"By reading the words on the page you idiot!"

But seriously, I'm just re-reading a chapter from Harry Potter becuase a) I remember really enjoying it when I read the English version and b) even though I'm following what's going on, there were quite a few words/phrases that I wasn't 100% on.

Going through a second time I'm noticing loads of language that caused me problems first time round but re-reading is helping me get straight in my head.

Not that I'm going to read everything I read twice (or more) but occasionally doing so seems like it might be pretty beneficial.

Any advice on how to get more out of text?

Synewave, do you know Steve Kaufmann? Please check here> http://thelinguist.blogs.com/

He suggests we read the texts and save the words we don't know, thus we create a list of words and study these words. After that we go back into the text, read it again and if possible listen an audio record of the text. Steve had just launched his website LingQ> http://www.lingq.com/ and I suggest you give a look, because it is very good. Unfortunately it is not working properly of japanese.

Yes, reading something a second time through, a lot of things make sense when they didn't the first time through. For the first few books I read in Japanese, I went through the chapters in this order:

1,
2, 1,
3, 2,
4, 3,
5, 4,
...

that way, I read each chapter twice, but didn't read any of them twice in a row so it didn't feel so repetitive.


What I do when I'm reading is keep a scrap of paper to write down unknown kanji words/compounds (particularly ones that pop up more than once, or look especially useful). Then I look up their readings and put them into my SRS, testing compound->reading. When such a word appears in a particularly interesting sentence, I note the location of the sentence on my paper (e.g. page 25, line 6), and copy the sentence into my SRS, but still quiz myself on just the one word.