Jun
27
By Kendo
Categories: Japanese Language, Practice Off the Cushion (Daily Life), Uncategorized
Jun
27
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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.
Thanks for the awesome information! I think I’ll try this style out now that I’ve seen a few of you having a lot of success with it.
This sounds interesting, of course I believe you probably could do away with the SRS portion of it. I’d like to hear how you do with this method, and how you progress with it. I think reading is probably the easiest and most enjoyable way to learn a foreign language.
A really neat idea! This is especially useful for people who don’t have much access to physical books. I think it’s really funny how much of an effect Liana has had on a lot of us. With just one inspiring post she has changed the way a lot of people approach extensive reading. Like you, I was always a fan of the idea of extensive reading and have taken part in the RMoD contests.
Looking forward to a future post about your progress with this method.
I understand perfectly the problem you’re running into, because I had it too — even among picture books, nearly all level 2 under the system I use, the difficulty varies considerably. (And I just returned one book to the library today — I swear it looks like it ought to be a high three, but I just can’t deal with it, and I’ve tried to read it like five times.)
I think I’m going to work on that online resources post a bit to make it clear which sites I think would be better to start with — I saw on one forum someone starting with the Yahoo kids news, which, unless his reading skills are considerably better than mine, would not be my recommendation. (Although it won’t be a problem too much longer, as they’re getting rid of it at the end of the month. How annoying is that? The format was lovely.)
So I’m not sure I’m understanding it right – do you break the stories up into several cards, or do you have a story on each card? If it’s the former, isn’t it kind of annoying to read the stories broken up? I could see something like this working for choosing stories at the right level out of a pool – like, if you took the first page of a bunch of stories and evaluated them this way, you’d wind up with a nicely sorted stack of first pages of stories, and you’d have a better idea of which ones would be easiest to read first… Reading the stories in a broken-up way seems counter-intuitive to me, though. But again, I could be misunderstanding.
Koyami, I think it’s so awesome ^^ When I was writing that post, I kept thinking “This is so long that no one’s going to read it, and I could be doing something useful and reading books instead.” So I’m really happy that people are getting something out of it!
Liana, actually I have some cards set up each way. Most of them have entire stories on them, however, a few of the longer stories I split in two, and then stories from sites like http://www.e-hon.jp/demo1/index1.htm, where there are essentially multiple pages (ie. each story has several images , each image grouped with a section of text), I have split up by “page” so that the images and text stay grouped together correctly. I understand what you are saying about reading the stories broken-up, but anki will actually show you new cards in the order you add them, so I still essentially read the stories in the right order the first time I see them. After that, I have a frame of reference for where a particular card belongs in the narrative so its not really a problem. The stories that get pushed to the future may be scrambled up somewhat, but even so, they will still serve their purpose just fine (of improving my japanese), and with picture book stories like these the plots are fairly predictable anyways, so it isn’t as if I’m spoiling the ending or something if I do happen to read a bit out of order. And again, probably the majority of my cards so far come from sites like: http://bit.ly/ladnY1 and http://bit.ly/lbiIUl where everything fits neatly on a single card, or at most split in two if they are rather lengthy. So its not a huge issue. What’s far more important is to not let the amount of text on any given card be too much, because that becomes frustrating and you end up passing the card without reading everything just to be done with it. Which is why I do break some up.
About yahoo kids news, I agree, that’s a bit difficult as a place to start. I know, because I’ve been using clips from that site in my intensive reading for several months. It’s certainly easier than an adult newspaper but not at all as easy as the fairy tales and short stories on the three sites I mentioned in in this reply. They are ending that service at the end of the month? That is such a shame. It’s a terrific format, for kids AND Japanese learners.
The idea of putting just the first page is a good one, except that it then loses the other benefit of the SRS which is the power of repetition. Pretty boring with sentence cards, but actually enjoyable with larger chunks from a story because they grow easier and easier to read each time you encounter them. At the same time, it makes the new vocabulary one acquires from them that much more likely to stick permanently. I didn’t really go into that aspect of things in my post, because most of my readers are already very familiar with the SRS, and because for me on this particular deck that’s a nice side-effect rather than my main purpose. I will probably discuss it further when I follow up on things in a month or so.
Hi Kendo-san, thanks for coming to my blog and being one of few male members at the tadoku community!
As I was reading your post, I remember the days when I was stuck in the same issue, lack of easy books best for tadoku approach. I started tadoku about ten years ago and it was almost impossible to keep doing it. Online bookstore was not that popular yet, so foreign books were terribly expensive, let alone the tiny number of bookstores which sold foreign books.
Then, yen got stronger and amazon and other online bookstores began to be known, I was able to buy easy books relatively easily. In my case, I have two children and tadoku books are also necessary for them, and moreover, my husband is a bookworm and won’t be fussy about my buying many books, so I have reasonable reasons to buy books and somehow managed to keep doing tadoku.
Anyway, the first obstacle you’ve got to overcome is to find a way to obtain easy books, and because of that, I strongly recommend tadoku doers to make friends, and if possible, to lend books each other.
うわあ、長くなってしましました。
It’s getting long…
他に、聞きたいことがあったのに。
I had other things I wanted to ask you.
他のエントリーに書いてありましたが、お子さんがいらっしゃるんですね。
I read other posts and found you have two children.
おいくつぐらいなのかな？
I wonder how old they are…
私の子どもは、１６才（娘）と１２才（息子）です。
Mine are sixteen, daughter, and twelve, son.
息子が反抗期（はんこうき）なので、たいへんです・
My son is in rebellious age right now, so it’s like “what the heck are you doing?” every day. ^^;;;
では、また！
talk to you again!
Hi emmie, thank you for your comment. I have visitation with my kids right now, from Thursday night to this upcoming Tuesday, its a special extra long visit, so I couldn’t reply to you sooner.
I definitely think a network of friends, online or otherwise, is really important when you take on a project like tadoku or learning a foreign language. I feel fortunate that we live in such an internet-connected world these days, and its so easy to make friends all over the world who share these interests.
As of right now, I’m finding lots to read online. And as I described in this post, I’ve worked out a pretty good method for sorting through it, even if it does seem a little cumbersome. But I definitely hope to get some more physical books soon, because there is nothing that compares to curling up on the couch with a book in hand and reading it. I really enjoyed the picture books that I found at the library, and have read most of them several times now just for the pleasure of it.
I enjoyed reading your Japanese, with the English translation beneath it. This kind of thing can be helpful to me. Sorry to hear your son is so rebellious now. I also was a very rebellious teenage son, but I settled down eventually. My son is six, and my daughter is four. They are the most important thing in my life, then learning Japanese comes right after ;P
I get to visit with them every other weekend, and every Thursday night for a while. And then in the summer I get a couple extra-length visits because they don’t have school. Those times are really fun, but they wear me out because my kids want every single second of my attention.
I would have replied in Japanese but they have exhausted me, and my brain just couldn’t think that hard tonight. I will try next time. Talk to you soon.
I was hoping you would do a post on this. It seems really powerful, but I wasn’t totally sure how to approach it. Sounds like your approach and the approach I tried are pretty similar, although for whatever reason that my incremental/extensive/tadoku decks tend to get dropped pretty quickly. I think I need to abuse the ‘4′ and delete buttons more haha.
Out of curiosity, do you make sure your Anki readings are correct? I’ve heard (and experienced a few times) that Anki gets it wrong every once in a while, and that’s really my biggest issue with the tadoku/Anki method. I would LOVE to be able to read my way to fluency (and maybe make some MCDs on the way to really solidify it) without dictionary lookups, but looking up readings in the dictionary just to make sure Anki is correct is tedious, and at that point I feel like I may as well be making more active cards that target specific points and using definitions since they’re already pulled up anyway.
Yes, you definitely need to use the “Very Easy” option and the delete button often with this method, otherwise you’re just hurting yourself. A deck you eventually delete because it is too hard or boring is a worthless deck.
I do not actually double-check the readings on this deck. I do for MCD’s and stuff like that, but with this deck I find it an unnecessary tedium. Yes there are the occasional errors, and if I suspect it is wrong I will double-check and correct the furigana, but otherwise, I just assume that all the other immersion and studying I do will correct any occassional errors I encounter. I figure its no different from reading Japanese Tweets, where there are surely plenty of grammatical and spelling errors, just like with English tweets, but because they are the exception rather than the norm, the erroneous patterns are not the ones you will remember.
If this was the only exposure to Japanese I was getting, it would be far more important to make sure everything was correct, but between my MCD deck, ReadtheKanji, all the other immersion, I’m sure any occassional errors in my Tadoku deck will get sorted out over time. This keeps it fun and dictionary free.
Ah, that makes a lot of sense. Even now (in English!) I am correcting errors, so there’s no reason why I can’t in Japanese also.
I’ll try it again, then. No dictionary this time
HI Kendo-san,
I just wanted to say a little about your comment,
“Japanese Tweets, where there are surely plenty of grammatical and spelling errors,”
This comment, from you a learner of Japanese, was intriguing.
I don’t see many errors when I read twitter and I wonder what realized could be not errors but many variations of Japanese expressions.
Do you know language used in Tokyo, in textbooks, in flashcards, or over TV is only a standard Japanese and there are many many different variations, like dialects, all over Japan? Japanese differs along with which area, society or generation you belong to.
For example, when you want to say “I’m doing tadoku.” you can say,
私は多読しています。多読してる。
多読やってる。多読しよるばい。多読しよると。してるの多読。しちゃってる多読。多読中。多読するなりよ。多読するっちゃんね。多読げなやりよると。・・・It’s going to last forever… I think as you read or listen to Japanese more and more, you’ll come to meet those variations and enjoy them.
Happy tadoku!
emmie, oh I didn’t mean to to imply that I was seeing Japanese tweets and personally saying that this or that tweet had errors. No, my Japanese is certainly not good enough for me to be judging the grammatical correctness of a native speaker’s! Rather, I was inferring that since English tweets and other internet posts often contain many grammatical and spelling errors, Japanese tweets would as well. This could be totally wrong though, and might have more to do with the ridiculous complexity of English spelling and grammar rules than any kind of universal sloppy writing when it comes to online mediums. Again, I certainly didn’t mean to imply that I was reading Japanese tweets and judging the correctness or incorrectness of the Japanese used there. Even once my Japanese is really, really good, I doubt I would feel comfortable making that kind of judgement. Hope that explains what I meant more clearly.
I happen to love the richness and diversity of colloquial Japanese. It’s one of the most exciting aspects of the language (along with kanji and onomatapoeia) and it would be truly, truly unfortunate if the “standard” Tokyo dialect was to replace all the many variations. Sorry that I gave the impression I thought otherwise.
I’m glad to know you’re interested in onomatopoeia, 擬音語擬態語（ぎおんごぎたいご）っておもしろいですよね、since I tend to use them a lot for making my post sounds casual… 私は、よく使っちゃいます。
When I read your post, I remembered a funny experience I had with a language learner of Japanese at Lj.
I think he was an advanced learner and he was giving explanations a lot to other learners, but I thought his words are a bit too affirmative as a non-native and what he says is correct only under limited situations. Then I wrote him some examples like I did now and his reply was; “my textbook doesn’t say so…” I’m sure you’re more into Japanese mind and culture than that guy was. ^^
BTW, I’m doing some manga E to J translation for fun to help English speaking friends, マンガが好きで日本語を学んでいる友達がいるので、時々（ときどき）日本語を英語に訳（やく）してしてあげるのですが、
and found this 擬音語擬態語 site. http://thejadednetwork.com/ so many…