I ran across some interesting “rules” that accompany Ask Publishing’s Japanese Graded Readers:
１．やさしいレベルから読む
Start at an easy level
２．辞書を引かないで読む
Read without using a dictionary
３．わからないところは飛ばして読む
Skip any parts you don’t understand
４．進まなくなったらやめて、ほかの本を読む
When you hit a bottleneck, stop. Read a different book.
While I don’t think “rules” are necessary (and I do find it fun to read material that is far above my reading level) I do think that these provide an interesting way to look at reading Japanese: Keep it moving.
Sure, there’s value in stopping to look up words you don’t know or carefully parsing a selection to glean its meaning. And sometimes it’s worthwhile to push through something difficult if you think it’s worth it.
But at the same time, if you are willing to let go of knowing, right now, the meaning of every word you see, willing to accept that you don’t fully understand most of what you read, and not be discouraged when you read something you have absolutely no clue about, you’re on good footing.
To build a real feel for what any given Japanese writer is communicating, you’re going to have to read thousands upon thousands of pages of Japanese.
You can grind through that word for word, phrase for phrase, sentence for sentence, or you can enjoy the journey.
It means that reading Japanese isn’t about being “right” or knowing every answer. It’s about continually seeking greater understanding and learning to see the Japanese style of communicating: how they express themselves, use slang, metaphors, and word choice.
Given all the ways you could construct a grammatically correct Japanese sentence, how do the Japanese actually do it? Given all the words you could use to describe something, which ones do the Japanese actually use? How do they communicate fear, anticipation, hesitation or excitement?
You can build a list of these things and you can memorize it. Or you can be it. It’s one thing to know all these properties of Japanese and be able to recite them. It’s another thing to have absorbed so much Japanese that all these topics are internal to you.
It’s one thing to recite an answer, it’s quite another to be able to derive the answer off the top of your head.
It’s the difference between knowing the grammatical rule a sentence violates and getting a feel in the pit of your stomach that it just “sounds” wrong.
I’ve “mastered” English, if you will. But there are only two rules of spelling and grammar in English that I can recite. The first is: ‘I’ before ‘E’ except after ‘C’ or in cases where the sound is like ‘ay’ as in neighbor or weigh. The second: ‘Good’ is a state of being and ‘Well’ describes an action i.e. Something is good if it is done well.
I keep these rules around because I sometimes forget them. Given the sheer number of spelling and grammar rules in English, having to keep two of them around seems reasonable, no?
And why would Japanese be any different? Dictionaries, Grammar lexicons and study lists are useful. But the real meat, the feel, the internalization, the effortless absorption comes from reading, reading and more reading.
Keep it moving.