According to Wikipedia (the Japanese version at least), 時をかける少女 was published in “中学三年コース”. Literally “course for 3 year middle-school students”, because it was written as a complement for class. Since the target audience are children, it makes it a children book.
Light novels are light novels not because of their content or style, but because they are published under a light novel label (which, again, is not the case for 時をかける少女).
That being said, I sometimes submit requests for books saying that a novel is a light novel since, despite what the label says, the content is way closer to an actual light novel (especially ライト文芸 stuff; they even put the ライト in there!)
Edit: okay, children book is not the correct term (it felt strange anyway, since I would not describe teenagers around ~15 as “children”), it’s called “young adult fiction” according to wikipedia.
Edit2: Oh, also I just went and checked, children books covers the 0 to 10 age range (sometimes 12 for some publishers). I.e. up until the end of primary school. Beyond that lies the range of “young adult fiction”.
My thought is to go with one book that you’re really into, and another book that’s just mental candy. So, most days you make progress on the harder one, but on the days that you’re too tired for it, you can still make “progress” with the easy one. (At least, that’s my strategy so far. )
That’s… true for a majority of light novels, I guess, but not all. Some even contain explicit depictions of sexual acts (and I don’t think those would be targeted towards actual minors, but what do I know).
The category I was talking about is called ジュブナイル(juvenile) 小説 in Japan (or Young Adult)
I get what you mean. I was just saying that if you start comparing yourself to someone else, comparing in hours is less… frustrating? Even if I compare myself to just my younger self, my younger self did not necessarily learn faster, but I literally had more time and energy to devote to studying.
So when I hear someone say stuff like “I became fluent in just a year”, I need details.
hehe, thanks. ngl, it was kinda satisfying to know I could do it, but it sure wasn’t fun. There were literal weekends where I brute forced them into my brain and after a break of ~10 years, the only ones I still remembered were those that I had learned through vocabulary/reading.
In English, book people usually also distinguish Middle Grade [i.e. grade 4 and older], which - I would argue - is pretty much the best literature age for beginners. The stories can be quite interesting but the language is not yet completely adult, though it’s also not as simplified as children’s lit.
In Japanese that’s probably 小学上級 or 中学 (which is why I always recommend checking out 青鳥文庫, つばさ文庫, 小学館ジュニア文庫, et al.)
The way natively uses the term “novel” just means “fiction geared towards adults”, imo - which is not really the correct definition. Something can be for kids but also a novel. Also, since the people requesting the entries also define the category, things are a bit wonky. (e.g. One of the essay books on my list is categorized as Manga. I would have put it under other, because it’s a manga essay, so about half the pages are essays that are illustrated with manga. )
Also, btw. re JLPT levels. I am not N2. I would probably pass N3 if I tried, but definitely not N2 but here I am happily reading away. Don’t let your JLPT level determine whether or not you are ready to read.
Reading books in that category is pretty much how I learned English myself, beyond the basics I learned (poorly) from school, so, that tracks.
I definitely disagree on that. There’s obviously no distinction between YA novels and “regular” novels.
To be honest, the distinction can be quite hard to grasp. For instance, my local library had one edition of 村上海賊の娘 一 | L41 in the YA section (the 文庫 one) and another in the “regular” section (the 単行本 one). They are not even consistent.
(Well, again, I think they are consistent in terms of labels, but the publisher aren’t consistent in assigning those :p)
For me, it was the other way around. Can’t read? I probably just need one more level.
I’m with Biblio on this one, I started reading really early (about 1 year of studying, maybe approaching an n4 level) and it was incredibly slow but really helpful. I was going at a pace of 3-5 pages in an hour on a children’s book I already knew in English, using Jisho to look up tons of words, and still didn’t have 100% comprehension. But it helped me see the words I did know in context really early on. (It took me 3 months to finish this one book, so it was a long project alongside my other studying.)
So while lots of people do well without reading until later, I wanted to offer my experience for contrast. I think the takeaway is that studying consistently, in whatever way works for you, is what’s important (but also books are fun)
The way I used koohi (or back then it was the previous version floflo) was to only learn frequency 3 or 4 words. Then look up the rest while reading if I felt like it was important for understanding. This way I didn’t have to slog through thousands of unique words. Nowadays I can learn all words contained in a book if it’s not too difficult, but for example fantasy books unknown freq. 1 words are still in the thousands. I don’t think it’s worth chugging through those.
I found koohi the most single biggest tool that enabled me to start reading books with relative ease and make progress.
I don’t think it’s that clear-cut. Reader average age has been rising and I’m sure the publishers know that. I found some stats that has some history also. For example, the average Bookwalker light novel reader in 2015 was 31.8 .
There was also another tweet that I can’t find now that placed many of the various magazines subscriber ages well over 20.
Same with YA in the English-speaking world. YA is now sometimes already too adult for teens, because the publishers have “aged” the stories alongside the readers.
Nice stats! It’s kinda funny that after 10 years, the readership is basically 10 years older People who grew up with light novel never stopped, I guess.
(Also, unrelated, but it was funny that the article put 住野よる in the ライト文芸 group, even though it’s fair).
I know there’s a lot of other excitement going on with the audiovisual release, but I needed to hold myself accountable and make an update…
Jan/Feb 2023
– Started off great, with lots of reading, but then somewhere in mid-Feb, I hit a wall. In retrospect, I think it was when I started reading くまクマ熊ベアー 1 | L24 . Not that it’s so hard to read, but that I went from books where I had furigana and a vocab list to one that I had no furigana and no vocab list. The story is interesting enough, but it really slowed down my progress (and drained my enthusiasm). Coincidentally, this week, a coworker started talking about making 3-month goals and holding each other accountable, and so I re-examined my goals and tried to come up with something challenging but attainable. (His goals are with kayaking, and my goals are with Japanese. “3 months” means 12 weeks, with Memorial Day weekend being the finish line, 5/26-5/29.)
– Otherwise, I’m not doing too bad. I’m getting comfortable with more and more words, and I’m making progress through the natively levels. Level+1 Reading Challenge 📚📈 - #41 by ForeKred
– I like keeping two books in the mix – one hard and one easy. The hard book is the challenging book with lots of new vocab and I’m shooting for 80% understanding (extensive reading). The easy book is either graded reader or children’s book – something that I’m pretty sure I should understand everything in it. Given that I should understand everything, I focus more on making sure I understand every sentence, and stopping to investigate when I hit a sentence that I don’t quite understand (intensive reading). I treat it sorta like a reading homework assignment. It’s also a good break when I don’t have the energy for the hard book.
– For the next set of goals, I’ve decided to: 1) attempt 時をかける少女 | L23 again (because furigana and vocab list), and 2) take the plunge into talking. – I wish there was an easier way to “ease into” talking. With reading, there’s many things you can do to go at your own pace, but with talking, you can’t tell the other person, “wait, let me look up that vocab… oh, I think I heard that before… how is that different from this other word…”. (Well, I suppose you can do that, but it’d slow down the conversation and probably annoy the other person real quick.). I think shadowing is a small stepping stone to conversation, but all you really have control over conversation is exposure time.
Mar 2023 goals (+3mo goals)
Read 20min/day (3mo: 1 light novel)
– 5 out of 7 days
– Keep on hand: 1 hard (extensive) + 1 easy (intensive)
Great update! Is always nice to hear progress and approaches other people take.
I can relate to this. Going with a book slow can be painful even if the story is interesting (imagine if it wasn’t). I started 本好きの下剋上~司書になるためには手段を選んでいられません~第一部「兵士の娘2」 | L30 but shortly after I moved to reading miscellaneous things (games, web comics…) as a sort of break from it.
Next week I start getting busier and the situation is not bound to improve. I’m tempted to switch to a read along the audiobook, but it also feels a bit like cheating. I had plan to mull over the weekend on how to proceed, we will see…
I tried keeping two books, but I feel it hurts me. I spend more time thinking with which one to go than actually sitting and spending time reading.
Good luck! That’s quite hard. Sometimes if I have idle brain time, I try to come up with scenarios on my mind and try speaking/explaining my way through.
Sadly as you say there’s no easy way to really put it into use, unless you are in a privileged location. I’m kinda aiming for a short June break in Japan if I’m able to, I’d love to put to the test my progress in real situations, and also visit book shops/libraries and see how far I got since my last visit.
I feel you on the book slogging. I’ve been trying to read こぐまのクーク物語 春と夏 | L19 for about a month now but keep putting it to the side because… well, manga is just… easier, honestly, even if the levels are technically ‘higher’. I mean, it’s nice when I’m able to understand stuff (and this is a children’s book, so the actual content is way more simplistic than I would like generally), but the sheer difficulty in parsing this different style of writing compared to manga can really dissuade me from even choosing it for my daily read.
But hey, Atomic Habits and all that. I’ll get through it eventually. (It’s the adding words to an SRS that helps more anyway in the long run… maybe?)
I just thought: Maybe that’s the trick (at least for those of us who like SRS). Together with the idea of learning about 100~200 words per book, maybe one way to make more reading progress is to start reading a book, gathering words in a vocab list, SRS’ing along the way, but stop reading after gathering about 100~200 words, and continue to let SRS do it’s thing. Then later go back and re-read the portion of the book you read, which by now most of the words should be SRS’ed into your head, and then continue making progress on the book, gathering new words in a new SRS list. In other words, break up the book into “learnable” chunks.
The key here, of course, is to look at re-reading as a new opportunity for understanding, instead of just re-reading something you already know. And also, to have patience with repetition. (Little kids learn lots through repetition, right?)
As long as you’re actively listening and not using it as background noise, it doesn’t seem like cheating.
I try my best to stop when it’s becoming background noise.
In fact I’m incapable of listening to Japanese audiobooks while doing other stuff other than walking, as I just stop understanding most of it. So at my current level, it requires almost my full attention anyway.
I did that when I tried to improve my reading speed. I used koohi.cafe (well, it’s predecessor technically) for that. I would have the list of words in the book sorted by first appearance and simply click on “add to srs” once I come across the next one I don’t know (if I want to learn it). Once my new card pile was at 20-50 words, I would just stop reading for the day. I also made sure I had no new cards and no pending reviews before reading.
That made for some slow reading at the beginning, but the pace quickly picked up. Soon enough, it became hard to find enough words during a reading session (which is when I dropped SRS entirely)
(I didn’t do any re-reading though, since I find those boring, but I did reread a book a few years later with a WK book club and I enjoyed how much easier it was)
I run a slightly different method: i have reading time and studying time. In reading time I just read, using the dictionary when appropriate but not bothering to log any words I come across into my SRS. I find this is crucial for my motivation to ‘finish’ books even if I didn’t necessarily gain words from them (except organically through seeing word repetition etc).
Then later as I feel like it I go through books I’ve already ‘read’ with a fine-tooth comb, adding them to my SRS as I go. These sessions usually go for about 10-15 words since that’s probably my upper bound for new words per day. I won’t add new words to a deck if there’s still new cards to be introduced, which means I probably go three-four days in between adding new cards on any particular book (but I swap between decks, so eg, today was こぐまのクーク物語 春と夏 | L19, but yesterday was 今日から始める幼なじみ 1 | L17, the day before 14歳の恋 1 | L22?? etc). This means the ‘study’ portion of reading a book can take quite a while, especially because I don’t mind skipping days if I’m too busy … but I don’t really mind, since I’ve already ‘read’ the books.
That said, I don’t really mind re-reading books, especially since it’s so much easier after the SRS portion, so…
Koohi looks interesting, but I think I learn words better encountering them in context first rather than my first impression being an SRS list. I think.
Well, that’s the good thing about having them in order of appearance. Also, the site learns what you knows (through words you have added or marked as known) so, eventually, as you read along, the next unknown word will be the one at the top of the list (or near the top, since it’s never perfect). So you first see the word in context and add it to an srs deck with one click.
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People who grew up with light novel never stopped, I guess.
