*tldr and links at bottom*
The New Year's Resolution
Last January I was doing New Year's Resolutions with my class and I realized I should give an example of my own goal and steps I'd take to achieve it. I had only read 2 books in Japanese before, but I wanted to challenge myself so I decided that I would try for 20 books in a year. I went for a pace of 2 books a month so that I had some room for summer and winter vacations to relax. I'm not sure what I was thinking here because even in English I'd never read that many books in a year and hadn't partaken in volitional reading for over a decade. My students seemed to enjoy the ambition though and I started my first book of the year: 砂の女.
Masterpieces and Masochism
My method for choosing books was very uninspiring: look up famous book lists and choose ones that seemed interesting (and were available either in my city or school library). After reading a few, I realized that they were following a pattern already so I modified the goal. I added the stipulations that I couldn't read the same author twice, and that every book must be part of some list of "masterpieces," or have received a literary award.
I won't comment outside of the realm of reading, but it turns out I'm a bit of a literary masochist. Part of the fun of these books was finding something every page that had me puzzled. I enjoyed capturing these unusual specimens like pokemon and stuffing them in an unholy abomination of an Anki deck.
The Cursed Deck
The Anki deck started out as an innocent part of my learning, the very first word added being 統計. It quickly morphed into something much different. I couldn't help but add many of the cool kanji and words I found in novels. After all, each individual card took less than 8 seconds to study so it couldn't be that bad right? 3581 notes and 49825 reviews later and while I have memorized 95% of the entries, their real life use cases are almost non-existent. Even if I at some point wanted to try for 漢検一級, at least a couple hundred of the kanji in the deck are not on that test. I still study it every morning (except weekends and vacation days) because usually when an old word comes back, I get some nostalgia and remember the story that I found it in. It's usually a nice 20-30 minute warm-up to get my brain going as well.
*Most of the additions to the deck were made with the Yomichan extension linked to Anki, however later on many of the words were not in Yomichan's dictionary so I had to self-edit them.
Effective or Fruitless?
This challenge was far from efficient from a language learning standpoint. However, it did have some good side-effects. The only empirical one I can speak to is the N1 exam I took in July. I had read something like 12 books at that point, and was rewarded with a perfect score (60/60) in the reading section. I imagine that doing some practice exams and reading guidebooks for the exam would have similar results, but it made me feel like my challenge wasn't totally a wasted effort.
Putting the datum aside, I do feel like my reading comprehension has improved drastically. In the beginning I was really slogging through the pages and usually maxxed out around 20-30 pages per day. Now I can read up to 100 pages or so before my brain gets tired and even if there are words I don't know, looking them up takes very little time.
What Now?
In 2025 I think I'm going to focus much more on speaking and writing, but I'll still read for fun. I have just finished 黒死館殺人事件, so it is not included in the count of 23 (great book but took me a very long time to get through). After returning it to the library, I think I'll read the rest of the 宮本武蔵 series. Now that the challenge is over I can also revisit some of my favorites like 村上龍 and 大江健三郎.
If anyone has any questions about studying, reading, specific books etc. feel free to ask them (obligatory not an expert).
tldr: Goal was to read 20 books, read 23 with some additional rules. Made extremely niche Anki deck, got N1 with good reading score. This year's goals are speaking and writing.
link to Anki deck (NOT PROPER STUDY MATERIAL): https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1942123634
link to full book list: https://learnnatively.com/user/dorod/jpn/books/
by Smin73
7 comments
Congrats and nice job. I’m a literary masochist too and your approach is something I commend!
Since you mentioned mining via Yomichan-to-Anki, could you share a little about your reading medium? Was this done all on Aozora bunko books on web, or what was your “reading stack” setup, so to speak? I’m currently mining vocab from BookWalker ebooks and Yomichan but it’s kind of a nuisance given the highlight restrictions and a few other things (I enjoy reading on my mobile phone). Thanks!
Man, I’d love to read Coin Locker Babies in Japanese someday. Thanks for the motivation!
Dug up some old notes from passages I liked in 砂の女:
逃げ道だと思って、身をおどらせた柵の隙間が、実は檻の入口にすぎないことに、やっと気づいた獣。。。
“ He was like an animal who finally sees that the crack in the fence it was trying to escape through is in reality merely the entrance to its cage -“ p. 123
ふと、夜明けの色の悲しみが、こみ上げてくる。。。互いに傷口を舐め合うのもいいだろう。しかし、永久になおらない傷をしまいに舌が摩滅してしまいはしないだろうか？
“Suddenly a sorrow the color of dawn welled up in him. They might as well lick each other’s wounds. But they would lick forever, and the wounds would never heal, and in the end their tongues would be worn away.” – p. 207
When I read, I find that there’s lots of rare but potentially useful vocab that shows up, like, twice the whole book and once it’s gone, it’s erased from my mind.
Did you encounter many of these? Did you just throw it into an anki deck and brute force remember it?
holy moly you read 黑死館殺人事件 in original!! I only got through the translated version this year, and even that was a challenge. This book is massive, and packed with an overwhelming amount of references and unusual words. The plot itself isn’t exactly easy to follow either. honestly I think even Japanese natives will have a hard time go through the whole thing… you’re truly an inspiration!
I do really love Abe Kobo so I appreciate your first choice. Good stuff. I do enjoy reading recreationally (recently I’ve been working on Underground) but I don’t think I could keep that pace. Though I read a lot of magazines and stuff too.
What was your level of Japanese before you started this? How many hours did you set aside reading per day?