Saturday 23 May 2015

Over a Year

It's been over a year now since I started trying to teach myself Japanese using the resources available to me online. It's been slow progress, but very rewarding, and certainly my reading comprehension is getting better day by day.

Looking at my progress I have managed, in around 12 months, to reach p.144 in 「カンピオーネ!神はまつろわず」(about half-way through), which is the light novel which I chose as my first Japanese book to read. At the time people suggested that reading a full-blown prose light-novel as my first foray into Japanese reading was crazy. "Insane" was a word that was used. And they were probably right. Nonetheless I've persevered and my grammar and vocabulary are much better than they would have been had I spent the last year reading manga as in the usual recommendation.

Now, reading is quite different to speaking or writing, and my skill at those is massively inferior to my ability to read what is (after all) a relatively simple novel.

Still if I've progressed this far in such a short space of time I'm pretty confident of my ability to continue further.