Randomly:

Today I passed 300 pages, so at this rate I should be able to triple my score from last time. However the second half of the month I intend to do quite a bit of rereading, so that will slow my pagecount (it’s half credit). I’m very curious how much I’ll remember from my first passes through.

Sketchbook manga continues to entertain. I think the anime is better though. Well, there’s only so much character development and storyline you can do in a four-panel. Only one volume left (have I really read five volumes of it in two weeks??).

Still far too dependent on furigana. After the contest this month I intend to make kanji readings top priority. Still not entirely sure how I’ll go about it, but will probably use RTK2 to some extent.

I finally ran out of graded readers.  You know, the problem with buying a set of readers like that, very likely half the material won’t be terribly interesting. The only reason I read a couple of the stories was that they were in Japanese. Won’t be rereading those. Since I clearly didn’t learn that lesson (or more likely figured they were still worth it), I ordered considerably more of the same as well as Halpern’s Kanji dictionary.

Very quickly, some thoughts on the first reading contest this year:

I’ve progressed.  A lot.  It never really seems like it when you’re in the middle of it, but, like watching a plant grow, you notice when you measure at longer intervals.  The last one, six months ago, I finished with just over 200 pages.  Today – and mind you I didn’t really read at all yesterday because I was quite late getting back from the relatives’ where I was for New Years – I have 50 pages already.  So essentially one day in I’ve been able to read 25% of what took me a month, half a year ago.  That’s pretty much all I did today so I won’t be making that much progress on average, but still, I’m happy with that.

It isn’t just quantity either.  Last time I was struggling with the level three graded readers.  This time, today I flew through one of the eight level four readers I have, without having to look up a single thing.  Nearly all the grammar made sense, too; just a couple spots where too much okurigana was piled up and I had to really think about it.  Good thing I have six of these left to read, and I wish I had more.

However; most of my reading today was manga (the delightful スケッチブック) and that is still a lot harder than the readers, which are written with carefully correct grammar – you know, the sort the books teach you.  But that’s exactly why I’m concentrating on manga this time.

About the contest itself: wow, lots of people!  And most that signed up are actually reading, too.  We had some troubles with the bot at first (everyone should just be on GMT. Let’s make a rule.), but LordSilent was on the case and fixed it right away.  Lots of credit and thanks are due in that direction.  So far I’d say this go round is a big success.

In the introduction to the graded readers, there are written the four rules of extensive reading, and I thought others might be interested in this as well:

1. やさしいレベルから読む。

2. 辞書を引かないで読む。

3. わからないところは飛ばして読む。

4. 進まなくなったら、他の本を読む。