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.
