Hi, my name is Liana Kerr. I’m 29 years old and live in Tacoma, Washington with my husband Brian Kerr<\/A> and our two cats. I work as a rater for the writing portion of the TOEFL iBT, and when I’m not studying Japanese, I’m often drawing paper dolls<\/A>, playing video games, cooking or watching movies. I volunteer at the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium<\/A> doing miscellaneous office work (and not feeding the polar bears, don’t get the wrong idea), and I’ve recently started organizing the Tacoma Japanese Language and Culture Meetup Group<\/A>.<\/p>\n

I studied Japanese for three years in college, but studied and used the language only intermittently for several years after I graduated. I’ve been interested in extensive reading, or tadoku (\u591a\u8aad) since some of my friends on Lang-8<\/A> told me about their experiences with it in late 2009; I started trying to do extensive reading in spring of 2010, but I started focusing on it (and finally stopped using the dictionary) around the end of the same year, a few months after we moved to Tacoma. I follow the guidelines my friends use<\/A>, loosely translated from Kunihide Sakai’s tadoku.org<\/A>:<\/p>\n

1. Don’t look up words in the dictionary.
\n2. Skip over parts you don’t understand.
\n3. If you aren’t enjoying one book, toss it aside and get another.<\/p>\n

My goals are to read a million words, to read all of the Japanese children’s books in the Tacoma library system and to read my copy of \u4e09\u56fd\u5fd7. I hope to someday be able to read Japanese as quickly as I can read English. I also consider extensive reading one of the most valuable methods of language learning I’ve ever come across, so I hope to help others who are learning Japanese and may be interested in extensive reading.<\/p>\n

I have a M.A. in Teaching English as a Second Language from Eastern Michigan University<\/A> and am fascinated by the process of language learning, so I hope to use this blog to describe and categorize books that should be helpful to extensive readers learning Japanese, summarize and discuss papers having to do with extensive reading, particularly as it relates to Japanese, and describe my own experience as a language learner.<\/p>\n

Feel free to e-mail me<\/a> about anything having to do with extensive reading, Japanese or language learning!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hi, my name is Liana Kerr. I’m 29 years old and live in Tacoma, Washington with my husband Brian Kerr<\/A> and our two cats. I work as a rater for the writing portion of the TOEFL iBT, and when I’m not studying Japanese, I’m often drawing paper dolls<\/A>, playing video games, cooking or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/joechip.net\/extensivereading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/joechip.net\/extensivereading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/joechip.net\/extensivereading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joechip.net\/extensivereading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joechip.net\/extensivereading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/joechip.net\/extensivereading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":225,"href":"https:\/\/joechip.net\/extensivereading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9\/revisions\/225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/joechip.net\/extensivereading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}