Practice reading without understanding

Reading is one of the most important sources of learning besides listening. It removes the time constraint, allowing you to get more from a piece of content. But practicing reading can be challenging.

It can be hard to find contents that perfectly match your current proficiency level in Japanese and still be “interesting” to read. Educational material is limited (and expensive) and not always entertaining. Children’s books are either too easy to read or utterly irrelevant to daily life.

Looking up in a dictionary every time you encounter a new word can be exhausting and discouraging. You spend more time jumping back and forth between your reading material and the dictionary than doing the actual reading.

Solution: read what you know, ignore the rest

Do you remember when you first learned reading in your own language? I don’t either. But if you look attentively at how children read, you’ll notice that they focus on the words they recognize and ignore the words they don’t (or wait for an adult to read them out loud).

Pick any text (book, article, manga) and practice reading the words you already know so that they become effortless to read. Acknowledge the words you don’t know WITHOUT looking them up in the dictionary and move on.

It will make reading less cognitively straining and build your confidence over time. Eventually, the words you know will be so effortless to read they’ll feel as if they were in the background, quiet and supportive. The energy saved will enable you to focus on the words you don’t know when you decide to practice understanding.

It will also train your predictive capabilities. Our brains are prediction machines. When we read or listen to a conversation, we are not passively waiting for the next word to come. We are actively predicting the story. Every time a new word arrives, our brain compares it to what it had anticipated. If it’s a match, a feedback loop will be strengthened, and we will relax a little bit. If it’s a miss, the brain will become more attentive, and we’ll get a bit tenser.

Have you experienced this weird phenomenon when after learning a new word, people “start” using it around you? It occurs because when you listen to a conversation, your brain fills the gaps in your understanding by predicting its meaning. If you focused on each word, it would be impossible to follow the conversation.

Read without understanding

The key to practicing your reading skill is to focus on reading and not understanding. It is okay if you don’t understand what you are reading. If it feels awkward, you can always imagine (predict) its meaning.

It’s a little bit like karaoke. You’re not really trying to understand the lyrics, but that’s not stopping you from having fun. In fact, karaoke has been a tremendous help for me to practice effortless (and fast) reading. Plus, it improved my popularity during memorable all-nighters in Shibuya … but I digress.

This post was created with Typeshare