Last week, Ken Loo sent me several books in Japanese. I've been struggling to read one of them, Kaori Ekuni's ぼくの小鳥ちゃん (My Little Bird). Sometimes I find myself sounding out the words, character by character making no sense of anything. Other times, whole phrases and sentences pop past my eyes into my brain and I stop suddenly with the realization, "Wait! I read that."
The difficulty, I find, lies not with the grammar or the amount of kanji. (I find it easiest to read kanji with furigana, where the text provides both visual and aural clues to meaning.) My lack of vocabulary slows me down, but reading a novel is a great way to acquire vocabulary. The biggest stumbling block is my lack of context. What kind of book is this? When you're learning to read, setting expectations and providing context are very important to comprehension. We approach mystery, science fiction, magical realism, historical novels, slice-of-life narratives, and romance differently. For example, if there are talking animals are they magical or metaphor? I love reading Mieko's Diary, because I read the English first to set expectations and then am able to wend my way through the Japanese.
I like the challenge of trying to read this novel. The graded readers I have are boring and the newspaper is still too difficult. So, I think what would help most is trying to read a story I'm already familiar with. Jack Seward says he practiced reading Japanese by reading English classics in translation. But I think it would be better to read something written first in Japanese. One book I'd like to find in Japanese is Tetsuko Kuroyanagi's 窓ぎわのトットちゃん, which I've read in translation "Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window"--so I'm very familiar with the story. Perhaps I will find it at Kinokuniya, when we go to San Francisco this year.
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens
June 15, 2004
Share Your Thoughts
Do you remember learning to read?