.

So, I’ve been a fan of the idea of extensive reading for a long time, and taken part in every round of the Read More or Die: Tadoku Contest (which is coming up again in just a few days, and was actually the impetus that got me to finally write this after a couple weeks of thinking about it) but it was a post titled “My Tadoku Manifesto: Why I Started Extensive Reading and Why You Should Consider it Too” that really pushed me to do it, and do it in a systematic way. I always knew the basic principles, but I never knew how one determined what the appropriate reading level was, or how to tell if a particular text was at your level. This wonderful post by Liana explained all that, as well as providing bucketloads of inspiration and encouragement. So I set off to the Nashville Metro Public Library’s Main Branch, fully hoping to find plenty of books in Japanese for a variety of reasons, including the fact that I was able to find listings for some on their web catalog.  When I got there I found about 20 children’s books that were at or slightly above my reading level, and that was it. It was more than I had any right or reason to expect to find, given that I live in an English speaking country, but far less than I had hoped to find. This was just enough books to whet my appetite, give me a taste of what extensive reading could be like, and get me started, but not nearly enough to carry the entirety of the project.

However, if you know anything about me, or this blog, I’m not very easily deterred. If a roadblock comes up, I typically find a way under, over or around it, and when none of those options work, I bust out the dynamite. So, I still have a number of places I plan to search for more physical books, and have hopes of having better luck with those when I do. But, in the meantime, after burning through all 20 books in a few days, I wanted to keep my momentum.  The good news: There was abundant material written in Japanese at a variety of reading levels all over the internet, and I had much of it bookmarked. Further, within a day or two of mentioning my dillema in a reply on her blog, Liana graciously put up an online resources post that had enough material on its own to carry someone from beginner to fluent. The bad news: there was such an abundance of material, none of it particularly sorted by level or easy to judge at a glance, making it difficult to know where to get started.

One solution would just be to plunge in and figure it out as I went, but I typically found myself overwhelmed and unsure of where to start. However, I’ve previously written about Incremental Reading and had been successfully using it as a strategy for intensive reading (the exact opposite of extensive reading) for months now. So a solution came to mind quite readily. Take the stories online, slap them into anki in chunks that would be appropriate for reading at one time, and read them incrementally. To give a quick summary of incremental reading, the idea is that you put lots of reading material into an SRS (spaced repetition system) and sit down with it and read.  Material that you don’t understand or is too difficult gets pushed out into the future, to be encountered again when you are more able to understand it, after having read other texts or encountering it multiple times.  This works perfectly as a sorting mechanism for extensive reading.

A few tips for setting this up:

First, I recommend using Anki. It’s easy to use, feature rich, and regularly updated. And it has some of the plug-ins and options I’m about to discuss.

Second, install the Japanese Support plug-in.  This will enable you to add furigana to the stories that need it. This way you can have access to readings for unknown words without having to resort to using any sort of dictionary.

Now, Set up a card model with the following fields: Expression, Reading and Images.

Find a source of material, with stories you think range around your reading level. Some will be too hard, some might be too easy, that’s ok. This is why we are using this method.  Pick your first story and decide if you want all of it on one card, or if you need to break it into multiple cards. I have some of each. If a story has multiple pages with images for each page, i tend to do a card per page so I can keep the images with the appropriate text (Here’s an example of what I mean). Now, copy any image or images into the “Image” field of your first card and text into the “Expression” field. Now go into the card layout and set it up like this:

This has the Image field and the Expression field showing up as the “front” of the card, and the Image field and the Readings field showing up as the “back” of the card. This way you can try reading without furigana, then if you need it, you can simply hit Answer and the back of the card will show up as a reproduction of the front, but with furigana added.

Your Cards will look something like this:

Front

Back (Notice the furigana on 下)

Obviously each card contains more text but you have to scroll down in order to read it. After you add the cards, to get the furigana on the back side, go into Anki’s browser, select the newly added cards and then from the File menu, pick “Regenerate Readings.”  Provided your deck has “Japanese” in the beginning of its name, and your card model has a field called “Reading,” this will copy the text from the Expression field, and insert furigana. Sometimes, this comes up looking funky the first time the card shows up when your doing them. To solve this, go into the “Edit Card” screen, then go back and everything should look right now.

When you do these cards, don’t treat them like regular flash cards at all. Just read them. The second a particular card proves too difficult, boring, or frustrating, pass it as Very Easy to push it into the future (or if its boring just delete it if you want) and move on to the next one. Cards that you can read fluently should get passed as well, but I usually don’t use “Very Easy” for these, and use “Hard” or the middle option instead. This lets me get more frequent repetition with the material that’s at my level, while pushing the material which is too difficult further into the future, to be attempted again each time they come up, to test whether or not they are easy enough for me now.

Enjoy, and whether you use this method or not, I highly reccomend you take part in the Tadoku Contest!  Happy Reading.