems a little shady.) but some of the beginner techniques are legit.

1. Avoid stopping at every word to read. Take your finger and slide it under the sentence you're reading and let your eyes follow your finger. This should be a very smooth motion, stopping only at the end of lines. (Also a bit awkward with Japanese books, I know.)

2. Avoid backtracking as much as possible. Of course you should go back if you haven't understood something (especially if the sentence was constructed with nothing but words you know), but this is obviously something you should try to avoid because it adds more time to reading.

3. Take a few minutes each day to read way faster than you should. Try as hard as you can to understand but don't worry if you don't. You won't make much progress if you don't push yourself.

Now to get a little meta.

Personally, I've found that my slow reading is mostly due to concentration issues. If I'm not 100% invested in what I'm reading, my reading speed is going to be slower because I'm going to have trouble understanding everything. In other words, my concentration directly influences the amount of information my brain can take in per minute so more concentration equals faster reading. If this is true, than I think it would be fair to say that the only way I can read faster while understanding what I'm reading is by upping my concentration. Good concentration is needed for making exercises 2 and 3 useful.

Lately I've been finding ways to keep myself more concentrated while reading. For example visualizing what I read, every last detail (if I don't understand 100% what I'm reading or if I'm drifting off, the picture won't be complete), and I also take small breaks between chapters to let my mind rest. I also sometimes use the breaks to review what I've just read in the language I'm reading as oral practice.

I feel that, after passion, everything in language learning comes down to concentration and paying close attention, so becoming a good, quick reader is also a good way to practice becoming a good language learner. Too bad I'm still a bad, slow reader.

Thanks, I've been trying to glide over sentences and not read words over a time, but if I go too fast I end up not being able to process the sentence fast enough. I guess I should reach my English reading speed if I keep at this for a year or so.

I sort of don't understand how anyone who can read books fast can find the reading/grammar/vocabulary part of JLPT N1 a challenge though...

dizmox Wrote:I sort of don't understand how anyone who can read books fast can find the reading/grammar/vocabulary part of JLPT N1 a challenge though...

It's not. ._. And if you read enough books you'll find 99%+ of the "archaic, useless grammar and vocabulary" from the N1...


Also, as for reading speed + concentration..
I've found that when I'm failing at concentrating that reading out loud can help me get back into focus. Even just mumbling.. the words get into my head better. I was reading some sociology texts online the other day and I'm not very used to academic Japanese (been a minute since college). But mumbling along as I went made everything make more sense.

Edit: Also despite having read ~25 novels and countless newspapers I still find my reading speed lacking. I guess English took a long time to get up to speed, too...
Or maybe I'm just bad at it. 8)

[Zgarbas]

I do not really see the link between jlpt type reading and novel reading... the text themselves are easy enough to read but the questions often confuse me, and the jlpt texts are often very different from general fiction... as for grammar, usually they are quite strongly linked to grammar rules and whatnot, so while if I would see a sentence in a novel I would get it if I had to recreate it i might get it wrong. and the star exercises are awful. then there is keigo and business japanese, formality levels etc which have little to do with general fiction...

Zgarbas Wrote:I do not really see the link between jlpt type reading and novel reading...

Well to be fair, dizmox did says "books" and didn't specify novels.

Anyway, I think (s)he meant that if someone were able to read Japanese at a good clip, say 400-500 words per minute, they would obviously have had to read many, many books on a variety of subjects to get to that point. This would probably mean, provided they don't just skim, that they have a pretty good level of comprehension aided by a large vocabulary and a deep understanding of common and even some of the rarer grammatical structures.

Even at speeds much slower than that, the amount of reading they would've done to reach their speed should still be more than enough to let them easily pass the written parts of the JLPT.

drdunlap Wrote:I've found that when I'm failing at concentrating that reading out loud can help me get back into focus.

This should be a good way to work on my pronunciation at the same time!

Yeah books don't necessarily have to be general fiction.. but even in fiction, at least in some of the detective/crime novels that I read, there's a lot of formality levels and keigo getting flung here and there and of course a ton of literary grammar.


Somewhat unrelated-- in the book I'm currently reading there's a page+ long section about how the main character's father was trying to decide between using 作 or 創 for his son つくる's name when he was born. I wonder how they're going to translate that into other languages...

drdunlap Wrote:It's not [a challenge]. ._.

Sorry, I didn't mean you, I was just expressing surprise at people who've been learning for less time but can read faster.

Sizen Wrote:Anyway, I think (s)he meant that if someone were able to read Japanese at a good clip, say 400-500 words per minute, they would obviously have had to read many, many books on a variety of subjects to get to that point. This would probably mean, provided they don't just skim, that they have a pretty good level of comprehension aided by a large vocabulary and a deep understanding of common and even some of the rarer grammatical structures.

Even at speeds much slower than that, the amount of reading they would've done to reach their speed should still be more than enough to let them easily pass the written parts of the JLPT.

Thanks! This is what I meant.

Zgarbas Wrote:I do not really see the link between jlpt type reading and novel reading... the text themselves are easy enough to read but the questions often confuse me, and the jlpt texts are often very different from general fiction... as for grammar, usually they are quite strongly linked to grammar rules and whatnot, so while if I would see a sentence in a novel I would get it if I had to recreate it i might get it wrong. and the star exercises are awful. then there is keigo and business japanese, formality levels etc which have little to do with general fiction...

Hmm, I see. When I took JLPT1 I'd maybe completed one novel at most, so getting through the texts was a huge effort.

Read 20 pages in 40 minutes when I timed myself today, so I guess 30PPH is a bit fairer on myself. I think this is just a matter of my general Japanese proficiency not being quite there yet.

Though not much, here is some free reading material (小説) via ＬＩＮＥノベル. Requires a LINE account and you get 3 novels:

①『陰陽探偵・中津川玲子の14日間』

②『君のために今は回る』

③『クロストライブ　～境界の魔女と眠り児たち～』

Each novel has 3 pages per chapter and is updated regularly (just received ch 2 this morning) Try it!

More info here: http://lineblog.naver.jp/lite/archives/27918063.html

[Zgarbas]

I was rather excited about being so close to #5. As I clicked "update" on the web app with the latest manga spree, I noticed that I was still 6th place. #5 had updated 3 minutes before me, taking the lead again. It was eerily anticlimatic. I think I may be taking this contest too seriously =/

In other news, I finished 国境の南. It is by far the worst Murakami book I've read =/. I have no idea what to read next. And I only have 80 pages of 宇宙兄弟 left . I'd like to start 夏目友人帳 but the scans I found are pretty unreadable =/.

In the end it's the total amount of books you've read in your life that's important, not the amount one read in June 2013, right? I figure finding a steady reading pace that's fun and maintainable is the best bet. Just reading 40 pages a day equates to 40-50 books a year which is probably significantly more than I've ever read in English...

I finished 狼と香辛料　volume 4 in the first 6 days of this competition, so I'm fairly pleased. just 2 more volumes to reach my initial goal.

Feel unable to concentrate properly today for some reason...

[RawToast]

dizmox Wrote:In the end it's the total amount of books you've read in your life that's important, not the amount one read in June 2013, right? .

Of course.

I am also on target for my relatively small goal of 60 It will be interesting to see how I do next time I attempt this (faster reading, no JLPT to bother with, etc.)

I ran out of book. (´・ω・｀)