monkeykoder Newbie United States Joined 5667 days ago 10 posts - 10 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese
| Message 1 of 6 30 March 2009 at 8:37am | IP Logged |
This may be an assumption on my part but I've been finding the most frustrating part of language acquisition is not being able to read in my target language. A good 50% of my native language was acquired through reading and of course I read voraciously in my native language. When attacking Japanese however there seems to be nothing that I can actually push my way through due to my limited vocabulary how have others broken through this (perceived?) barrier?
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Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6381 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese
| Message 2 of 6 30 March 2009 at 8:42am | IP Logged |
1) Easy/graded readers
2) Parallel texts
3) Dictionaries/translation tools, ideally pop-up ones.
For when you're a bit more advanced:
a) Read novels (or chapters, at first, if you want) in English, then in Japanese
b) Read a lot of books in one series
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Satoshi Diglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5765 days ago 215 posts - 224 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English Studies: German, Japanese
| Message 3 of 6 30 March 2009 at 8:56am | IP Logged |
I'd say you should pick one text (like a Wikipedia article) and fully dismember it. Get all those kanji and words stone cold in you mind. At the same time, read other stuff superficialy, resorting to dictionaries a lot but without worrying about new kanji or words, just try to understand it.
That's what I have been doing. Volte's suggestion still apply.
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monkeykoder Newbie United States Joined 5667 days ago 10 posts - 10 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese
| Message 4 of 6 30 March 2009 at 9:07pm | IP Logged |
Thanks for the replies. Does anyone here happen to know of some good reading material for when I get beyond consulting the dictionary every line? Young adult type novel series that aren't completely boring maybe?
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Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5953 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh
| Message 5 of 6 30 March 2009 at 11:00pm | IP Logged |
Have you considered manga? Comics are far more mainstream in Japan than most of the world, so you can get them on practically any topic, from karate to corporate politics, and from romance to Roman mythology.
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monkeykoder Newbie United States Joined 5667 days ago 10 posts - 10 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese
| Message 6 of 6 30 March 2009 at 11:30pm | IP Logged |
I actually have a couple Manga sitting around that I'm trying to work/push through it's just a pain trying to sift through certain parts where they've decided to write large parts in hiragana (yey kanji) there have been several points that I can't figure out enough context to even get help from native speakers (over the net). (I see you're studying Gaelic how is that? (it's one of those languages I want to put on my to learn list but I'm kind of afraid to))
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