東野圭吾の手紙

Japanese
#1

Hi community! I’ve been using Bunpro for the past 2-3 years and whilst I’ve always been passively scrolling through the forum, this is my first post that I would like to seek advice (or motivation) from.

Recently my sensei introduced a book of an author that passed not too long ago (as the subject suggest). I thought given that I’m working in a Japanese company, in a dominantly Japanese department immersed with their daily emails and conversations in Japanese, surely I would be able to try and read this book somewhat.

Literally went and bought the book off Kinokuniya this evening and I’m utterly humbled.
I barely understood the context (mostly from my advantage in kanji since they are similar in Chinese language). the ones I can read, I barely made heads or tails of it.

I literally laughed to myself when I read half the page realising that the “financial asset” the author was talking about…was actually the name of his brother.

It really put a damper to my motivation after 14 pages…would like to humbly ask if anyone has faced similar situations before? How did you get through this phase? I reckon it’s similar to me struggling with English as a kid reading through literature and getting better over time, but I dont get that similar luxury as an adult cramming Japanese to a business level for the sake of my career (and hobby)…

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#2

the first like 20 pages of a book are always crazy hard for me, while I get a feel for the prose, setting, narrative style, and other details.

I would say dont take the first 14 pages as anything other than a warm up!

Have you read a book in Japanese before? The first few are also usually rough. Getting used to Japanese in a completely different medium just takes getting used to, no matter how good your Japanese is.

Something I do to help me along is set timers for like 10 mins while I read. After 10 mins, I can stop and have a break, or if I’m actually getting into it, I just keep going. Breaking the reading up with a timer helps me feel less defeated when I don’t get anything. I feel like when I understand how much time I put into something, it feels less hopeless, somehow?

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#3

Welcome!

As cafelatte says, the beginning of books can be hard, either due to not being used to the writing style or the fact there is no context. Lots of authors also like to show off a bit at the start but calm down quite a lot when things get going.

As for 東野圭吾, I’ve read and enjoyed a couple of his books (容疑者Xの献身 and 白夜行). His books are quite fun and have some decent writing for mystery novels. The difficulty level is quite typical of normal modern mystery novels, so if that is the sort of thing you’re interested in then I’d recommend sticking it out! It will get a lot easier the more you read :muscle:

By the way, some of his works have TV or film versions, I am pretty sure, so you could always try watching them prior to reading for some extra context.

This is a good tip - I have also used timeboxing and variations of it in the past and it has always helped