As I’ve noted on my paper doll blog, no matter how hard I try to moderate myself, I really just have two settings when it comes to hobbies and projects: white-hot intensity and complete indifference. I can try to say “I’ll spend two hours drawing, two hours studying Japanese and one hour reading this book in English” and I can keep that up for, oh, five days. Actually, I get better at balancing things as I get older — it is not too often anymore that the housework completely goes to hell while I work on something — but the fact is that I’m just happier if I’m totally obsessing over one thing.

I write all this in hopes of explaining why I haven’t read a new Japanese book, or indeed an English one, in well over a week. There’s a video game series which I adore called Metal Max; I actually translated the SNES remake of the first one, Metal Max Returns, for Aeon Genesis a while back, and Metal Max 2, well on its way to being translated but in need of a lot of work, has been hovering in my consciousness recently. I bought Metal Max 3 when it came out for the DS in the summer of 2010 and played a good forty hours in, so when I wanted to play it again I decided to just restart. The difference between what I understand now and what I understood then is pretty astounding, and I credit it to extensive reading because that’s the only thing that’s changed between then and now. Besides just general improvement in reading speed and comprehension, the big difference I’ve noticed is that I’m much more able to pick out the important parts of something I don’t understand very well, instead of just getting frustrated and skipping everything.

In any case, that’s what I’ve been doing instead of reading my normal fare. The ReadMOD players have a mechanism for counting games in their extensive reading tallies, but I don’t have the first idea how many screens I’ve looked at, and in any case Metal Max 3 is really well above my fluent reading level; there are many words I don’t know, both in terms of technical jargon and rough language. (I can understand that someone wants to kill me, and I can understand the context in which they wish to kill me, but the actual words they use to deliver their message are often a little incomprehensible to someone who still spends her time reading books about friendly bears baking cakes.)

This nearly magical improvement is very encouraging to me: if these are the kind of results I see at 100,000 words, I can only imagine how it’ll be at 250,000 words, 500,000 words, a full million. Of course, for that to ever happen I have to stop screwing around with video games that are way above my level and get back to business.

Happily, I found a resource which will make the process of getting back to business much easier! I am still feeling like I would prefer level 3 and 4 books to level 5 books, but in my experience with the three libraries where I find Japanese books, those level 3 and 4 books are rare little beasties compared to the amount of level 2 and level 5/6 books. Even at the central Seattle library I’m finding fewer and fewer of those 3/4 books, and I wind up bringing home level 5 books or level 2 books that are a little more advanced than most picture books. I had just started thinking about buying more books or scouting out the other libraries in the Seattle system when I learned about Nikkei Bunko, a Japanese-language library that’s part of the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Washington. I went on a field trip the very next day and seriously. oh. my. God. There’s easily five times more kids’ books there than there are at the central Seattle library, and it looks like there are enough level 3/4 books to keep me happy for some time. You’re limited in the number of books you can check out; the sign-up sheet says “five” but the guy there said “Oh, you can check out more” and I picked out another five — not wishing to push my luck just yet. I really like the idea of finding one book you like that’s at the right level then reading others in that same series, but most of the time when I get books out of the library I only find that they’re part of a series when I look them up later, meaning I have a great lead on what I might want to buy at some point but that I can’t just skip from book to book. However, this place has a lot of collections of children’s literature, illustrated reference books, series of books fairy tales and so on; it looks like it was put together with an eye toward being educational for the kids who take Japanese language classes at the JCCCW, but it also has the side effect of making it easier for extensive readers to pick out new books.

So if you are at all close to Seattle, I highly recommend that you make some time to visit Nikkei Bunko! I’m going to add the books I’ve read since my last update, then get started reading some of my new treasures.

I’m up to 128,486 words, but I haven’t had time to update all the books I’ve read, so I haven’t formally posted the new total yet. I usually try to update everything on Saturday, but I’ve been busy lately — so busy, actually, that I haven’t read very much at all this week. I did, however, make it to 100 books! (I must admit, the last three or four were all level 2 books — I wanted to hit the milestone soon.)

I signed up for 読書メーター after noticing it on lordsilent’s Twitter feed. Here I am, feel free to add me as a friend. It’s a cool service! I’ll write more about it later.

So at a certain point, I ran out of level 3 and 4 books from the Tacoma library; there were a lot of level 2 books left, but I thought “I am so sick of picture books that I could just pick them all up and throw them clear across the room.” That’s when I got my Seattle library card and read about two dozen level 3 and 4 books. After that, I felt like I could go back to the picture books — I did vow to read every last one, after all, and I thought I’d just like to get them out of the way. (You’ll note I’m not vowing to read all the children’s books in the Seattle library.)

When I started reading in Tacoma and keeping track of the words, reading one in a day every couple of days was a good pace, and my total word count increased by two hundred here and three hundred there. Now, it takes less time to read a level 2 book than it does to make the Amazon link and think of something to write about it. The surprising thing is that I don’t know exactly what changed. Level 2 books used to be harder to read, but not that much harder; they had more unknown words, but not that many. It feels more like my eyes are changing than anything else. I keep thinking of something one of my friends who does extensive reading once said: that language comprehension is just pattern recognition. At that time, I was trying out extensive reading, but just couldn’t put down the blankety-blank dictionary and trust myself to actually read. But now, the easier patterns are starting to settle in place.

Now, I’m picking up books and thinking “This looks interesting and within my fluent reading level,” then running them by my classification system and thinking “Hm… Long… Lots of words… Not many pictures… Less furigana… Wow, this is a level 5 book!” The one I just finished, “Suzu and Rin’s Secret Recipe!” was perhaps just at the border of my ability, but still within my fluent reading level. I even took a stab at a level 6 book, and although I put it back down after a little bit, I was able to glean some very interesting facts about お歯黒. This fascinates me: it’s not as if I’ve been working on grammar (I know, I meant to, but I was right in predicting that it would be the first thing I’d jettison if I got in the least distracted by any other shiny thing), and the only other Japanese-related activity I’ve been doing since I started extensive reading back in Ann Arbor has been writing diaries on lang-8; I know my experiences with that helped me read much faster than I did when I started writing diaries in October, as comments and messages that once took me all day to decode became much more manageable after about four months of frequent writing — but even still, when I started extensive reading I had already been using lang-8 for several months, and I still found level 3 books extremely intimidating. I mostly stuck to level 2, relying a lot on the pictures to be sure I understood what I was reading, and I had to really train myself to stop using the dictionary all the time. And now here I am, with a new attitude of “Level 5? Sure, that’s doable!”

I really do think my rather rapid progression has a lot to do with the many vocabulary words that passed through my mind as I played dozens of video games; I went through this cycle with every game where I first looked up all the words that I didn’t know and made dutiful little vocabulary lists out of them, then got impatient and skimmed all the text, then got hopelessly lost and annoyed at having missed too much detail and started over with another game. It was a fun method of vocabulary building, but in terms of actual results it was slipshod and frustrating; I can’t recommend it. Still, I think that many of these words are already in my head somewhere, they just didn’t get reinforced until now. As I read, many of these half-remembered words came back to me, and that in turn made me better able to fill in a lot of the blanks left over by completely unknown words, as well as makes it easier to remember the word the next time it comes up. That’s just my own perception of my situation, though.

It makes me wonder, maybe I should do some extensive reading in French next? I’m often surprised by how much French I retain — it is really unfair that even now French is still easier for me to skim than Japanese, although I understand Japanese much better. (Reading Japanese feels like switching to another mode; written French looks so similar to English, in contrast, that it doesn’t cause the same feeling.) In practice, my French is so rusty and muddled up with Japanese that I can’t claim to know the language, but it’s still in my head somewhere. I bet I’d do pretty well if I spent an hour a day reading French… Well, it’s a thought, anyways. (As much of a thought as studying Japanese grammar is.)

By the way, I hit 100,000 words! The book that put me over the top was, coincindentally, the picture book I dislike the most because the illustrations are so creepy. Now I’m at 117,746 words, and I suppose the next meaningful number will be 250,000 words, or 25% of my goal. I also got my patio all set up; we moved in at the end of summer and haven’t had anything out there except for a bird feeder all this time, but now I have a little herb garden, hanging flowers and a pair of comfortable chairs. This is where I sit and read now, wrapped up in a blanket usually (because it’s still a little cold here). Having a nice spot like this does wonders for my concentration!

I went back to the Seattle library on Wednesday for more books, taking the bus this time, because (unlike with the Sounder train which I’m so fond of) there’s a bus stop just a block away from the main library. I came back with a nicely stuffed bag of books, and now my word count is up to 90,511, so by the time I write next week’s update, I’ll be up to 10% of my goal!

I’m gradually becoming able to pick up level 5 books and read them without feeling like I’m in over my head, and level 3 books are starting to be too easy. In my case, I have a rather wide base of words I’ve seen once or twice before over the years but never learned or had reinforced until now, and that’s serving me well — I don’t know what kind of progress someone without that base of years of video games and lots of lang-8 diaries and comments would be making. For me, though, it really feels like I’m tying a lot of previous experience together very quickly.

One weakness of my apartment is that I don’t really have a cozy place to read: the office and the dining room table feel too hard somehow, our living room furniture is good for playing video games but somehow not so comfortable for reading, and reading in bed in the middle of the day just feels goofy. So I’m in the process of making our little balcony a reading-friendly area: I set up a little container garden, and all that’s left to do is to find a better chair than the one I have now. I’ll take pictures when it’s all done.