Crossing the fog of reading

[cjhey]

An important issue I’ve consistently had in my Japanese learning is that, when reading, I feel like I’m seeing things popping in and out in a foggy scene. Things happen and I can maybe make sense of some of it, but the fog never leaves. The whole purpose of this post is to gauge how other people may have moved past this obstacle–dispersing the fog as it were.

Take, for instance, the following:

This is something I can sort of read. That is, I can read it as if it were a theater stage covered in fog. In fact, when reading, I can pinpoint the things that are unclear, and often it comes down to vocabulary, but sometimes it’s more than that:

Mind you, I’m not asking for translations or help with these sentences. Those are problems that can be solved. However, what I’m showing here is sort of how different moments and fragments during reading make comprehension rocky. Some of the stuff I marked here required rereading, or reading forward without understanding and then revisiting–and even then, the feeling of reading is foggy, even after the job of finding the vocab I don’t know and looking for patterns I may have missed.
Now, I recognize many of my shortfalls when it comes to Japanese in terms of grammar knowledge and vocabulary, but I can qualify it with some minor quantification:

This is my current progress on Bunpro:

As for kanji, I should know some 2k, and about some 7k words, counting from the decks I use. This may sound like a pretty decent number, but, particularly when it comes to vocab, I feel it’s incredibly insufficient.
When it comes to reading stats, I think I can qualify it as having read some 2 million characters, mostly from manga (and I mention this after reading this thread). This may sound like a lot, and my reading is in a much better place than before, but it certainly doesn’t feel like it’s nearly enough. Many, many years ago I took about 4 or 5 years of Japanese at a Japanese Institute, but the actual progress I made in the classroom was, to be frank, almost invisible. We did みんなの日本語 1 and 2, following it closely. My vocabulary probably never grew past 500-1000 words at that point, and my kanji knowledge was basically nonexistent. Still, if anything, those years cemented the most basic concepts of the language.
Most of my reading from those 2m characters, as I mentioned earlier, comes from manga, and I think I did myself a disservice by not jumping into written-only materials. The first actual books I read were the ミラーさん series from みんなの日本語, a pair of graded readers that eased me into the idea of reading actual novels. After that, I read 時をかける少女, which didn’t feel that bad, and the book I showed earlier is 霧のむこうのふしぎな町. This children’s book, however, is kicking my ass. It’s frugal with kanji, so often I won’t have a clue about the semantic field of many words, and very often I just struggle to understand what’s going on because of dialectal variations or just constructions I’m not familiar with.
My 2m estimate is still rather conservative, without taking into account any reading done online, or things I didn’t finish. The problem, however, is the fog: Every time I read in Japanese–and this is the only area I’m focusing on, so when it comes to listening, I am basically a complete novice–I feel this sense of being immersed in a fog. Figures come in and out and do things, but those things often become masked by the fog.
What I’ve figured out works is rereading: Rereading often dispels a large part of this fog, though not always. Rereading a page you just read is, however, a bit of an annoyance that makes the experience of reading much worse.
Vocab lists also help, but to a limited extent: I chose 霧のむこうのふしぎな町 because it was listed in the beginner book clubs on the WaniKani book clubs, and there’s a spreadsheet with vocabulary. Reading with the spreadsheet is, indeed, helpful, but often I’ve found myself asking questions that were not asked and that do not have entries on the spreadsheet, and as I don’t enjoy reading on my computer, I need to have two things open to go through it, making it more annoying.

I’m sorry for venting, but I think my question is directed to those who have traversed the fog and came out the other side (if they ever felt that way): Are there any pointers, a compass for someone still lost in it? I figure the most honest advice is, probably, keep reading: A couple more million characters will probably be a good idea, haha.

And maybe there are others who feel like they’re navigating in this fog too: Are you there, somewhere?

[bunnypro]

Relatable!
Can’t offer much more than that right now, but definitely struggle with the large volume of texts to read within a relatively short time period on the JLPT N2 exam.

[casual]

I’m just starting with proper reading, and so cannot really offer any pointers, but two points do sound relatable.

There is a lot of, for a lack of better word, caching required. Holding on to the first half of the sentence until I reach that long awaited は and figure out who’s actually doing what. Some sentences make no sense until re-read 3 times, which is not ideal for pacing.

And second, I’ve been staying away from anything written more than 30 years ago, even if it’s aimed at children and/or beginners. Maybe, especially if it’s some sort of むかしばなし. It sounds easier to start with simple stories about your average 21 century schoolkid, written in modern non-dialectal language.

[kamov]

As far as I know, the only way to get better at reading is simply to read more, it’s one of the few places in life where quantity > quality.

And I do feel like this too, but it gets better, and going through Satori Reader and Bunpro helped me a lot.

[Gacee]

I haven’t reached this level of reading in Japanese yet, and so I can’t say that what I mention here is entirely the same thing but will hopefully provide some perspective.

In my second language, French, one of the first proper books I read in the language was something called Le chevalier au lion , - at the time it was /so/ hard, and I experienced exactly the fog you are describing here. I was able to, with a lot of dictionary help and class discussion, get to figuring out what was happening in the plot but the details were so vague. The sense of uncertainty was horrendously unpleasant.

I recently reread that book some three years and many other books later and I was astonished at how much more vivid it was. The battle scenes were gruesome, the tension was palpable. It felt like /reading/ in a way that it didn’t when I originally read it. The only thing that seriously changed in that three years was I read a lot more. I didn’t go through large decks of vocab flash cards or more intensively study grammar. I just kept reading and looking up words that were necessary to comprehension and reviewing grammar when necessary.

All that to say: the fog lifts. you just can’t rush it.

One practical piece of advice for more quickly being able to enjoy your reading is to read things that have some unifying thread. Pick a genre, an author, or even a time period that you enjoy reading and just read stuff that is linked by whatever thread you’ve chosen. This isn’t great for breadth learning but it will familiarize you with the style common for whatever you’ve chosen and you will gain a stronger depth of knowledge on those things much faster.

[Edo9]

Yes, I have no doubt experienced this. You express it as fog which is better than the term “fuzzy” that I used. But a while back I read through a light novel and there were plenty of times where I felt lost and not sure what was going on. Still, I made it through and finished it. I might have only understood about half of what was going on, but it was an accomplishment in my eyes.

My biggest problem, I haven’t read another one since. I have read manga and other things, but I have yet to finish another novel or light novel. Looking at the posts CursedKitsune has been posting which I highly recommend, it’s apparent that I’m just not reading enough. And that might be the case for you as well.

Some people here have been saying that the fog lifts, and even though there is still plenty of fog for me, it has lifted in several areas. It’s going to remain foggy for a while, but it’s clearer than it used to be. It’s gonna be a while, so enjoy the things that you can understand. Reading はたらく魔王さま, I was lost quite often, especially in the action scenes. But when one of the characters friends who was from Kobe talked about the Great Hanshin Earthquake, went into Kansai dialect, and was talking about how people in Tokyo talked to her about it so casually like it wasn’t a big deal, man I couldn’t put that book down. It’s the moments of clarity among the fog that make the trek through the unknown worth it.

[Magyarapointe]

I’ve been there too, and I have a very similar learning experience with Japanese : high school classes for 3 years, reached the « old »
JLPT 3 level, then self-study through various means. The only difference is I jumped early into reading, and only very recently came to read manga (all my teachers emphasized that reading manga is difficult, and can be counter productive if you don’t already speak Japanese at a relatively high level)
I used to just read as much as I could even if I didn’t understand whole sentences, sometimes whole paragraphs, because stopping to look even one word in a dictionary takes time and breaks the reading flow.

I got better … very slowly….

And then recently I discovered the combo yomitan + ttsu reader !

Basically, ttsu reader is a web-based app that will accept epubs (so you can read novels you care about, and not only websites or made-for-learners text like Satori Reader), and Yomitan (the new version of Yomichan) is a very, very good pop-up dictionary, way better than the kindle dictionary for example, that you can customize to your heart’s content with bilingual dictionaries, monolingual dictionaries, and even grammar dictionaries. It has been a complete game-changer for me, because it’s super fast, so you don’t lose focus on the text when looking something up, it helps with collocations and idiomatic expressions, not just with words, and while I almost never used yomichan/rikaichan/rikaikun/etc for websites before, I use it a lot when reading books.

Compared to other dictionaries, yomitan will also parse the verbs for you, so not only will it give you the translation of the word, but it will also automatically tell you that it is passive/causative/causative-passive/whatever, so it will shed light on those foggy parts, and do it fast.

You can also use it to mine sentences directly into Anki, but even without doing that, it has been a huge help for me.

And if you’re not a fan of reading on you computer, you can also use it on an android ebook reader.

Setup can be a bit bothersome, especially if you try to do some fancy things with Anki, but it was worth it.

As for ttsu-reader, it handles epubs, furigana, vertical reading, has a tracker, and you can set goals for your readings (I try to read 3000-5000 characters a day). And it will sync with your GoogleDrive or OneDrive if you want to use it on several platforms….but will also work offline.

I still have those « foggy » moments when I have no idea what the sentence means and have to re-read it, but now it only happens once every 50 pages or so…

So even though you state in your original post that it’s not a problem of simply looking up things in a dictionary, I think it still is, because you actually need to use several dictionaries and reference books to get the complete meaning of a sentence, and that takes time and break your flow. I find it simply way easier with ttsu-reader paired with Yomitan, and really encourage you to give it a try !

[amberglade]

Is there something like this on iPad / iOS?

[cjhey]

It’s certainly nice to not feel lonely in this foggy boat
My reading speed is still atrocious! I can physically read faster, but then my comprehension sinks to basically 0. So slow reading+rereading is what works for me in order to kind of make sense of things, but it takes quite a while to be done with a page!

[cjhey]

This unlocked some repressed memories too, haha. The first novel I ever read in French when I was learning the language was Truismes. It was foggy, slow and painful, and I ended up hating it. Thinking about it now, it was quite a poor choice for a beginner, even as a native Spanish speaker! Reading some pages now, there’s no mystery nor much of a fog, but this was a good reminder of how ambiguous reading can feel even if you do have a foundation of sorts.
On the other hand, it makes me see a big fault in my reading up to now: Mistaking familiarity for understanding. I am reading manga I have read in other languages in the past, and often I can get away with not really understanding what the words mean because I know what they could say or what they were translated as. Sometimes this creates a false sense of security that gets crushed when reading new things. It’s not that it’s a bad idea to read things you’re familiar with, but rather, it should be done with the caveat that there’s gonna be extralinguistic factors that aid comprehension, but those factors may not be present elsewhere.

[josh]

@cjhey

Are there any pointers, a compass for someone still lost in it?

Keep in mind, I’m still learning. I still struggle with this as well. However, I do have a tip that has helped me a lot when I run into sentences that I don’t fully understand despite knowing all the grammar/vocab in the sentence. I’ll just take one of the sentences you highlighted and show how I would go about deciphering this.

祖父は、いつか自分の船がもてたら長室におくんだといって、一つのランプをたいせつにしていた

Step 1: Remove what doesn’t make sense.
Since all sentences in Japanese MUST have a subject and a verb, it’s easiest to take out the foggy parts and look at the core of the sentence. In this case, since you have multiple parts that are making it confusing, it’s best to just reduce it down to its simplest form:
祖父は[something]といって、一つのランプをたいせつにしていた

I put [something] in there because the verb 言う is acting on an object, which is that whole block we took out. So this just helps clarify the new broken down sentence.

Step 2: Figure out what the new sentence says.
It should be much easier now that we’ve removed the fog. Looking at what we have, we can translate this to along the lines of “My grandfather, who cherished that lamp, said [something]”.

Okay great, now we have the general idea of what the sentence is saying. Now we just need to figure out what’s hiding in the fog.

Step 3: Break down the fog by putting it into its own core sentence.
Let’s look at いつか自分の船がもてたら first - you mention two parts in here being a bit confusing. Well let’s remove いつか自分の and simply look at 船がもてたら. We can break this down even more and just look at it without any conjugation to get 船が持つ meaning “(I) have a boat”. What’s great about this is that it can’t get any simpler. By having a basic sentence like this means it makes it less overwhelming and you can now target anything that might not make sense much easier. For example, it may not make sense why が is being used here, but by having it in such a small sentence you now have the ability to simply just focus on this one thing that is confusing and find an answer (at least, this is helpful for me).

Well cool, now we can work our way up! We can change this to 船がもてたら (持つ goes to potential + conditional) and we end up with “If (I) could/was able to have a boat”. Cool, we’ve moved this out of the fog and we can repeat this process until everything else is cleared up… and then we can put it all together.

What I think is great about this process is, even if time consuming, it utilizes what you already know to figure out what you don’t know, or to help you unveil what you DO know but couldn’t see at first because it was being written/said in a way you aren’t used to yet. And, not to mention, the more you do it the faster it becomes. I also think doing this in general helps your brain see more clearly how Japanese is working on a deeper level which, the more you do it, will likely reduce the amount of times you’ll need to use it because you’ll keep in memory what you learned from the previous time you did it. But idk, no research behind that, just going off of what I’ve somewhat have experienced.

Hopefully this can be somewhat of a lighthouse for you when there’s too much fog

[Magyarapointe]

@amberglade

Is there something like this on iPad / iOS?

Ttsu works in iOS, and 10ten is the closest to Yomitan. It’s good, but not as good as Yomitan…

[Asher]

Awesome post! Such a relatable question that I am sure most people experience to some either major or minor degree when they first start reading, and potentially for a long time after!

@cjhey

I feel like I’m seeing things popping in and out in a foggy scene. Things happen and I can maybe make sense of some of it, but the fog never leaves

This is a great description, and I think you really hit the nail on the head. Having learned to read in two languages other than English (Swedish and Japanese), I would say that the experience was entirely different for each. In Swedish, I was able to make so many more inferences based on my understanding of the world that had been pre-built in English. English and Swedish happen in the same consciousness of how the world works. So even when my vocabulary was not the greatest, I was still ‘conscious’.

I use that example because I believe that learning Japanese is fundamentally different. Basically, you are linguistically unconscious when you start reading Japanese. It’s like being a baby all over again when you can snatch little pieces of information but forming webs of related context is incredibly difficult, because you have not become ‘conscious’ yet. I guess this consciousness that I am trying to describe is similar to the point when you’re about 3 years old where most people can recall their first memories. We could say that a contributing factor to that person developing memories is that they have become linguistically ‘conscious’, and that they are capable of reflecting on that memory using language. All memories before that point are from the theater in the fog.

@cjhey

I’m not asking for translations or help with these sentences. Those are problems that can be solved. However, what I’m showing here is sort of how different moments and fragments during reading make comprehension rocky.

It sounds like you are highly aware of the points you need to improve, and I agree that you are probably correct in that you don’t need anyone to explain vocab or grammar to you. You just need to become more aware of what you are reading.

@cjhey

I’m sorry for venting, but I think my question is directed to those who have traversed the fog and came out the other side (if they ever felt that way): Are there any pointers, a compass for someone still lost in it?

I definitely went through this issue and would describe it in the same way you did. It’s succint, and paints a good picture of honestly how it feels. The one thing I remember doing that made the biggest instant impact for me was not just saying the words in my head as I read, but actually saying each word loudly and with intent in my head as I read. Use your inner voice to shout the words at yourself. This may potentially seem silly, but it helped me way more than I care to admit. It’s like shouting the words blows the fog aside so that you can get a better look at the stage. You’re trying to fast-track that ‘consciousness’.

Sorry if this is weird advice , I just really vividly remember this stage and how it made me make the link between conscious and unconscious understanding, regardless of whether or not that is even a good analogy .

[Ceuteum]

Yeah, I feel like I’m at the same level right now. Sometimes it’s alternating between “oh, I sort of understand everything, amazing, didn’t think I’d get there” and “wow, I have no idea what they’re talking about, even though I know every word here…”. Sometimes it happens on the same text passage

Though I think the fog lifts. As others have already said, it’s just a matter of more reading, studying and giving it a couple more years. As a non-native that was my experience with English, too. I still remember trying to read and feeling like I only have a rough idea what’s going on. Fast forward maybe 5 years and reading is not a problem anymore.

[casual]

@Asher

Having learned to read in two languages other than English (Swedish and Japanese), I would say that the experience was entirely different for each. In Swedish, I was able to make so many more inferences based on my understanding of the world that had been pre-built in English. English and Swedish happen in the same consciousness of how the world works. So even when my vocabulary was not the greatest, I was still ‘conscious’.

Relatable. Going from English to Dutch was a completely different experience than to Japanese. Even with very insufficient vocabulary, at least the general shape of things made intuitive sense. Actually, it would be interesting to try to read something now and refresh that feeling.
Learning to read English as a foreign language… was probably confusing, but primary school kids have different brains and expectations, so I cannot really say anymore.

[cjhey]

Thank you. This is a more streamlined way of doing something I’ve been doing, which is basically highlighting what I don’t get (on my Kindle, mostly), using the internal dictionary, finishing the sentence, rereading and then using the translator when those sentences become impenetrable. Since I’ve never really systematized it, sometimes it may yield worse results, so I think being more precise about how to tackle those sentences I have a hard time with could be actually a better way forward.

[cjhey]

“Hypersubvocalizing” makes a whole lot of sense to me! It means you have to be deliberate about your parsing of the sentence while reading, which forces you to take it slow in parsing and retrieving info. Great idea! Thanks!

My knowledge of languages beyond Spanish and English is fairly varied, and though I have reached some middling competence in at least one non-indoeuropean language (Estonian), the strong influence of indoeuropean languages on it made it much easier to parse even in light of large gaps in my vocabulary. This has been the same for other IE languages I’ve dabbled in to some moderate competency, particularly those that are rather distant from Romance languages (particularly Balto-Slavic langs). Japanese oftentimes not only trips me because of its vocab; it sometimes transcends barriers of IE sentence structure and contextual requirements! It’s both fascinating and frustrating. I think you’re also right that the fog feels like only being partially conscious in the language, like being in a fever dream. The feeling I had maybe a year and a half ago was that of profound vagueness (a worse feeling than that of fogginess). And come to think about it, that feeling has substantially subdued.

[jrmr50]

A practical tip that might help.

Read something that you are familar with so that you can visualize the scene as you read it.

I read a light novel for an anime I’m very familar with. Even though the difficulty was way beyond my current ability, by being able to visualize the scene in my head, I could move the jigsaw puzzle pieces of text around until they fitted.
E.g. the way I’m reading it, it’s as if character A is saying it/doing it, but I know character B says this/does this.
I even went and rewatched the episodes to help with this. Of course scenes in the book that didn’t make the edit were really difficult!

but yeah, I have the same problem with unfamilar content. I just finished a short story the other day, and in this book they all have twists at the end. This story finished and I completely didn’t get whether there was a twist or not. oh well しょうがない

[jrmr50]

Also we tend to forget the times we might read something in our native languages and not properly comprehend it first time… Huh? Why the did the police rob the store… what, wait… oooohh!

[Beghaus]

Honestly the only answer is I think you just have to keep reading. Read every day. Read something you are familiar with already. Read something you are not familiar with. But the main thing is read every day for one month, or six months, or a year, or two years, or three years or whatever. Eventually the fog will clear and instead of simply understanding grammar and words as disparate things you will begin the picture what is being expressed in your head. I’m not familiar with the novel you are reading but even without understanding everything was able to skim read the passage and visualise the characters and their thoughts and words as my own. I could only get to that point through practice and perseverance.