Howdy all,

I thought I'd ask my japanese language senpai for feedback on a new issue that's coming up with my Japanese language studies: reading aloud and reading speed.

Point 1: I've mentioned this elsewhere, but I recently hit the huge milestone of being able to read what people here call "native material". With a dictionary, I can now read things like NHK Easy News and Doraemon and understand them and discuss them with friends.

Point 2: I recently asked my teacher (from JOI) straight-out if she thought I'd be able to pass the N3 exam. She said that her students tend to do well on language knowledge and listening, but struggle with reading comprehension ("their feedback is that the sentences are long, there's a lot of kanji and the time limit is tough"). She recommended that I develop a habit of reading out loud.

Point 3: I am a member of a weekly Japanese-English conversation group. I started reading NHK Easy News outloud there. One guy has taken me under his wing and is a super-kibishii sensei to me. It's fun but frustrating, because I realize that I sound like someone dropped me on my head as a baby.

I'm kind of in a state of shock with all this. Literacy is completely new to me. Of course I've been texting and emailing for years. But sitting down with large blocks of text and reading them outloud is new to me. I spend about an hour with Anki a day but this is completely different. I'm guessing that, like everything else with learning a foreign language, it will improve with effective practice and study methods (ie regularly reading out loud with my friend). I'm just kind of surprised and disappointed at how low my starting point is. I'm also disappointed that a month into it I am not somehow magically better at it. It's a huge contrast to, say, studying kanji, where you learn the symbol and then can recognize it like a flash in texts.

Can any senpai relate to where I'm at? Can anyone say how long it took them to get comfortable with reading outloud and develop a comfortable reading speed?

Thanks.

I wouldn't say I am very comfortable with reading out loud even in English! I rather have to force myself. I find trying to act the parts (even a little) makes it feel less awkward.

However, I think you are talking more about speed of reading, recognition and perhaps pronunciation.

The first thing I would say here is is that from what you say you have recently made a breakthrough in functional literacy. That is a wonderful thing. I think that conceiving Japanese as primarily "study" does lead one to focus on the negative and the frustrations more than the positive. Not saying one shouldn't look at it that way, just noticing that that is one of its drawbacks that it might be worth noticing and possibly correcting.

Learning is a long curve and every new skill takes time, but you are making good progress. You've come to a new part of the mountain, as it were and are starting from the bottom of it. But that's good.

I think how quickly you progress (boringly enough) simply depends on how much you practice, and it is very true that all of us have some aspects we learn more easily than others.

But from what you say, I don't get the impression that you are bad at this at all. You have made a big step forward and now you are chugging along nicely toward the next one. It does take time.

But learning Japanese is a long, long happy journey. There is no real "arrival point" but there are many, many "level ups" like the one you have just had. Rather than wishing the journey away, enjoy every stage. (It took me quite a while to learn that!)

I wouldn't say I'm an expert at reading aloud or anything, but I'm fairly comfortable with it. When I started, in a college Japanese class, I was pretty slow. Then I spent a long while without doing it, and I started doing it again in a Japanese learning group I joined after I passed N1. Reading aloud is a different beast entirely from reading. With the former, I don't have much time to really think about what I'm reading, and my comprehension suffers because of it, even in English (There's a lot of "What did I just read, again?").

Reading aloud is a somewhat mechanical-seeming process (Word = sound, say sound, repeat), and if you're having trouble it's probably one of two things, as far as I can tell: lack of practice, or the texts you're reading are too hard for you currently.