To any advanced learners (and especially those who went to university in Japan): do you have any tips for getting through textbooks aimed towards natives? I am in University in Japan and have passed N1 and generally don't have very big issues with understanding lectures, talking to classmates, and writing essays/doing assignments… but the assigned textbook readings are starting to wear me down a lot. The last few semesters I only had one or two classes that really required textbook reading and it was mostly for group projects on chapters, so the workload was heavily split up with my native Japanese classmates and mostly relegated to summarizing and regurgitation rather than internalizing the content and being fully quizzed/tested on it.
However, this semester, I have 6 classes with mandatory textbooks, and all of them require individual work and actually reading through the full chapters, answering questions on them, doing writings, quizzes, solo presentations etc etc etc and it's getting very hard to keep up with. Before, I really only had to take textbooks in bite sized chunks and frankly didn't even bother trying to read the whole thing.
My current process is:
skim pages and highlight unknown words → look up those words and make flashcards → SRS them until I felt mostly confident → read through the chapter and take notes (sometimes takes a few goes until I feel like I have a solid comprehension)
When I only had one textbook, this would take up time but it wasn't THAT bad, but now that I have 5x the work, it's getting hard to scale it. The content is different enough in a lot of the books that I'm not seeing a very big crossover in the specific type of unknown vocab/language used either, unfortunately, so it doesn't even feel like getting better at one book passively improves the other ones very much either lol
Is this a "trial-by-fire" that I just need to push through until I improve enough that the imposter syndrome goes away, or is my approach just too inefficient? Should I have read more novels in my free time instead of scrolling reddit all day??
Obviously, I would prefer to avoid just taking pictures of the chapters and running them through google translate, but that gets more and more tempting the closer I find myself to deadlines.
I'd appreciate thoughts and advice from people who have been in a similar situation before!
by TimeSwirl