You've been learning Japanese and now
you're ready to start reading Japanese, but there are some things
that you should know. Reading involves a lot more than just
understanding the language used to present a story or information.
Reading
isn't just about the language.
When reading, we have expectations
on what will happen based on our prior experiences and knowledge of
the world. These kind of expectations make it much easier to
understand what we are reading, because what we know is not entirely
dependent on what we read. But when
reading in another language from another culture, we lose much of
this other knowledge. We are forced to depend on the words
alone.
The
skills needed to read and understand.
In
beginning to read Japanese, you are actually faced with a lot more
than just learning vocabulary and grammar. You must also
learn about the culture that created the work and understand the
context of what you read.
For
an example in reading Japanese, you could read and understand the
language, that characters in a story were using different honorifics
(-chan, -san, -sama, etc) with each other, but would you
really understand what the language implied
about relationships between the characters?
Another
example is a newspaper article. If you open up a newspaper in your
native language, for your own country and region, then you'll most
likely recognize the names, places, and events that are discussed.
Now open up a newspaper (or news site) for a different country or
region that speaks your same language. The vast majority of the
names, places, and events will be completely foreign to you. Even
though it's still the same language, your knowledge of the world
doesn't allow you to understand.
You understand the words, but you don't gain meaning.
So
we (readers) need to understand cultural details, information about
the world, in order to understand the meaning of the words in the
story or article. Ironically,
one of the best ways to gain this kind of worldly information is
through reading, but you're just starting out and are still focusing
on learning Japanese itself. So how can you build knowledge
of Japanese while retaining a cultural context that you understand?
Build
your language learning skills in a context that you know.
One
of the easiest ways to build knowledge of the language is in a
setting where you know the rules. Somewhere that you can form
expectations and use your background knowledge of the world to help
you. The best way to do this is to use translations of
materials that you already know.
By providing an environment where you have knowledge of the subject
matter and the culture that made it, you can learn not only the
language, but how the language represents those nuances.
Take
for instance the Harry Potter books. They're immensely popular and
they've been translated from English into just about every major
language. Supposing that you have
read at least one of the books, you would already know the background
information. You'd
understand who the characters are, how they act, how they relate to
one another, as well as how the story goes.
So if you were to try and read the story again in Japanese, you'd
only need to understand how the language presents that information.
You would already
know the context, so you could focus on the language.
That's
the first secret of reading Japanese: Use what you know to teach
you what you don't.
If
you know the story or subject and you know the context, then all you
have to pay attention to is how Japanese presents that same
information. You build your knowledge of the Japanese language while
also learning how it presents contextual cues. From there, you can
move on to exploring new materials. So grab a translation
of an old favorite and start reading it in Japanese. You'll find that
you understand a lot more than you expected!
What's
that noise? Why that's the sound of Part Two coming soon!
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- The Two Styles of Reading
- The Other Side of Immersion
- Why reading before bed could save you from burnout
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