When you read novels, manga or whatever, are you comfortable skimming over some stuff, or do you obsessively scrutinize everything you read? Just curious!

I actually find the best way for me to read is to underline every word I come across that I don't know. I generally don't bother to look these words up, but looking for words I don't know makes me focus more on what I'm reading.

I scrutinize everything. I look up every single word I don't know, and all grammar I don't understand. One of my main goals in reading is obviously to learn Japanese, and I can't accomplish that by skipping things I don't know

Even if you skip the stuff you don't know, you'll still be solidifying the stuff you do know or just kind of know.

quincy Wrote:I actually find the best way for me to read is to underline every word I come across that I don't know. I generally don't bother to look these words up, but looking for words I don't know makes me focus more on what I'm reading.

Do you look them up later? And if you don't look them up while you're reading, how well do you understand what you're reading?

kusterdu Wrote:

quincy Wrote:I actually find the best way for me to read is to underline every word I come across that I don't know. I generally don't bother to look these words up, but looking for words I don't know makes me focus more on what I'm reading.

Do you look them up later? And if you don't look them up while you're reading, how well do you understand what you're reading?

vocab deck!

You don't need to know everything that's being said to follow the plot. If a word is coming up enough for me to notice then I'll look it up, and if there's a certain scene which seems very important to understanding the plot, then I will scrutinize it a bit more. If you constantly need to look up words you don't know in order to follow the story then I think you need to find something a bit easier.

If I'm reading a manga I've never read before then I flip through without reading looking for words I don't know and write them down. I look them up before I actually read and while I'm reading I write down any new words or sentence patterns I meet but unless they're vital to the story I just keep reading and look them up after.

"You don't need to know everything that's being said to follow the plot."

Amen to that. I saw 2 movies while I was in Japan and understood about 10% of the dialogue, but I got the plot in general.

If, say, you have the ability to learn five words per day, I don't think it would matter all that much whether you learned those five words from reading one page of a book very carefully and picking every word you don't know, or from reading 10 pages of the book and picking only some of the words.

Theoretically, I suppose the latter skimming technique could be considered more practice, since you're combining vocab with a higher quantity exposure to the language.

Mushi Wrote:If, say, you have the ability to learn five words per day, I don't think it would matter all that much whether you learned those five words from reading one page of a book very carefully and picking every word you don't know, or from reading 10 pages of the book and picking only some of the words.

Theoretically, I suppose the latter skimming technique could be considered more practice, since you're combining vocab with a higher quantity exposure to the language.

The reason I just pick the words that come up frequently is because they are probably important to understanding the book. Also, if it keeps coming up then I will be able to learn that word faster than a word which I might not see outside of anki for weeks.

I skim big time. I just get too bored too easily and quickly if I can't continue at a decent pace. Like Mushi said, the brain has a limit to what it can learn in a certain amount of time, so looking up 50 words when you will only be physically able to remember 10 is just a waste of time to me. Both ways will lead to the same amount being retained in the end.

I look everything up, and add to anki if i think it's likely to come up again.

I tried the "read but don't look everything up" method. Not only was it often hard to tell whether the word i was skipping was important or not, it also seemed like the words i skipped would pop up again and again and made me wish i'd just learned them the first time. So i'd often end up looking up most of the words later anyway, with the added loss that i was only partially understanding the previous material before i finally looked the word up.

Looking up every word as i go makes the first few chapters of a new topic fairly painful, but then the burden lifts dramatically as the new vocab gets recycled. My philosophy is that if i'm reading something i want to be able to read, then i need to know all the words that the target audience knows. It matters very little to me whether the word is common or rare, as i am going to need to know them all eventually anyway. And it's often the rare word that is essential to the joke, or whatever. "He is a [blank]" isn't a terribly funny punchline.

I look everything up and add it to Anki no matter how significant or insignificant it may be. My goal is to eventually reach a vocab of about 30,000.

It has its benefits and its drawbacks. One thing that annoys me sometimes is that say i've already got my 35 words for the day by reading a book, I then feel like I can't go play a game cos there will be stuff in it I don't know and I want to learn all that stuff too. Haha.

I kinda avoided this a little in the beginning by starting out reading articles because they're short and then moving on to longer stuff. I can see that within the next 12 months I'll have learned enough that I can read a book for a few hours without hitting the quota and then be able to enjoy something else and get the remainder.

I guess sometimes it sucks at first but use that method for 2 years and you'll soon have very little problems reading anything in Japanese. That's why I'm sticking with it

I think balance is important. If as a beginner you look up every single word, you're not really reading, more like decoding. When you do this, in a way you're only working your vocabulary skills, whereas if you read without looking up words, you can power through much faster and then you're training your grammar too. Reading too slowly kills the increased understanding (vocab and grammar wise) you get from context. Stopping and thinking about a sentence too long kind of isolates it from the rest of the text. If a dictionary is crucial, then your material might be too difficult. Then again everything is difficult at the start but I sometimes think it's worth embracing the uncertainty a little.

What I usually do is write down unknown words if I can be bothered, and add them to a vocab deck later. But I rarely actually look up words as I read because it kills the flow.

depends what I'm reading... I find that looking some things up in an electronic dictionary is so fast it doesn't really ruin the flow too much. I can then use the history to add the words to anki later.

caivano Wrote:depends what I'm reading... I find that looking some things up in an electronic dictionary is so fast it doesn't really ruin the flow too much. I can then use the history to add the words to anki later.

Rikaichan with a text entry window + the 's' key. Why do people act like looking up a word is such a big problem? So long as there's only a new one every 3-5 sentences or so, it only takes a few seconds. It's a bit different if its a kanji i don't know how to read though.

I like reading in cafes or the park rather than next to my computer

Actually, I purposely read in a whole lot of different ways. I figure you learn different skills by reading in different ways.

I've used the "Read Real Japanese" books, and am still working on them, and for those I make sure I understand absolutely every sentence 100% before I move on. Since the book provides cultural hints, and information about grammar that might seem weird, I figure that it's a good opportunity to practice understanding Japanese in a very precise way.

When I read a newspaper, I typically choose about three articles that look interesting. For two of them I'll just skim them, and if I understand them I understand them, if not too bad. Then for a third, I'll look up all the vocabulary I don't understand at all, but I won't look up vocabulary that I have a hunch about.

For manga and video games I don't look up anything.

For other novels/short stories, I vary depending on how much I get lost.

caivano Wrote:I like reading in cafes or the park rather than next to my computer

Yep, i was actually agreeing with you. Although I've got a laptop, which is vastly different to having to sit at a desktop computer. And often what i'm reading is on my computer (legit ebooks, i swear ). If i'm away from my computer, then i use a denshi jisho (just a cheap one i picked up second hand). If i had an iPhone or whatever, i'd probably use that.

Anyway, the rest of this isn't directed at you. The point i was trying to make (but seem to have failed at) was that if dictionary lookups are a pain, maybe look at the dictionary you're using and how you're using it. Also, if there are lots of words you don't know in something you're reading, maybe that's a sign you should either find something easier or start learning some of those words. IMHO, you can't really claim to be "reading" if you don't know a decent percentage of the vocab. Lots of the time, you can mostly follow the plot of something without understanding a word (manga, anime, drama, obviously not novels). Therefore, reading is more than being able to guess at a plot.

This is just my opinion of course. If skimming works, do that. I just found the partial understanding and constant "huh?" moments way more frustrating than a quick dictionary lookup. It's probably the biggest argument i have with the AJATT method (vague as that term is): comprehensible input is need, not just any input.

zigmonty Wrote:The point i was trying to make (but seem to have failed at) was that if dictionary lookups are a pain, maybe look at the dictionary you're using and how you're using it.

Yeah, I was surprised how much difference it made (and how much more likely I was to actually read things) when I got my electronic dictionary. In particular being able to just use the handwriting input to enter a word can save a lot of time and frustration.

Mushi Wrote:If, say, you have the ability to learn five words per day, I don't think it would matter all that much whether you learned those five words from reading one page of a book very carefully and picking every word you don't know, or from reading 10 pages of the book and picking only some of the words.

The latter option is far better.

Yeah, I originally had a paper dictionary, and then the Kanji Sonomama one for the DS for kanji (I would have used it for regular words too, but it was probably actually slower than a paper dictionary).

Anyway, with a real electronic dictionary my look-up time was easily less than a fourth of the time it took on the DS/paper dictionary.

It takes me hardly any time at all to look stuff up on my Iphone. I see why most DenshiJisho don't have writing input... cos the Japanese just don't need it.

zigmonty Wrote:comprehensible input is need, not just any input.

Totally agree with this, but a dictionary isn't as necessary for comprehension as people think. It may actually be harmful, because when you look up a word, it goes into your short term memory, you encounter it again a few times and then it is promptly forgotten again (and you may be less tempted to srs it because you think you know it). If you allow yourself to just keep reading, you can figure out unknown words as you re-encounter them again and again in different contexts. It is only through the repeated exposure that words are truly 'learned' anyway. Maybe it's just me, but I don't even remember learning most of the words I know, and I certainly didn't check them all in a dictionary, I just sort of picked them up somewhere. Granted I live in japan though so I may be getting more exposure. But it's the same with English. As an educated native speaking adult, I may well have a vocabulary of 30,000 words or more. How many of those were looked up in a dictionary? How many were learned incidentally? How many were learned since reaching adulthood when this kind of learning is meant to be impossible?