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Weekly Update #10: Thoughts on the new bunch of extensive readers
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I’m posting a day late since I was out of town, but as of Saturday I was at 220,526 words. Didn’t read quite as much as I wanted to during the week, but made up for it on the weekend. Haven’t updated my book lists or sidebar either…. Well, that can wait.

I’m excited that this blog has been getting some attention recently! I think the most logical way to promote extensive reading among Japanese learners would be to try to reach Japanese teachers, since they’re in a better position to create libraries available to multiple students and those of us studying on our own have to fend for ourselves. Still, I get the sense that many of the people who have found this blog through Twitter should do even better with extensive reading than I have, provided they can find enough of the right kind of material. I wish I had discovered extensive reading earlier and spent less time puzzling out texts above my level, but that did mean I was exposed to a lot of words, and although most of them didn’t sink too deeply into my mind at the time, many of them were then later reinforced by extensive reading. My impression is that many other people studying on their own have also immersed themselves into listening, reading and so on, and I bet they have their own stores of latent vocabulary that will be brought to the forefront and strengthened through extensive reading.

I hope I’m doing a good job explaining what exactly I’m getting at… I was mostly writing this blog for my own reference, and it shows, so I should do more to make it useful to other people. I was rather enjoying having a blog that no one read, though. My paperdoll page gets about fifty times the traffic this one does… Not that I am complaining!

Update (June 28): Hey, they’re starting to confirm my theory! ^^ Check out Operation Subarashii: Read More and Extensive Reading meet Incremental Reading, or How to (多読)tadoku without a 日本語 library.

 

2 Responses to Weekly Update #10: Thoughts on the new bunch of extensive readers

  1. Samantha says:

    I can’t imagine trying to read in Japanese. I learned very little of the language to try to talk to a Japanese exchange student at my high school. Which kind of worked I guess, since we’re still friends, although she laughed whenever I said anything in Japanese. Not sure that’s a good sign XD I’ve forgotten a lot of what I learned, and I never understood the sentence structure in the first place. I’m more interested in learning Mandarin now, because I intend to adopt a baby from China.

  2. Liana says:

    That was sweet of you to learn some things to try to talk to her — even if she did laugh ^^

    If I ever wanted to try to tackle another language, Mandarin would be a very attractive candidate, because Japanese uses Chinese characters in its writing system and Chinese loanwords, and I’ve long been fascinated with how they were adapted. I spent about a week looking into learning Chinese, and I spent the whole time thinking things like “Wow! “Chair” in Chinese is “isu” too?” (The characters are 椅子, and sometimes I see them used in Japanese too, but at the time I’d only seen “isu” written in hiragana: いす.) But I think Japanese will keep me busy until I die, so ^^;;