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!

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!!!

Last edited by IceCream (2011 December 28, 8:57 pm)

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

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.

Last edited by Splatted (2011 December 29, 7:42 am)

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.

Last edited by Eikyu (2011 December 29, 11:20 am)

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

http://junbungaku.wordpress.com

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 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.

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 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/20 … oku-tools/

I suppose it's as good as anything.

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.

Last edited by astendra (2012 January 02, 3:53 pm)