Yeah, 金閣寺 is a book I've started 3 or 4 times and keep giving up on because the vocab is weird. I think I read in a book by Donald Keene that one of Mishima's first stories was about a kid who kept getting beat up at school because he was a nerd who knew too many obscure words... I thought, yeah, that's Mishima all right.

Right now I am reading 夜は短し歩けよ乙女 but I don't know if I'll keep reading it for the contest; there's more obscure vocabulary than I expected from a contemporary pop novel! I have a Banana Yoshimoto book I haven't read, and a Mori Eto book I ony got halfway through, and if all else fails I'll pick up the new Yom Yom.

First off, congrats to IceCream and ta12121 for getting into the top 10 for Japanese readers last round. It's insane how much reading you guys managed to get done in one month!
The idea of having a goal to set this round is a great idea. I like the fact that since everyone can see the goal that we've set, we'll be more motivated to keep up with our reading.
This is my second time doing the Read or Die challenge, so I've got three goals for myself:
1. Track my reading for the whole month. Last time I got lazy and stopped recording my pages halfway through.
2. Get into the top half of the ranking. So in terms of page numbers, my goal is 350 pages.
3. Actually finish a novel instead of getting freaked out and stopping a few pages in.

Finishing a novel will prove to be the most difficult goal. I've tried a few times to get through a novel for elementary students, but get discouraged by how little I can understand. I'm hoping the Read or Die challenge will be the shot in the arm I need to just tough it out. Getting through a 200 page novel in a month is very do-able, and I'm really interested to see if the book will become easier, or if my comprehension will improve over the course of the month.

Good luck to everyone this round!

So the ranking is in pages read? How do you read 2005.4 pages?

do you mean the .4? different mediums have different amounts of a "page" they count for. So, if some of your score is watching programs with subtitles, or reading anime, you can end up with part pages read.

ohhh is 金閣寺 hard? i heard it was easier than his other books...
oh well, i'll give it a go anyway. Since i have it as a text file, it's easy enough to look up words i don't know... i can always give up if it's too hard.
Oh yeah, i also want to finish 吉本ばなな's Kitchen this time too.

Yeah, good luck everyone!!!

Yeah, I meant the .4. I don't think that 金閣寺 is harder than other stuff from Mishima. It's just that Mishima likes to use very obscure words. The only other thing I've read from him is 憂国 and it wasn't easier, just shorter. But other things from that period are also hard. Have you tried to read 雪国? It's not easy, but much more enjoyable.

no, i haven't... who's it by? I'll add it to my list!!

雪国　is by 川端康成, one of Japan's two winners of the Nobel prize in literature (the other is Kenzaburo Oe). I just recently finished 山の音 by 川端 and thought it was excellent, though very slow-paced. Easier than Mishima but definitely harder than some of the more recent novelists I like.

I think I'm going to join in for this round. It sounds fun but I was on the fence about it last time since I felt motivated anyway and figured I might as well not waste time reporting my progress. This time I'm in a bit of a slump, so hopefully it'll drag me out of that.

Are other people here doing the recommended style of extensive reading (ie. not looking up words etc), or are you just doing lots of reading.

Edit: For those interested, I think Exploring Japanese Literature contains the short version of 雪国, Mishima's 憂国 and another story with gloss and translation. It's really good if you want to tackle them without being chained to a computer.

I usually read following the "rules" of tadoku (that is, not using a dictionary, skipping over parts I don't understand, choosing reading materials at a level where I can enjoy them without using a dictionary) for a large part of the reading that I do, whether I'm participating in the contest or not. I just find that dictionary lookup is too disruptive to my absorption in the text, too time-consuming, and makes subway/bus/bathtub/bed reading cumbersome. Rikaichan solves some of that, but not all, and not every book I want to read is available as a text file.

Those are good rules. Constantly checking words in the dictionary is quite distracting, though it's hard not to do it when dealing with older works.

I'm reading the 精霊の守り人　せいれいのもりびと series's first book right now. Quite good and not too hard to read. It's a bit like those 十二国 books.

i don't really follow the rules. When i'm reading a real book i rarely look stuff up, but i find reading with rikaichan a lot more effective, so unless there's a book i really want to read, i pick ones i have text files of.

Apart from being able to look up words i don't know & therefore learn them, i also find rikaichan really helpful in solidifying the readings of words i already know. When i read real books, there's always words that i end up guessing the reading of and getting wrong, which is kindof unhelpful as it sticks.

it's nice to have a balance too though, so i read real books as well.

By the way, this blog looks quite interesting if you want to keep track of new book releases:

http://junbungaku.wordpress.com

I stopped part way through last time- I think I ended up around 70th. It looked like a bunch of the top people were playing games, and I'm not convinced the ratio is correct for game "pages" to book pages. Not that it really matters since it's really a competition against yourself.

Maybe I'll join again, but I think I need to focus on clearing the rust off my basic vocab before doing much more reading. (though I really liked the first 5 or so chapters I read of 若草色のポシェット - I should continue that)

captal Wrote:I stopped part way through last time- I think I ended up around 70th. It looked like a bunch of the top people were playing games, and I'm not convinced the ratio is correct for game "pages" to book pages.

We corrected that issue in the middle of the last contest. Visual Novel game screens went from being worth 1/11th of a page to 1/20th of a page.

I just registered, and I got a load of books (actual paper ones!!!) from my Japanese aunt and uncle, so hopefully I can finish them during the contest.

P.S. I tried reading without looking things up and it worked suprisingly well. I still understood most of it and I really felt like it was good for my Japanese. I ended up reading twenty five pages the day before the contest and it's so tempting to count them. XD

I wish I was able to understand how extensive reading is helpful for language learning. I just cant convince myself that reading without using a dictionary at all is helpful. For one, you will be guessing at any unknown readings, and its unlikely you can learn new words when glossing over unknown kanji. I dont know. Maybe I just suck at learning.

sikieiki Wrote:I wish I was able to understand how extensive reading is helpful for language learning. I just cant convince myself that reading without using a dictionary at all is helpful. For one, you will be guessing at any unknown readings, and its unlikely you can learn new words when glossing over unknown kanji. I dont know. Maybe I just suck at learning.

It's hard to say and depends on the persons level. I find it to be helpful but that's because I already have a solid grasp of understanding japanese now. So more reading and more listening will add to my progress. I tend to add things to my srs that I have trouble understanding+use that as my "active" dictionary for long-term retention.

The "guessing at unknown readings" is a problem, and why it's a good thing to read things with lots of familiar vocabulary and read things that have furigana on the kanji. The main principle of extensive reading isn't "read a whole lot," it's "read things that are easy SO THAT you can read a whole lot."

The ReadMod website has some good 多読 related research and resources, but I'll throw my own two cents in because extensive reading is one of those things that I refuse to shut up about.

1. For learning vocabulary, there are times when you can encounter a new word and guess it from context. But I don't think that can be relied upon, especially with Japanese where you can learn the kanji and still not learn the correct reading. However, through extensive reading, you might see a word you already *sort of* know another 10 or 15 times, and then you start to know it better, and you start to get a feel for what kinds of contexts you can use it in, and the knowledge you get is more solid and versatile than if you put the same words in your SRS and saw it 10 or 15 times in a single example sentence.

2. There are lots of things that are involved in reading besides vocabulary. Things like:
-Reading kana quickly and fluently
-Solidifying grammatical knowledge
Even if you understand a grammatical concept, how long does it take before you really have an intuitive understanding of it? You don't need to see it ten times, you need to see it a thousand times, and in different contexts.
-Developing strategies for reading when you don't understand every word.
Normally, I read extensively because I want to, but last year I had to read 女工哀史 for research for a novel I was writing. And I had to read it FAST. This is a 400-page book about working conditions in textile mills, first published in 1925. I would never have had the time to look up every word I didn't know. But thanks to a lot of extensive reading, I was able to read it quickly and still get the information I needed to get.

3. Motivation
I think I'm like a lot of learners of Japanese in that I started learning because I was interested in anime and manga, even though these days I'm more interested in novels. I think being able to read long stretches of texts in a single sitting is one of the things that transforms reading from "studying" or "homework" into "that fun thing I'm going to do so that I can find out what happens next!" I think there was a real shift in my attitude when I realized that I was reading ノルウェイの森 and I was understanding (a chunk of) what was going on and I cared about what happened next, and... it would have taken me years longer to get to that point if I cared about looking up every single word I didn't understand.

Obviously there are a lot of gradations between 100% extensive reading with no dictionary use ever and 100% intensive reading making sure you understand every single thing, and I think it's useful to spend time at different places on the spectrum. But extensive reading is worth trying, in my opinion, and there's a lot of good research supporting it.

I think that you need at least an intermediary level to be able to do extensive reading. If you can't understand anything, then it's not going to work. I've also done something like extensive reading and it feels liberating not to be looking up every single word. Once you have a certain level of Japanese, the words that you don't know are not that important. They might be descriptions or technical words or describe certain feelings, but ignoring them won't prevent you from going through the story. The point is that you will read much more this way and not bore yourself as quickly. I also did end up searching for the words that came back more frequently and I saw myself understand more and more as I progressed through the book.

When it comes to unknown readings, I try NOT to guess them and just think of the word visually.

I was going to ask how you're supposed to count pages if you're using an Aozora (etc) reader, but then I found this: http://blackdragonhunt.wordpress.com/201...oku-tools/

I suppose it's as good as anything.

i get the number of pages in the book from http://book.akahoshitakuya.com/ then, because i use cb's Jnovel formatter http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=7229, divide the number of total pages so it fits into 100, then add on whatever pages are left over at the end.

e.g. 村上春樹の「世界の終わりとハードボイルド・ワンダーランド」 book 1 has 397 pages. i format the text file so it comes out with 99 pages in cb's Jnovel formatter.
So, each time i read 1 page as a html document, it's 4 novel pages, and then i'll add on 1 page when i reach the end. (99x4=396, 396+1=397).

it's a bit long winded, but it's easier than it sounds when you're doing it...

Ah, that's pretty cool. I was originally looking for something like that, i.e. an easy way to look up actual print pages, so I might use that instead. For the book I tried it on, the script ended up counting double the amount of pages compared to the site. Maybe 400 characters/page is a bit conservative.

Now that I'm looking at Amazon, I see they have these details as well. Maybe I just didn't look hard enough last time.

Then again, counting pages is pretty approximative as it is with regards to actual content, since all books are not the same dimensions.