Manga reading verses novel/ light novel reading

That does make sense. (Off topic, 生活費 was a word my language exchange partner asked me one time and I had no clue, I got schooled that day. We have since continued working through similar vocab and situations to do with daily living expenses).

This is partly why I’ve stuck with the children’s books for the moment as I do also want to re-read キノの旅 and Zoo, but both of those are around Lv29-30 iirc and still way above my level. Maybe picking up a short book or one with short chapters might let me work intensive study in and not be as jarring.

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Could be worth checking to see if anyone’s interested in doing an informal book club with a book you already own.

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That’s an idea. Might look at that in the new year. Thanks :slightly_smiling_face:

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I mostly read books these days, but when I go to the onsen I always read a few volumes of manga while I’m there. Both are great for language learning so I would say rather than “getting more” from one or the other, they offer different things.
For example, reading manga can be great for picking up colloquialisms, dialects, etc. and you already get a lot of context from the drawings so it can be a lighter reading experience. That can be a double edged sword though because the fact that you can see a detailed drawing of the scene means that you won’t need to read a huge paragraph describing it. That kind of imagery is what made reading books very difficult for me at first because there were so many adjectives and adverbs that I had never seen before.
As you said, intensive reading can be tiring and with books it can be especially hard to grasp what’s going on if you miss the meaning of even a few words. I think that what you’re going through is normal though and part of the learning process. I haven’t tried the pre-learning method that others have suggested, but it sounds very helpful for understanding. For me, adding unfamiliar words to Anki and just doing a lot of repetition (reviewing yesterday’s words then reading more) slowly but surely made it easier.

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くまクマ熊ベアー 1 is a light novel that’s on the easier side: L22. Contentwise it’s on the shallow side, at least volume #1. Later volumes are better.

But the pro-side is, it’s a web novel, so you can easily use a pop-up dictionary which simplifies look-ups extremely. You just have to hover the mouse over a word and can see its reading and meaning.

Edit: Even if you use the built-in dict of your phone or pad, which is less comfortable, as you‘d have to mark a word and then choose some option to look it up, it will be at least double as fast as reading a physical book and searching words by typing them in on your phone or pad (personal experience).

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You mostly read physical, right? If it doesn’t break your heart, you can write down notes/translations for words you don’t understand while you are at home inside the book and then re-read at work with all your notes already being readily available. Or you get a separate notebook and write down the words you don’t understand in there and then re-read at work.

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Yeah, this seems to have been the general consensus from most of the comments as well. I never thought about Manga being better for dialect and colloquialisms, that’s a good shout. I think I need to look at it more in that way than how I have been looking at it.

Thanks. I have tried the pre learning method previously but it didn’t work for me then, though maybe now I know more I should try it again and see if it helps then weigh up the pros and cons. :thinking:

I do have an e-book version of this though I haven’t picked it up yet. Maybe some easier content to do intensive reading with would be better, so that could work. Phone or iPad for dictionary use isn’t a major issue since I mostly read physical books so I use my phone/ iPad for look ups most of the time unless I’m up for using the physical dictionary.

I do read mostly physical (partly to reduce eye sight strain and partly because I just prefer it). A separate mini note book might be helpful (I tend not to write in physical books unless it’s just my name and date received) so that could work. Thanks, I didn’t think of that. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I feel, at least at the point I am in my learning, that it’s a long term game. The chances that any particular word I learned this week also appears in my reading this week aren’t that high, even with a deck for what I’m reading sorted by frequency; but over a year of learning 10 new words a day in jpdb, that’s over 3500 words and the chances are pretty good that some of them will turn up.

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I sort things chronologically, for this reason. Either the word will appear soon, or it appeared recently. Which also lets me feel free to blacklist troublesome leech words, if I’ve already passed them in the book. And of course you can always switch to frequency sorting, if you get too out of sync.

The other thing I realized is that I’m better off going for breadth than depth. I’m not gonna fully remember a lot of these words just from the SRS. But if I’ve seen it 5 times in my reviews, there’s a greater chance I’ll recognize it when I see it in the book.

My goal isn’t to completely know/finish the deck (tho that would be great). My goal is to make the book just a bit easier, while I’m reading it. It works best to start with something where you already have a high percentage of the words (tho this is initially tricky to determine, until you’ve told jpdb all the words you already know in the deck)

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I’ve been more and more tempted to give jpdb a try since I’ve seen some examples of ways I could use it and not want to die, but I can never find anything on the site. Is it that there’s just a limited amount of books or is search that bad? (Specifically I was considering previewing Silent Witch since I’d like to try and read it with the WK IBC next month, if anyone can find me that deck…)

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Mmm; I tend to aim for 95% coverage, and even the decks that have highest coverage at 98% or more still have hundreds or even sometimes thousands of words not yet studied. (This is part of why I prefer sorting by frequency – a word that only turns up once in the book doesn’t seem worthwhile to me. If they had an option for “chronological order but skip words that occur less than three times” I’d probably try it.)

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A bit of both. Notably it does not cover manga at all. Trashy light novel coverage is very good; it has some non-LN novels but sometimes I end up reading books partly because they have jpdb decks. It does have at least some anime. Search by (romaji) title works but there is no way to e.g. search by author.

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This is what I do! It helps to break down sentences (like those neverending descriptions of a character in Korean that make you lose the actual subject). I also mark new grammar, both in the sentence so I can easily look back and find it, and the explanation in the margin. And when I do lookup some words, I write them down as well!

That way I can easily look back on what I’ve read, take note of the vocab and grammar to check if I remember it, reread it…

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Limited amount of books. I’ve been able to find a good amount of stuff I like, whether searching English or Japanese, but sometimes stuff is just not there.

I used to think like that too, but I realized recently that it’s the less common, less frequent words that are more beneficial for me - as I’m more likely to have to look those up, and less likely to be able to guess them from the kanji. If a word occurs 3x, I might get it on my own, the 2nd or 3rd time around. That said, some of those do end up on the blacklist, particularly ones with 4-5 mora kunyomi readings

95% coverage is almost where I wanna start (jk sort of). More seriously starting at 85-90% coverage is optimal for me, and so is starting with as high a unique words percentage as possible. But the total words makes a difference too. The deck with 6k words will probably be much harder than the one with 4k words, even if I have higher percentages in the former. I’d love to get to a deck that only has hundreds of words I don’t know :joy:

Anyway, I don’t have a set coverage goal. I just start the deck a bit before, and keep doing it while I’m reading, and just do reviews/new words as I’m up for them. It definitely does feel good to see the percentages slowly go up tho!

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Somebody mentioned a similar site that is manga-oriented, but I can’t remember what it was (and it was janky on mobile… Which is where I would mostly use it)

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That was me, it’s Manga Kotoba. I’m really happy with it except that the server is painfully slow. It’s just a POC/hobby project so I can overlook it, but it does make using it a struggle depending on the time of the day.

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Is it supposed to have SRS? Or is it just the words list? I do like that it shows the frequency and spread(!!) when you get into the individual pages. Ex on https://manga-kotoba.com/volume/鋼の錬金術師-1巻 . That’s quite cool! Also the fact that you can import known words is definitely a help. I did strike out on everything I tried searching for tho, but eventually saw 鋼の錬金術師

I tried exporting 鋼の錬金術師 | Manga Kotoba without frequency count (which is what it says to do for jpdb import), and it kept crashing. So instead I exported it w/ frequency count, and used VS Code to delete all the numbers, then imported into jpdb, and it worked well (apparently I’m at 54% unique words and 58% coverage on that… but there’s a number of words I’d need to mark as known first, to find out what the actual number is)

If I use it in the future, it will probly just be for exporting to Anki/jpdb

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I’m not sure if it has SRS or not, I think it’s more geared towards discovery than it is learning? I mostly was planning to use it like you did to get a list out of the site than trying to learn them there.

I bit the bullet and started a jpdb deck for 乙女ゲームの破滅フラグしかない悪役令嬢に転生してしまった... | L27. I guess over the course of the past few months I’ve told it I know enough words that it’s not that miserable this time around. I’m also doing it in chronological order for the first time, which I realized after I started has the added bonus of not showing me all the words that I already know all at once.

Is the jpdb import a Patreon feature? One of my other gripes about the site is that so much of the content is so 男向き/bro coded that I haven’t really bothered to dig through the decks (it also doesn’t help that the search is really bad). I wonder if I could just figure out a way to generate a Silent Witch frequency list since I think that’s what I’d be the most interested in previewing right now…

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Mmm. I did at one point go through the whole list of 1500 novels bookmarking the stuff I thought I had some chance of maybe wanting to read, but you have to be super bought into the system already to take on that tedium. At least most of the 男向き books have covers that make them obvious at a glance so you can scroll straight past :slight_smile:

The developer also took a year long break from doing anything with the site, but they seem to have come back to it now. If they ever set up a system where they can delegate “add deck content” to other people the deck variety might improve.

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Lots of excellent answers already, but let me throw in my two cents.

So it sounds like you want to get better at reading extensively. I’m someone that never had patience for intensive reading, even as a beginner I was reading pretty much entirely without lookups. The thing that helped me the most when starting out was familiarity with the text. It is a lot easier to figure out what is going on if you know what to expect. You can also follow the story better even if you don’t understand every scene, since you already know the content of the parts you are missing. There are different ways you can achieve this:

  • read a series you have already read in English
  • read the manga / watch the anime before you read the light novel
  • look up a summary of the plot beforehand

Don’t be discouraged if you have trouble understanding the prologue. That happens to me as well, my comprehension at the start and at the end of the book are usually quite different. There’s just so much new information: new characters, new setting, new vocab. It’s difficult to catch everything straight away. The same goes for volume one of a series. Most of the heavy lifting happens in volume 1, subsequent volumes tend to be easier. That’s why if you are starting out it might be best to choose a light novel series you can read a couple of volumes of, instead of a standalone novel.

If you read along to an audiobook you won’t have to worry about kanji readings, and it’s one more clue to help you figure out what is going on.

Other than that, if you want to tackle books slightly above your level joining a book club is great. If you have questions there are people you can ask and the discussions can help you pick up on details you’ve missed.

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