Just checked. You could buy an Airbus A340 Private Jet. It’s exactly 300 million dollars.
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An electron microscope costs 15 million, so… 20 of them 
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Now this is useful information 
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Welcome to another episode of my study log where I write about my language adventures and latest learning obsessions.
Wow, it has been a while! The past weeks have been pretty busy for me and I’ve had to focus some of my time on other things, so I haven’t had the time to write a new post. But, language learning is a lifestyle and the fun never stops (for me), even when I am busy! Here are a few updates of what I’ve been up to - I have more about shadowing and Korean that I will probably include in a post later this week so that this doesn’t become the longest update ever.
Update 1 - I quit マネーロンダリング入門 国際金融詐欺からテロ資金まで | L34?? because it was too hard!
In my last log update I wrote about this book and how it was a good challenge for learning financial terms and big numbers (yes, it’s my dream to become someone who understands Swiss banking). Well, I kept chipping away at it little by little, but as I started reading other books on the side, the time periods between when I picked it up got longer and longer until I realized I couldn’t remember what was going on at all anymore with the money laundering incident in the chapter I was in. I tried to keep reading hoping it would come back to me, but it was just too complicated and there was too much unknown vocab, so nothing was sticking in my memory. Instead of restarting the chapter, I realized that I didn’t care that much about finishing the book in general since I was not really enjoying the format the content was presented in. So, I’m going to have to find a new book for the “new topic” bingo square and I will keep being unable to talk about the bonds market or tax loopholes in Japanese, but I think that’s a loss that I’m willing to accept. 
Update 2 - Reading Speed Project
I hope this is not a boring update since it is pretty specific to me and the level I am at, but I’ll share it anyways in case it’s helpful or interesting for any other forum friends! If it isn’t, well…please indulge me. 
I think a bunch of others around here can relate, but I am often unsatisfied with my reading speed in Japanese. Even if it is a book where comprehension isn’t a problem at all, I know I’m still a slow reader! How do I know that? Well, my kindle tells me the average read time of a book when I start it, but then the “time until end of book” number calculates automatically based on my reading speed and that number is way longer! Way longer!!! So I have real metrics and data that I am indeed slower than a native.
In general, I think “native level” is a not the most helpful benchmark to aim for, but I’ve read hundreds of Japanese books at this point and am closing in on 100,000 pages read, so it is a desire of mine at this point to close that gap. I don’t need to be the fastest! I will even take the bottom end of the average native range! But I do want to push myself here a bit more and see what further growth I can accomplish. Reading faster means being able to read more great books in less time too, right?
So, I did some research on improving reading speed and read some academic studies people who are actual professionals did in a controlled environment to see what interesting things I could try and incorporate my own dilettante, non-scientific learning activities. If you are curious yourself, try searching “improving reading speed in L2” and seeing what you can find - there is some interesting stuff out there! I will make a longer post at some point in the future that goes into more depth when I’ve gathered more data and have my own experiences to tie in to hopefully make it more interesting, but today I’ll just share what I decided to do based on my research!
In short:
- I decided to time myself reading in 15 minute chunks where I try to go as fast as I can without suffering loss of comprehension and note the number of pages read when I’m done.
- When the 15 minute period ends, I recall what I read in my head as a sort of “quiz” on the details to ensure I’m not cheating.
- I do a long longer 30 minute timed session every week where I read at a non-rushed speed with the goal of understanding my current baseline natural reading speed.
- I try to do this with books that are level 35 or below (my very comfy range) so I can purely focus on speed versus comprehending the language.
In addition to the above, I’m also noting whether or not the book was a physical hardcover/paperback, kindle, etc. and the time of day. Whenever I decide to summarize all the data, I will also make some pretty graphs!
The fact I am doing this all myself and self-reporting/judging comprehension make this a non-perfect experiment (amongst other things), but I wanted to come up with a fun thing to do that would push me to improve my speed, so this is where I’m at. 
So far I have been doing this for about 6 weeks and have already had some interesting insights + improved my speed! For reference, my initial reading baseline speed was 12 pages per 15 minutes and it increased to 14 pages per 15 minutes after 4 weeks. In addition, I’ve topped out at 19 pages per 15 minutes under “time pressure” so far which is a large improvement! 
I think if I can raise my baseline to 17 or 18 pages and my fast reading time to around 22 or 23 pages, I’d be very satisfied from this experiment.
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I am back with another study log update, this time about all of my latest learning obsessions!
Obsession 1 - the え sound
Every so often, I will have an epiphany about a certain Japanese sound and then become really hyperfocused on it. I guess it would be more efficient to just review the entire phonology at once but 1) I don’t think I would be able to remember and use them all right away if I did that 2) this study log is partially about all the random things I get up to trying to entertain myself on my commute and not about learning fast. Anyways with that said, my current sound hyperfocus is the vowel え！
え seems like an easy one, right? That sound exists in English in the word “make”! Except have you heard the word メイク before?! If you listen very closely, it’s kind of different? Or at least, I only recently became tuned into the difference.
Here is a YouTube video showing the tongue and lip positioning of Japanese vowels:
And a screenshot from the section on え:
Compare with a screenshot from a similar YouTube video on the American English pronunciation of “a” from “make”:
The images are stylized differently, but you kind of get the drift right? え is higher and slightly more forward in the mouth. The tongue is also touching the back of the front teeth for the Japanese え and not for the English a.
I must say, practicing and getting it right feels so satisfying! I visualize trying to “save” the sensation of being in the right position in my muscle memory and think it helps. I’m obsessed! 
Obsession 2 - singing to practice pronounctiation
I sometimes get bored shadowing or listening to spoken content and want to listen to music instead. Then, if I end up listening to music and a song is catchy, I want to sing along to it too! Singing on its own is fun for me, but it’s also a great way to practice pronounciation if you are so inclined. I find it especially helpful for focusing on vowels, because long drawn out notes always happen on vowel sounds. Additionally, you can hear if your note harmonizes with the singer or not if you’re singing over the song, so you can get some good instantaneous feedback. Since my current obsession え is a vowel, that means I’ve really been enjoying trying to hit good えs when I sing along to Japanese songs.
In particular, I’ve really been into this song lately and it contains a lot of great え sounds to practice with!
MONO NO AWARE - 風の向きが変わって
The chorus contains a lot of え sounds following a variety of consonants, so it’s fun shifting between them all and trying to get the sound right.
Lyrics to the chorus with えs bolded:
風の向きが変わって
前髪が逆立った
いつまでも甘ったれたままじゃダメか
カザミドリどこを向いたとて
吹きつける向かい風
全て吹き去ってそれから気づいた
That section alone contains a lot of frequently used sound permutations such as って, まで、でも、だめ、まえ、すべて、 so it’s great to practice them! Furthermore, there are also えs hidden in places where the stress pattern of my native accent could sneak in and make them sound like unstressed, slack vowel sounds such as in the words いつまでも、甘ったれた, so trying to hit them properly and remember how my mouth position feels also helps when speaking.
There is a verse later in the song with some more good えs:
若いやつの流行りや
ベテランのライフハックなんか
不感だわ俯瞰だわ
ガードレールが曲がる
Here we have the katakana English word ベテラン (we all know how tricky those can be and, if you are American, how great the temptation is to turn vowels into schwa sounds is) and another ガードレール which features a long え sound. So much variety! I’m obsessed!
The moral of the story is that anything can turn into a learning material if you are curious (or bored) enough. Songs that you already love are a great place to start, especially if it’s a song you can listen to over and over again!
Obsession 3 - RIDI book’s AI voice TTS
I am now officially back from with my Korean hiatus! I haven’t been hitting the textbooks yet since I have some other time consuming non-language related studies going on in my life that I need to prioritize, but I have started reading more in Korean again.
The primary thing that has got me reading again is actually the AI voice text to speech feature that RIDI recently added to their app. They had a TTS with a computerized voice before that was ok, but now they have several more AI generated voices to choose from that sound a lot more natural - they even have names too! They’re also great to put on while reading to a book because it automatically scrolls the text, so I can sit back, relax, and let Minjae-ssi read to me hands free.
If you close the app, the audio will also keep playing, so you can effectively turn any book into an audiobook and take it on the go with you! I have purchased some Korean audiobooks with real voice actors before and would like to keep doing so when they’re available, but this upgrade let’s me have my own audiobook version of any webnovel or obscure book that would never get recorded otherwise! It’s the best application of “AI” tech that I’ve come across for my own life so far.
While I was very deep into キクタン韓国語 and learning single vocabulary words from textbooks a few months ago, I found the audio component to be so helpful for being able to memorize words better. That is still holding true now while reading with the AI voice TTS - I notice I am able to remember words I looked up before while reading since I have the memory of how they sound to rely on, besides just how they look. I will do pretty much anything to make those neural connections stronger (ok not really but)! 
So, it’s safe to say that I am obsessed! The numbers speak for themselves - I ended up finishing 3 books in the last 3 weeks thanks to this feature, and I have 2 more in the works now! Let’s gooo
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oh my god you are crazy but this is so cool!! You’re my hero!
I just counted my pages read in Korean and I have 26,300 pages of non-webtoon books, 80 books total – how long have you been reading in Japanese to get almost 100,000 pages (and does that include manga?)? How many books do you tend to finish in a year in Japanese? Do you have an idea of your comprehension of the books you read? (from kimchi reader, I know that YA is 98-99% for me, Higashino books are mid-high 97%, and sci-fi stuff is like 96%, while literature can be from 94-97%.) I’ve been grinding Anki pretty hard because at this point I can read about a page per minute, but I think what’s holding me back is my vocab being lacking (obviously it’s very high in the grand scheme of things, but I’m a perfectionist and I’d venture you are as well). I also want to read at native speeds! In English I can read 3-4 pages per minute, so Korean reading is so 답답…
and I totally relate to the kindle estimated reading time! I don’t know if it’s based on average read speed, though (or maybe we have different models of Kindle), because mine is wildly inconsistent and will regularly jump up by hours even when I read in English and, again, I read way above average pace in English. But it is very discouraging to see the estimated reading time keep going up lol.
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I also read up a little further and saw you’ve been doing a lot of shadowing in Japanese, and that’s something I’ve been interested in doing in Korean as well, as I would love a perfect accent (even though I’ll probably have an autism accent no matter which language I speak… sigh), but I would love to hear more about your method and how you’ve been shadowing, if you don’t mind explaining. If you’re following a method explained in a YouTube video, I’m happy to just watch that as well. I’ve been curious about shadowing for a long time and read about it on Reddit, but it would help me a lot to hear how a real, high-level learner actually does it, because what I’ve read has been a bit light on the details of putting it into practice.
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Aww 
that’s so sweet of you!! Thanks for stopping by my log! I’ve been enjoying all your Korean updates and book reviews and am happy to have another Korean buddy on the forum.
Answers:
- I started reading towards the end of 2019, but already passed the JLPT N1 (TOPIK 6 equivalent ish) before that. Don’t ask me how I managed to do that without reading…
I generally don’t put manga towards page count so that is all text based books! - The number of books I read per year varies. In 2020 it was around 50, and then I increased to 100 per year in 2021 and 2022. Then I started Korean, so I dropped back down to around 50 books per year and expect to hit that again this year.
- I don’t use any reading apps like kimchi reader, but comprehension depends a lot on the book! I would say as a general rule I hit maybe 99.5 - 100% comprehension on most contemporary fiction books that are below level 40 or so, as long as they are not very literary or experimental. Reading feels very easy and natural to me and is basically no different than reading in English for books like that.
Fantasy can be a little harder for me because I never read fantasy, so I’m not used to it. Books from before 1950 ish are where things start getting harder for me and I have to go slower and do more lookups. The hardest author I’ve read is Yukio Mishima because he has a massive vocabulary!
This is just my personal opinion and I think it will differ for everyone, but vocabulary has been the single most important thing for me to improve my reading. I can’t overstate how beneficial reading widely and looking up nearly everything has been for me! Reading flows better and I can read faster, which makes it more enjoyable.
Shh, don’t blow my (nonexistent) cover. 
I’m trying to tone that down these days and just focus on having fun with my languages instead of pursuing perfection for extrinsic or egotistical reasons, but I do go down some weird rabbit holes of trying to understand some small thing very well. This struggle is part of the journey! 
Haha
Me too, Korean reading is the most 답답 ever for me still I’m at about 15,000 pages read and always compare to my Japanese.
I don’t really have any formal method to speak of at all. I’ve posted about shadowing throughout my log here since I often mix up what I do…in general, though, I just listen to audiobooks or podcasts on my commute and try to speak out loud at the same time and repeat what I heard. It’s a pretty good brain workout since you have to listen, remember what’s being said, and then speak while trying to mimic the sounds all at the same time. Depending on what I’m interested in that day or week I may focus on a particular sound or my intonation/pitch or other things like breath control. Sometimes I don’t feel like shadowing at all and won’t do it for a few days. I do not have a perfect accent at all and it’s not really my main goal since I don’t need to speak regularly…I also feel like how I speak is part of my personality and charm, and not a bad thing as long as people can understand me. I’d say my motivations are really that I just want to learn more about the language and linguistics and also just entertain myself while in traffic.
My Korean listening and speaking skills are much worse, unfortunately. I’ve done a minimal amount of shadowing in Korean and I can’t do the same things I do with Japanese at all. I cannot hear the individual sounds as crisply as I can in Japanese and don’t have high enough overall comprehension to listen to any random media and free flow shadow after it, because I can’t remember and repeat the words if I can’t catch them. Instead I use the audio that comes with textbooks I use and has a script and will repeat the same things over and over. If I want a challenge and feel like doing free flow I’ve used Didi의 한국문학 Podcast since it’s a good level for me.
If I did really want to put effort into “perfecting” my accent, though, I would probably do these things:
- Get a pronunciation focused textbook resource that hopefully explains pitch, intonation, and all of the phonology
- Work through that while recording myself and comparing with the original audio, maybe getting very intense and using a computer program like praat
- Incorporate regular chorusing into my routine, recording at certain points to check progress
- Get a tutor who focuses on pronunciation for actual native feedback every week
- Leave voice recordings on hellotalk and ask to have anything unnatural pointed out and then investigate what is wrong on my own, retrying when I figure it out
I hope the details above helped! As mentioned, it’s not a real method and routine. Rather, I just get curious about different aspects of the spoken language and follow that curiosity until it leads me somewhere cool. I think if you listen well, stay curious, and put in the time doing any kind of shadowing at all then you can find a method and path that works for you!
Ok that’s all the info from this language maniac. Over and out. 
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This discussion: How to Read at the Sentence Level (Stagnated Reading Speed) may be interesting for you.
Concerning a native speed example: the author of the commentary to 霧のむこうのふしぎな町 wrote that he read the about 200 pages of the book in about two hours. He was 30 years old, when he first read the book.
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oh wow you are a god. 100 books is something I used to always do in English before I started reading in Korean – and I’ve done 150 or 200 before, too – but the idea of 100 books in Korean is just insane. I guess I am on track for 60 this year if I keep up my pace. I should just stop using Discord tbh lol, but easier said than done.
Maybe I’m just not looking in the right places, but it feels like the Korean learning community is nowhere near as developed as the Japanese learning community. I haven’t heard of anyone having read as much in Korean as you have in Japanese. 넘사벽… are there a lot of Japanese learners at your level? Have you seen any Korean learners at a similar level?
thanks so much for your response to the other things! My brain is fried (it’s late) so I’ll have to give it a more thorough look later, but I was so surprised by 100 books a year that I just had to respond to that part. Also thanks for liking my bingo updates
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Are you able to get through some stuff without a dictionary/lookups? Even in the easiest stuff I read, I still run across a word or two I don’t know or immediately recognize. I dream of the day when I can go without.
Same for me… you can’t really process other things about a sentence, if you’re too busy processing all the words. Also there are vastly less grammar patterns than words - so that stops being a barrier earlier than vocab, I think.
I’m at 33 so far this year. Never occurred to me to try to reach 100, but I’m tempted to make it a goal now…
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Oh gosh thank you! 
I feel shy now! 부끄~ It means a lot to me that my experience are helpful to you (and other learners)! I’m just a regular person with a full time job doing this all as a hobby and trying to see how far I can go. If I can do it, anyone can. 
I will say that the years I read 100 books were during the pandemic and that there were multiple long strict lockdowns where I lived, so I had a lot of free time and nothing better to do. It was also a good escape from reality. It was a fun challenge for myself, so I’d recommend doing it one time too if you’re into that type of thing! Watch out for burnout though!
I would agree with this 100%. I’ve been learning Japanese way longer so I’ve seen the online community change over time, and it just has way more history. Blogs like All Japanese All the Time were very influential in terms of spreading the message of reading and immersion, and you can still see the influence in the community now as other learners have carried on the message. The Korean community seems to have not had anything like that (and it is also less chronically online. My impression is that Korean learners end up going to Korea and talking to people/taking university language classes, or they’re watching dramas. )
I am not part of any Korean learning communities besides the small one on natively simply because I’m not the most experienced discord user and don’t know how to find them. I also don’t know any other Korean learners irl. I sometimes see Reddit posts from people who read Korean books to learn, and the blog “Retro Learns Korean” is also reading focused if you didn’t know about it already.
I’ve seen a lot more advanced Japanese speakers out in the wild and know a handful in real life who have amazing abilities. There are also a lot of incredible people in this community! In general, the most advanced people I’ve seen tend to live in Japan or are in academia. I don’t know any other civilians like myself who just took their hobby too far, but I’m sure they are out there! Most people just aren’t online talking about it.
Yes!! Ofc! Love having more reading buddies.
Yup! The last few books I’ve read were physical and I don’t remember picking up the dictionary during them. It’s totally possible if you just keep reading and learning words. It’s on a scale, though. Things become easier, but there are always harder books when you’re back to doing the same thing and stopping and looking up words.
There are also certain things I’ve accepted I don’t care about looking up, like plant or fish names, or places. I sometimes google them if it’s important for visualizing the setting or what’s happening but in general I don’t.
If you want to, go for it! I love a good challenge to encourage growth. It was a very hardcore experience, though. I sometimes ended up reading stuff I didn’t really enjoy that I had to force myself through to increase my count, or I was constantly thinking about the next book I wanted to read instead of focusing on the current one. Those reasons (and time) are why I don’t have a target number of books anymore. Now I try to focus on finding good stories I enjoy as my main goal.
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Cool to hear 
Of course. And there’s plenty of stuff in English where I’d definitely have to pull out a dictionary, despite having a pretty high reading proficiency
I’m 50/50 on those. I like to look them up, but plenty of times will skip. Flower names (which are often personal names in stuff I read), I always look up tho, and then check if they have a 花言葉 meaning too (that might be a good thing to make a jpdb or anki deck for, now that I think about it)
That sounds rough. I’m terrible at reading stuff I don’t enjoy, so I’ll mostly only do it if I think there’s some real historical/genre significance, or there’s some other external pressure (like a book club or a friend). Otherwise life’s too short for that.
I do have to remind myself not to think too far ahead about what I want to read sometimes tho, so I don’t get too stressed.
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I’m definitely able to read books with no lookups, but I think that if I really want to improve my reading, I should be mining hard. I read 20-30 paper books with very few lookups when living in Korea, and I don’t feel like I developed anything more than a tolerance for ambiguity and a vague sense of what certain words meant. Now that I’m going hard on Anki, the words are sticking in my brain much better.
I’ve met plenty of people who speak Korean really well irl, and so do I, but yeah, I don’t know any heavy KR readers besides Retro (yes, I found his posts when I first started to get into reading!) and it seems like he took a much more input-focused approach where he was struggling through books at really low comprehension levels for the purpose of learning. He also stopped updating his blog a few years ago. The only hardcore readers I know are immersion learners, and that’s not me lol… I was a textbook learner and I’ve had thousands of hours of conversation. It would be nice to find someone who is way better than me in every respect who I can aspire to. But most people like that (ex: Tyler Rasch) are minor celebrities who wouldn’t be on discord lmao. Btw, if you’re interested in Discord, the Refold Korean Discord is where myself and some others discuss Korean books.
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Oh good point! I’m interested in knowing about 花言葉 too, so I should try looking those up when I find flower names.
Nice! Anki is definitely so helpful! Do you mine for full sentences??
I am a textbook learner too 
I think it can be a great way to build a strong foundation!
I’ll look it up and try and join!
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I actually mine paragraphs most of the time hahaha. And I usually have 2-3 Cloze cards per paragraph. Some of my Discord Korean learner friends think my cards are terrible, but I really like them lol. Monolingual paragraph output cards with Korean definitions.
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Wow I think you’re the first person I’ve ever heard of who does a whole paragraph! I guess having to read multiple long paragraphs forces you to do some reading practice while reviewing
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Really? I can’t imagine doing only one sentence! I really need the context from the surrounding sentences to help me remember the word. It does indeed serve as reading practice as well – when I was much worse at Korean and started doing longer cards, it definitely helped me improve my reading speed – although the consequence is that my average card time is way lower than people I see on Discord. 15-30 seconds per card depending on how locked in I am.
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