I came here to improve my japanese…I’m improving my life.

I mean if you’re bored during a movie do you just fast forward and watch the 20 mins you like, or do you go find another movie to watch?

I also really enjoy your humor.

Thanks for another great post!

―慈夢

1) Another freeing article. It again frees me to do whatever I want towards the language until I get locked in the box of my own doubts again.
2) “Just do it. Just do something.”
3) The irony of it all, I read the whole article. Actually I skimmed through it then read it all. So maybe, not irony. Just using the advice you have given.
3) Who is the Syrian you’re referring to?
4) You’re so correct about music. I skip music all the time, and the songs that I loved a long time ago, I don’t even listen to anymore.
5) Principles trump commands. The way one thinks affects how they will do something or how they live their life.
6) Maybe I can do this (skimming) with anything: books, movies, anki, friends (?), etc.
7) I always appreciate your humor. It maybe a little coarse but it always brings a smile to my face.

And for all that, thank you for writing this article.

I bet you listen to all of the songs in m-flo’s Planet Shining album. That album is gold and I can never skip a song while listening to Planet Shining.

Also, having read something before does not guarantee that I will have much of an idea of what’s going on, at least based on the text itself and not memories from before. For instance, I’m reading the script to FF7 as practice (courtesy of AJATT), but even for moments I remember kinda well, I still have to pull up the dictionary because I can’t make heads or tails of the situation. I’m aware that I could just bump down to a lower difficulty text, but the problem is less in the difficulty in the text and more in that I don’t know how to approach the text in general, making them all of about the same very hard difficulty.

Here’s a live on-the-spot example. I’m interested in gravitational waves, which jisho.org tells me is “重力波” in Japanese. I do a google search for that (oops, getting a lot of Chinese, better search for “重力波が”) and get a list of pages, and for whatever reason
this one catches my eye. Click. Bunch of text that’s not calling to me… oh, pictures. And below that some text “重力波の検出実験はウェーバー…” Oh, hey, I know 実験, and now 重力波, but not the word in the middle. I should take this to dic.yahoo.co.jp, but I’m feeling lazy so back to Jisho. Oh, of course! I should have been able to guess that from context. And ウェーバー must mean Joseph Weber. I now have the material for a few new MCDs. I can kind of guess at the meaning of the rest of the sentence from a few key bits I already know (1960, 現在 and レーザー) but this is starting to feel like work. I’ll bookmark this page in case I want to come back to it. But for now I’m gonna go do an image search for 猫が一杯…

So, I had a little moment of engagement, read the phrase “gravitational-wave detection experiment,” got a sense of the context it was in and moved on before it got boring.

The same general process can work for books. Start with things you already know you’re interested in, stories you already know and love either because you read them in English or because you’ve seen the anime, drama, movie, etc that was the basis for or was based on the book. This stacks the odds in favor of it being interesting, it gives you context to help understand, and it avoids the risk of spoilers (the last point, by the way, being my only real objection to skimming/scanning. I would hate to ruin the author’s carefully-constructed drama over whether character A is going to die on page 287 by having already seen her enjoying a cup of tea on page 310). Oh, and of course having pictures helps too, both in terms of providing context and generating interest, making manga a natural choice if you happen to like any.

cadres.pepperdine.edu/ccar/ar/c7/Connaghan/MindfulLearning.htm

And for (fiction) books, I’m aghast that people skim! If a novel isn’t interesting enough for me to want to read every word, then I put the entire book down and find one I like better.

My point is — if you hate listening to an entire CD and you skim books, then do that. But not everyone is that way. In language-learning (as in life in genera), the important thing is to know yourself and do what works for you. 🙂