Crossing the fog of reading

Japanese
#7

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 !

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#8

Is there something like this on iPad / iOS?

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#9

It’s certainly nice to not feel lonely in this foggy boat :slight_smile:
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!

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#10

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.

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#11

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 :slight_smile:

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#12

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

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#13

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!

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.

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.

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 :sweat_smile:, 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 :relaxed:.

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#14

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 :sweat_smile:

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.

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#15

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.

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#16

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.

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#17

“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.
:slight_smile:

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#18

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

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#19

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!

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#20

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.

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#21

I would say I feel like I’m in the same boat.
I completely agree with many of the comments from others, too.

Something, that I think is worth mentioning as well, is finding an author you like, and reading a lot of their stuff.

Assuming I recognise the vocab, I think often the difficulty is getting used to the sentence patterns/structures. Sticking with a single author means you can really get used to the style of sentences they write, which I think can help clear the fog a lot.

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#22

I “finished” (added, not mastered) all the BunPro items a long time ago, I know somewhere around 14-15k words, and I still feel the fog pretty strongly. The worst is when I see something entirely out of context, such as opening a Japanese website and feeling completely lost, not able to quickly glance over everything and see my way around like I can in English. I think I haven’t done a huge amount of reading compared to other people at my vocab level, so I’m hoping there’s still a lot of gains to be easily made. I don’t help myself by tending to choose to read things that are a bit difficult for my level, too.

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#23

Its really just going to come down to grinding away and looking up (mostly) everything that you don’t understand. That feeling is totally natural, but I can assure you there is a light at the end of the tunnel. What it comes down to is what field is the book you’re reading related to? When you enter into a new field/genre you’re going to have to learn all of the common words and phrases that are typically used. But after you finish a couple pieces of media related to it then your reading speed will greatly increase. It’s always a tedious process. I recently started a novel about former empires and all of the historical and political vocab are really testing my patience. But over time you just kind of accept that it is what it is until you get used to the new material. Just remember while you’re trudging your way through it that you’re not alone in the struggle.

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#24

Nice thread, lots of useful advice! Summarizing the ideas of everyone here (out of order):

  • Reading stuff you have familiarity (watched an anime of it for example)
  • Reading stuff you don’t have familiarity (never saw it in another language)
  • Reading Text-only works
  • Narrow Reading (reading in the same thread, like same author, same genre etc)
  • “Hypersubvocalizing” (shout the words in your head as you read)
  • Don’t read stuff too old
  • Read more
  • Highlighting the foggy areas in the text
  • Break up foggy sentences systematically into simpler pieces and build them up again
  • ttsu reader + Yomitan (or 10ten on iOS)

The stuff I would say were already said before by everyone. As by the thread you linked, I’m also going through the fog, hallo :wave:. For me, highlighting and hypersubvocalizing are new, and the breaking up of sentences, I really should be doing more… Well, let’s keep going, one day we may look back and notice we already didn’t have anymore fog for ages, and sit down to look at the sunrise

image

Also, for those on Android, it’s a good idea to check Jidoujisho, it fuses a bunch of stuff (including ttsu and yomitan) together, it’s pretty cool.

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#25

I usually compare it to static like when you’re listening to the radio and you can hear that there’s a station but you can’t entirely make out what’s being said - just a few words here and there. As you progress, it’s like a slight adjustment to the tuning knob on the radio and the signal starts to become clearer and clearer until finally you get it.

When I first started reading there was a lot of static and I had to look up just about everything that was being said. But as I continued to read more every day, I began to see a lot of progress. I love reading in Japanese.

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#26

Just want to add, and something to consider, is you’re comparing your current Japanese reading experience to your current native language reading experience. I would guess that you likely have a lot more years in your first/native language and probably only a few in Japanese. You probably encountered just as much fog years ago.

Just my opinion, but as we get older we tend to try and quantify and compare our abilities constantly. If we’re not “getting it” we start to get nervous. Yet, when we were children we often just “did stuff” without a lot of thought and strategy. You got handed a book about a cat in a hat and you just went with it. You didn’t spend the whole time reading it wondering if you understood a particular grammar point and how much vocabulary you needed to put into flashcards after; you just read about the cat in a hat.

You likely had the same issues you’re having now when you were learning your first language, but back then you just didn’t care as much and probably don’t remember it. So now, as an adult looking back, it seemed a lot easier than it really because you didn’t care about the struggles and didn’t bother to remember them.

You’re probably doing just fine. I think we probably all are. I think we just get bombarded by our own worries and a bunch of “I read every book by Nasume Souseki in under 3 hours and I just started learning Japanese two days ago! Everything you’re doing is wrong!” YouTube videos and forget that.

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