yogert909 Wrote:

kameden Wrote:Your problem has less to do with you reading furigana and more to do with being obsessed with "reading things at your level" whatever that means. Most experienced language learners will tell you that readings things that interest you will help you learn much faster than reading things that are easy.

I don't know about this. I've gotten the opposite advice from several experienced language learners that I respect, so it's not an obsession. It does seem to make sense for me at this point to read something that I don't have to look up 90% of the words and have major problems with grammar. I do think at some point I will just dive right in, because that's the kind of person I am, but I'm truly am such a beginner where even the easy stuff is hard. So I think it's better to crawl around a little before I try running.

This makes a lot of sense to me. I still remember jumping into native materials way too early, when it was taking me over a half hour to read one page of kids' manga with only about a 60% comprehension (this was still in the days of paper dictionaries, though).

To me, reading something with lots of furigana is a more authentic experience than "reading" something where you basically can't understand anything without a glossary or dictionaries. Using rikaichan to hover over every word of something isn't "reading".

Now having said that, I think that you should be doing studying at this level (textbooks, SRS, graded readers, whatever) in addition to this furigana reading.

yogert909 Wrote:

RawrPk Wrote:So far the only historical type of manga I could think of at the top of my head was Vagabond.

Based on the life of Miyamoto Musashi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyamoto_Musashi


You can check it out thr raw manga here. Furigana isn't everywhere but I did see some.
http://raw.senmanga.com/Vagabond/

This is good. I know who Musashi is, but I haven't read too much about him yet. Do you happen to know how historically accurate the manga is? Probably not very accurate, but one can hope.

Not very. It has a lot of historical set pieces though so that might keep you interested.

EDIT: Oh it's also on the harder side of the reading scale.

EDIT2: On the main topic, you can try just making a conscious effort to pay attention to the kanji. Moving it away, as others have suggested, works too

Stansfield123 Wrote:And, since yogert is using physical copies (which is great, far more appealing than staring at a monitor or even reading printed out materials off a wad of printing paper), it's probably a good idea to just hack the readers he has, find a way to temporarily put something over the furigana as he reads. Maybe some kind of tape would work, if it doesn't rip up the paper when removed.

OP can easily use Post It tab marker stickers (the paper kind) to cover furigana. Or washi tape for more control of size.

kameden Wrote:I didn't mean it in a mean way or anything, most inexperienced language learners do this (including me), which is why people say learning a 3rd language is easier than a 2nd. If you look at Steven Kaufman's videos on youtube, he always talks about the biggest mistake people make is staying with beginner material too long. The excuse of not being good enough never goes away. If you were really a person that can just dive in you probably would have done it already, which makes me think you'll never do it and always keep reading stuff that's easy, which is a good way to make really slow progress and get burnt out on stuff you don't care about in the mean time.

I know you didn't say it to be mean and I really appreciate your advice. Although I don't think I'll use it immediately, I fully intend to read things above my comfort level. To my wife's horror I do attempt things above my level in pretty much everything I do including reading books above my level as far back as grade school, skiing black diamond runs when I should be on the blue intermediate hills and diving into writing python scripts without as much as a tutorial. So I hope you understand that I agree with you, but right now, beginner readings are above my level. But I'll be moving on to harder material shortly.

Don't sweat it. I'm barely staring to seriously read myself and furigana is helpful. I only avoided it so much because I thought I need X amounts of vocab internalized first before diving into native material. Or do a ton of intensive reading @_@ I still do it but I started extensive reading too. Less stressful/more motivating.

Graded readers and manga are what I'm starting off with. I tried to dive into news first and well... ;_; I'm not ready just yet.

RawrPk Wrote:Don't sweat it. I'm barely staring to seriously read myself and furigana is helpful. I only avoided it so much because I thought I need X amounts of vocab internalized first before diving into native material. Or do a ton of intensive reading @_@ I still do it but I started extensive reading too. Less stressful/more motivating.

Graded readers and manga are what I'm starting off with. I tried to dive into news first and well... ;_; I'm not ready just yet.

Exactly my experience. I'm not really interested in intensive reading though and I'd be happy to skip that all together. At least until I'm really good at everything else and want to really fine tune my writing, but I don't really intend to do much writing either unless my situation changes.

I'm actually sorta doing narrow reading now. I'm reading Shokugeki no Souma as my extensive reading and recipes as my intensive reading. I've always liked cooking genre types like shows on Food Network so it's fun for me. Intensive reading recipes aren't very difficult because they're short. I find that it's best to intensive read shorter text rather than longer otherwise @_@

For example, I would do intensive reading on this recipe of karaage which was featured in the Souma series (I saw the anime first and slowly reading the manga). It's a great way of narrow reading and extensive reading reinforces vocabulary that I might have ran into during the recipe readings.

http://cookpad.com/recipe/691327