Comments on: Why The Way We Read Sucks and How to Fix It: Part 2

By: Sleepy

Sleepy — Thu, 30 Jan 2014 12:30:31 +0000

みんなの日本語. Think of a Textbook for foreigners that is pretty much 100% in Japanese(It has furigana too, people have varying feelings about furigana).

Funny thing is, it was kinda expensive where I got it($44 about, but stuff like this is hard to come by on America’s Amazon). It didn’t come with the CD either(I’m fine with that now, but some may not be).

When I first got it, I wanted to read it like everyone else, slowly and page by page. Needless to say, I disliked reading until I learned to skim pages real fast and then got addicted to reading again.

By: 名前

名前 — Thu, 30 Jan 2014 03:19:02 +0000

Curiosity got the better of me, which book is it?

By: Sleepy

Sleepy — Tue, 28 Jan 2014 16:05:31 +0000

I must thank this blog for this post. Some time ago, it allowed me to LIKE reading once again. I have a book that I like to go through many, many times a day. I only own 1 book, I might get another, but I enjoy this one soo much anyways.

Also, my brother, who HATES reading with a passion, calls me a bookworm(again, I only own 1 book) and a otaku all the time.

By: Nick

Nick — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 17:52:01 +0000

This is a very interesting conversation. I’m not learning Japanese, but I love reading about reading. I think a lot of points here are converging towards the idea that different kinds of books need to be read differently. This is actually the topic of a great book by Mortimer Adler called “How to Read a Book”. It’s definitely worth a read… or a skim.

By: Elaine

Elaine — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 23:09:28 +0000

**AND read a summary….
(May I request an edit button?)

By: Elaine

Elaine — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 23:05:50 +0000

Haha, I’ve been reading non-fiction like this for ages, only way to do it.

As for fiction I have a friend who constantly skims and skips chapters and reads the ending of novels all the time and doesn’t seem to suffer for it. I, however, find it much more enjoyable to read a story from from start to finish. 🙂 If I find myself skimming, that means it’s boring and if it’s boring then it’s not worth my time, and if it’s not worth my time I stop reading it (or read a summary and a forum discussion about it if it’s for school).

To me reading non-fiction feels like internet browsing and reading fiction feels like watching a movie.

By: All Japanese All The Time Dot Com: How to learn Japanese. On your own, having fun and to fluency. » Why The Way We Read Sucks, And How To Fix It: Part 1

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 18:17:00 +0000

[…] to fix the problem! But for that, dear children of the AJATT, ye shall have to wait for the very forthcoming sequel to this article — part deux! Wherein shall be demonstrated reading techniques that can help you have more fun reading any […]

By: branigan

branigan — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 20:09:21 +0000

I don’t really agree that what you said about skipping and skimming applies to fiction. Sure, people are free to do whatever they want, but I think the whole purpose of fiction is for the reader to catch every word. Apart from enjoying the the mere story, a very large part of it is enjoying the way words are used in the literary form of art. If people find certain pieces of fiction boring, then that perhaps means 1 of 2 things. 1) it really is boring and not worth the read, or 2) the reader just doesn’t have the level or reading experience under his/her belt that is necessary to enjoy a piece of literature of that level. You know? Enjoying the feelings, emotions, etc, that are evoked by the way in which the words are used is everything with fiction.

That’s my opinion at least 😀

By: Shigehisa

Shigehisa — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:03:20 +0000

This doesn’t seem quite congruent with the “all in moderation, including moderation itself” post.

By: The Expatriate

The Expatriate — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 11:17:14 +0000

I haven’t seen this discussed anywhere yet and it’s a pretty noob question, but here goes:

How do you SRS sentences from these non-fiction books?

I can understand SRSing sentences for language learning, such as Japanese and Chinese where you have the original sentence on one side and either a translation or an L2 explanation on the other side.

But if I’m reading an L1 self-help book and I want to SRS a sentence (as Khatz seems to like to do), I put the sentence on one side and…. what, exactly, goes on the other side? Or do you not need anything since the point is just to drive the sentence/meaning of the sentence into long-term memory?

Any comments are appreciated. Thanks.

By: All Japanese All The Time Dot Com: How to learn Japanese. On your own, having fun and to fluency. » Why The Way We Read Sucks and How to Fix It: Part 3 — The Unified Reading Process

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 07:57:07 +0000

[…] Read & Dog-ear […]

By: James Devereux

James Devereux — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:41:29 +0000

HAHAHA. Thank you for this post, this is what I need to cure my terrible reading habits that stop me from ever finishing a book! I know this site is for Japanese but I’m going to write Korean anyway~ 뗑큐!

By: Ampharos64

Ampharos64 — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 23:07:24 +0000

Hmm, I can see how it would work with fiction in L2 – since I can’t understand much yet I’ll take those sentences I do understand and skip those I don’t. With L1, though, I don’t want to miss a word, in general the idea of wanting to skip = does not compute, since to me it’s ALL the good stuff.

Well, I am taking an English Lit. MA, after all. <3 reading.

By: Drewskie

Drewskie — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 03:48:06 +0000

きのこ、 I think the point is not to arbitrarily skip material, but to skip material you find boring. If you love every word of a book, of course you would read every word. If you only liked 30% of a good book and you skimmed for that 30%, then made another pass later, you might find that 30% less interesting, and with the context of that original pass, you might find other parts a little more interesting/relevant.

As other’s have established, though, this is definitely more useful for non-fiction.

By: きのこ

きのこ — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:36:39 +0000

I love to read. I’ve never seen it as a chore, either in English or in Japanese. If it’s a book I’m bored with, I just don’t read it – luckily my school days are far behind me. I skim newspapers all the time so it’s not like I’m not familiar with the concept, but as far as I’m concerned reading is fun.

Why would I want to read just 30% of a good book? Where’s the fun in that? There’s more to reading than the “information” contained within: the setting, the writing, the characters, the developments, the dialogue…so much more than just “information”. Sometimes if I like a passage/page a lot I even go back and read it again. Me? Skim City Hunter? Never!

In other words I completely disagree with Khatz and the rest of you on this topic.

By: アメド

アメド — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:30:58 +0000

hey did anyone see that banner when you enter the AJATT site? QRG THE MOVIE!. haha i mean yea a movie that explains the AJATT method. That’s good to hear i was already planning on getting the sentence pack+QRG guide pretty soon anyhow just as a way to donate b/c learned alot of japanese and only been 4 months of this method. On another note i was interesting in that kanji kentai thingy for the future maybe in 2 years or something lol. Tests 6000 kanji. I was thinking of adding more kanji to my RTK kanji deck on anki but hmm i guess it’s better to learn all new kanji through sentence cuz of the context you get to use it in other than the meanings only. Hence the need of monolingual because it’s only way to get somewhere solid i..e fluency.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:41:03 +0000

Of course this doesn’t apply to fiction; fiction may be more demanding in terms of vocabulary, but it requires less concentration and attention – you simply get absorbed in a work of fiction like you do a movie. I finished reading Crime and Punishment recently (a freakin’ mammoth achievement for me as far as reading literature goes) and reading from start to finish was easy, because the story was absorbing. No way I can do that with a work of non-fiction; I’d burn out too easily.

The swiss-cheesing method for non-fiction therefore sounds great and I will no longer feel guilty for skipping bits, thinking a book must be read from A to Z, in that order. The trouble is, with certain non-fiction, particularly philosophy, it has ideas that build on one another which require linear reading. It’s worse when one section refers to an earlier section which refers to an earlier and you ending reading it linearly, but backwards in order to fill in the required gaps. I guess it depends largely on the work, but I suppose it would work very well to “swiss-cheese” a book like “The History of the World” by JM Roberts, which I ACTUALLY read in it’s entirety – all 1200 pages, start to finish and almost died from boredom and exhaustion…So I guess you could set it up as follows, at least this is how it seems to work for me:

Books in a “SERIES” format (their sections are independent of one-another):
Encyclopedias, reference works, history, biographies, readers/compilations
These books are swiss-cheeseable.

Books in a “CO-DEPENDANT” format (their sections build on and refer to one-another)
Fiction, much of philosophy
These books aren’t so suited to swiss-cheesing

This is just a rough sketch, but looking at it, it seems most genres would do well to take the swiss-cheese approach, which I shall be doing from now on! Thanks!

By: John B

John B — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:01:01 +0000

I’ve long had the skimming part down (my political science degree often required the digestion of massive tomes of really boring crap), but, much to my wife’s chagrin, I’ve not managed to implement the “throwing books away” part. 😉

By: beneficii

beneficii — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:49:17 +0000

Jaybot7,

“I think Khatz is getting a bit ahead of a lot of his readers and forgetting that many of them need to be like children and not to be afraid of watching that one film or reading that one manga over and over and over again because they *enjoy* it and want to read it more.”

I don’t think Khatz has forgotten this. He has said to read, watch, or listen to things you like over and over again. I think he has even mentioned it in this post.

Unfortunately, it’s too boring to go back and check. :p

By: Jaybot7

Jaybot7 — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:18:12 +0000

When I think about it… this is how you read a manga you don’t fully understand already. If the manga is interesting enough, you skip over the phrases you don’t understand and laugh/enjoy at the ones you do and are able to continue on with the story.

I think Khatz is getting a bit ahead of a lot of his readers and forgetting that many of them need to be like children and not to be afraid of watching that one film or reading that one manga over and over and over again because they *enjoy* it and want to read it more.

With fiction (which um… what else is there to read? Why would you want to read boring non-fiction stuff in Japanese? Khatzumoto is such a nerd :P), I do highlight and dog-ear on my uh… 5th time through I think. By that time I already understand the story and content very very well, but I was always too damn lazy to enter the few things I didn’t know it into SRS. You should see my copy of One Piece 第一. 😉