the corioblog

I thought to myself, “I’ve been bored and cabin-feverish lately.”

I thought to myself, “My japanese lessons are over, but I want to keep practicing.”

I thought to myself, “I’ve made it through several manga, but those are made easy by the fact that 80% of the page is pictures.”

So I went and ordered a novel in Japanese to read.

THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW IF YOU ARE CONSIDERING READING A NOVEL IN JAPANESE:

• The text really does run from top to bottom, then right to left. Tackling a page full of this format is significantly harder than making your way through a speech-bubble-full.
• Furigana are your friends. In their absence, you will spend inordinate amounts of time paging through your kanji dictionary, only to discover that three quarters of the time it’s a word who’s definition you’ve known for ages.
• Run-on sentences are apparantly not frowned upon. Expect to see single sentences, with perhaps two commas thrown in, run to half a page in extreme cases.
• Double negatives are definitely not frowned upon. However, it turns out that there is a big difference between knowing that they are the commonly accepted way of expressing some sentiments and deciphering text making liberal use of them.

About the only way I’ve been able to make headway so far is by moving through a two-step process: jotting down wordwise translations of each sentence, then at sentence completion rearranging the previous translation so that the grammar makes some sort of sense in English. A side effect of this process is that when I’m done, I’ll end up with a (probably crappy) translation of the novel.

I persevere.