In February, I went with J to a new ramen place I heard about through the Japanese conversation group. The ramen shop was near the SCC library and since we'd never visited the SCC library before, we dropped by there after yummy ramen. In their Japanese section, they had all the volumes of Hikaru no Go (along with other manga). Encountering those volumes reminded me of the few volumes of HnG bought the previous year collecting dust on my bookshelf at home. This led me to trying to read volume 1 in March. By the time April's Tadoku came around, I was on volume 4.
Tadoku (多読) loosely translates to 'reading lots' and the Tadoku contest ran January, April, July, and October last year, months during which one tries to read as much as possible, reporting progress throughout the month via twitter to the Tadoku bot. The bot maintains rankings and totals and has a twitter feed of ranking and total updates as participates update their statuses. It's not an actual contest per se, but more of a gentle competition, essentially whatever each person makes of it. Seeing numbers does amazing things to human psychology. Knowing that you only need to read a few more pages to catch up to the person whose rank is one above yours becomes extra motivation to "just read a few more pages", for example. The April contest was what started me down the path of reading more books.
In 2011, I read (with very loose translations of the titles in parentheses):
- ヒカルの碁 (Hikaru no Go) volumes 1-23 (all)
- よつばと! (Yotsuba &) volumes 1-6
- テガミバチ (Letter Bee) volume 1
- 日本の昔ばなし aka Once Upon a Time in Japan
- あのときの王子くん and 銀河鉄道の夜 (mentioned previously)
- かぎばあさん (Grandma with a Key) series, books 1-9
- くまの子ウーフ (Little Boy Bear Oofoo)
- 霧のむこうのふしぎな町 (The Strange Town on the Other Side of the Mist)
- 少年探偵ブラウン (1) (translations of Encyclopedia Brown books; I only read nine of the fifteen stories in the book)
- ふたごの魔法つかい風と火の国 (Twin Witches series, Wind and Fire Countries)
Total = several picture books (not listed), 30 volumes of manga, and 15.5 children's books. Much more reading than I set out to do at the beginning of the year.
I love to read in English, so developing an interest in reading was never the problem. I was just always at the "am I ready?" stage. Each author has their own writing style and different subsets of vocabulary that they use, so the first few pages of a book are always *hard*. But now that I've delved into a few for-native-speaker books, I know I don't have to stop at the first or second page when I encounter difficulties. If I can get beyond that initial hump and get into the story, I'll get used to the author's quirks. Now that the gates have opened, there is a ton of stuff I want to read! The problem still is the difficulty of the material though, not in a "am I ready?" way but in a "I'm just not understanding enough of this" way even past the first several pages.
The かぎばあさん and ふたごの魔法つかい series are aimed towards 小学校低学年～中学年, which I interpret as grades 1-3. 霧のむこうのふしぎな町 said 小学中級から, which I interpret as grades 3-4 and up. I don't think there are any books for which I'll know all the words and it's hard to place my exact reading level, but it's probably around 2nd to 3rd grade right now, meaning if I read books around that level, there should only be a couple of words per page that I don't know and I'll understand the little details. I can probably read up to 7th or 8th with more dictionary lookups. Even without lookups, I can at least understand a good portion (though maybe not all the itty-bitty details) of the plot and setting. Unfortunately, some of the books on my to-read list are adult-level books or literary works T_T
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