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Notes -
So I read 89 books last year (details can be found in the wellness Wednesday thread). Many people here and more so in real life seem to pretty surprised, and impressed. I'm not sure if this is me being a time (or hobby) snob, but I'm a little dissapointed in this kind of reaction. In the real world this makes some sense: TV and scrolling are much more appealing than a book after a long day at work, but I was hoping to see more serious readers in a place that's as text and argument heavy as the motte.
Reading a lot of books isn't as hard as it seems. The average american spends something like 4+ hours on the internet+TV. If you take 1 of those hours and convert them into reading every day you get 365 hours a year. At 50 pages/hour, that's 15k pages a year, or about 50 300-page books. I read slightly faster and slightly more, but also a significant amount in Spanish, which is slower. So probably 2 hrs/day at an average of 50 pages/hour. That's about 30k pages. If I look at my goodreads, I read 33,885 pages total. I keep more detailed stats for Spanish. Looks like I read for a total of 227 hours for a total of 11k pages, which is about 45 pages/hour. Of course these numbers vary from person to person, and book to book. All very do-able for the average Mottzian. It just means largely giving up other forms of entertaininment, like video games or TV, and perhaps more importantly, not being a workaholic.
So are my expectations for this place off? Am I overestimating the importance of books to the average Mottzian (and in self-cultivation in general)? Underestimating people's daily time commitments?
This right here is the load-bearing part. I read in Japanese at maybe 10 pages/hour. Not only does this mean that books take (at least) 5 times longer but they aren't designed to be read at this pace. It's much harder to stay immersed in a plot when you can only read about one scene an hour and each book takes 20/30 hours i.e. more than a week of reasonably focused effort to complete. In English, on the other hand, I blaze through most books at easily 100 pages/hour with little or no perceived effort and I've always been a voracious reader.
Lee Child (a bestselling popular writer) once wrote that the most common compliment he got from ordinary people was 'I finished your book'. To get ordinary people (i.e. slow readers) through a full novel requires a level of page turning suspense that most writers can't achieve.
Personally, I would sell one of the less-important organs to double or triple my Japanese reading speed but none of the suggested tricks seem to work for long.
(Any advice very welcome!)
Mad respect to you man! I don't have any Japanese advice, but I know with Spanish, as I kept reading my speed increased quite a lot (I was reading around 10 pages an hour when I first started out). So I would imagine the more you read in Japanese, the easier it might get. Something I've been trying with learning Italian is using the audiobook alongside the print book. You can set it to 0.75 or 0.8 speed and read much faster than by yourself. This might help a lot with Japanese, where I imagine a lot of the difficulty is with the association of Kana/Kanji with the sound of the word and thus the meaning.
Thanks! I’ve read, or perhaps more accurately ‘skimmed’ about 70/80 books in the last 5 years but something just won’t click. I’ve actually got slower as I get better, because I understand more of the characters now and I can’t just skip over them the way I used to. That’s why I wonder downthread if it’s not an effect of formative training.
I will try your suggestion re: audiobooks :)
So I had a similar experience with spanish where my reading (and percieved language level actually) went down as my language ability went up. You notice a lot more detail and words that you just skimmed over before you now have the ability to try and parse out because you understand the surrouding context. Luckily at least for me this effect seems to be temporary, my reading speed has rebounded and continues to get slightly faster (although when I'm tired Spanish still is very hard to read). For context I've read ~86 books in Spanish all the way through. I would imagine this would all take a lot longer for Japanese, which is a langauge much further away from English.
Tell me about it, lol.
Thanks, really, this is interesting to hear. The vast majority of learners I know are either too new / too bad to give applicable advice, too Asian, or near-fluent but uninterested in reading anything longer than an essay comprehension passage.
I spent the last couple of hours trying your audiobook + novel tip and it worked a lot better than the last similar thing I tried a few years ago. I’ll keep experimenting with it.
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