Language Journal: October 31st 2019
Right now, the hardest part of my learning remains quantifying my progress.
I've been reading 盾の勇者の成り上がり for probably a month now. It is challenging me far more than any manga. But, where I get stuck still makes question whether or not I'm growing much as a result of this.
I think I am.
But, as I said; how do I know? And I don't.
68 pages in, I can still spend 10 minutes fully translating a page.
But, at the same time, I can read through 2-3 pages in a minute or two and come away getting a solid gist of the content. I may not know the readings of every word; I would say I miss the readings on 1-3 words per page, and I may not know the meanings of every word. Of which I miss maybe one a page. And then there are odd figures of speech, which in this book seem to pop up every page or two and those can take several minutes a piece to track down.
Since I haven't tried reading any other manga or anything else in this time though, I don't really know.
Basically, the biggest problem though is, while my my more carefree reading mode has likely increased, my slow methodical approach doesn't appear to be getting much faster.
I think I've answered my own questions in thinking through this though. I have noticed that there are common words which slowed me down in the beginning which I'm now picking up without any issues. The words I'm not certain on are almost always ones I can guess at both the reading and meaning of. And the ones where I can't now tend to be obscure words or ones with rarely used Kanji.
If I had mixed the new words I hadn't known in at the beginning I would be reading through much more slowly. And the overall time wasn't necessarily longer because a lot of the more common words were also easier and quicker to look up.
Also, reading Japanese is a lot more complex than say, listening or reading manga where the Furigana is there to help. 遭った instead of 合った really through me off for instance. Same meaning (well, same dictionary entry at least) but different kanji. And 揺れる while not uncommon, is a bitch to try and search up when you're not sure and have mistaken it for 振れる.
Anyway, yeah, the last two days my basic tactic has been to just try and read through a full page or two or more without stopping, then circle back and do all of the dictionary work to suss out the full and proper translation. I try to limit it though, because I don't want to slack off and read through and then not do the translations. If I finish, I can always do another batch of pages.
The story flows a lot better this way. And it is definitely encouraging me to think more about the translations and the structure of the sentences. Anyway, I think I can fit in another 2-3 pages today. So, done here for now.
I've been reading 盾の勇者の成り上がり for probably a month now. It is challenging me far more than any manga. But, where I get stuck still makes question whether or not I'm growing much as a result of this.
I think I am.
But, as I said; how do I know? And I don't.
68 pages in, I can still spend 10 minutes fully translating a page.
But, at the same time, I can read through 2-3 pages in a minute or two and come away getting a solid gist of the content. I may not know the readings of every word; I would say I miss the readings on 1-3 words per page, and I may not know the meanings of every word. Of which I miss maybe one a page. And then there are odd figures of speech, which in this book seem to pop up every page or two and those can take several minutes a piece to track down.
Since I haven't tried reading any other manga or anything else in this time though, I don't really know.
Basically, the biggest problem though is, while my my more carefree reading mode has likely increased, my slow methodical approach doesn't appear to be getting much faster.
I think I've answered my own questions in thinking through this though. I have noticed that there are common words which slowed me down in the beginning which I'm now picking up without any issues. The words I'm not certain on are almost always ones I can guess at both the reading and meaning of. And the ones where I can't now tend to be obscure words or ones with rarely used Kanji.
If I had mixed the new words I hadn't known in at the beginning I would be reading through much more slowly. And the overall time wasn't necessarily longer because a lot of the more common words were also easier and quicker to look up.
Also, reading Japanese is a lot more complex than say, listening or reading manga where the Furigana is there to help. 遭った instead of 合った really through me off for instance. Same meaning (well, same dictionary entry at least) but different kanji. And 揺れる while not uncommon, is a bitch to try and search up when you're not sure and have mistaken it for 振れる.
Anyway, yeah, the last two days my basic tactic has been to just try and read through a full page or two or more without stopping, then circle back and do all of the dictionary work to suss out the full and proper translation. I try to limit it though, because I don't want to slack off and read through and then not do the translations. If I finish, I can always do another batch of pages.
The story flows a lot better this way. And it is definitely encouraging me to think more about the translations and the structure of the sentences. Anyway, I think I can fit in another 2-3 pages today. So, done here for now.
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