…and where to find it!

Books. Horrible things. Taking up all that physical space, gathering as much dust as they possibly can, and you can’t even read them in the dark without technological assistance. A tree is felled for every page turned.

Not to mention the types of people who actually read the things…

…But do they have a positive side to them? Are they not just the smartphones of the 1400s, damaging eyes and maddening parents at the dinner table? And where can you even find them these days, anyway? We’re going to answer all these book-burning issues and even more in today’s article, as we tackle libraries and why they most definitely should have a place in your foreign language study.

Contents

• Libraries in today’s landscape
• How I ended up in a library for the first time in decades
• Difficulties reading Japanese
• How to find the perfect book
• Learning to read
• My first book in Japanese!
• Book list

Why Li?

Youtube. Language exchanges. Dramas. Flesh and bone, honest to God, real life friends. There are many ways to Do a Foreign Language, but today I’m going to slay the mustiest, most old-fashioned dragon of them all.

The local library.

Put down that newspaper crossword puzzle and grab your reading glasses (they’re on your head), ‘cos we’re going in.

While the internet remains relatively open (“Don’t cry for 2008 internet, it’s already dead”) and has an unimaginable wealth of resources, it’s not the only game in town. If you live in the country of the foreign language you’re studying, the local library is like a goldmine just waiting to be, er, mined… for gold! Language gold.

‘But these books are all too hard!’, I imagine you seething frothily at your computer. Not to worry, dear reader, for I shall present to you a piss-easy way to find Japanese books at your level, on a subject of your choosing. Such personalized study material all in one place, for free, is like a silver mine just waiting to be- oh…

The Opening Chapter

It was my second week in Yonago. Most of the staff in my new workplace of secondary education were on holiday or dossing. And it was while Mountainroad-sensei and I were in the midst of one such doss that he suggested he take me to get my library card.

The notion was presented as though it was an everyday occurrence. As normal a thing as paying one’s electricity bill or “grabbing” a coffee.

‘A library card?’, I thought, and emitted a faint yet audible ‘懐かしい’, despite having not studied any Japanese at that point.

So we impishly skived off to the library. It must have been more than a decade since I’d been in one, and I immediately learned that library odour is uniform throughout the world. This isn’t a bad thing, but was a deflating come-down from the sensory overload that had been my first couple of weeks on the other side of the world.

“Ah… this.”

After a solid ten minutes of struggling to write my address in My Very First Kanji (for practice, according to Mountainroad-sensei), and a further twenty minutes of pure, undistilled administration, I had it. That shiny yellow rectangle of magnetized plastic. The hue of future dreams, the colour of old pages stained by time and fingering by a thousand readers. The corners safely rounded off, symbolizing the shelter and sanctity of the four walls of the library. Yonegi* emblazoned upon its smooth surface, imbuing the holder with optimism about what treasures may lie beyond the silent-yet-sassy gatekeepers of the reception desk.

I didn’t set foot in there for another five years.

Hero’s journey… to the library

Half a decade later, and after two years in the wilderness that is the occupied city of Iwakuni, I was back in Yonago, struggling to prepare for the N2. I’d heard from someone that the city library had a decently-sized study area. Upon investigation, it was indeed more conducive to a fine benkyou session than my 30m² apartment, and I found myself returning on the regular.

At that point I did not consider the books there accessible to me. They were for Japanese people, after all. It merely felt beneficial to take my notebooks out of the house from time to time, and I enjoyed the studious environment. Being around people getting stuck in for important things like university exams and so on is not to be sniffed at. Not quite ‘proximity is power’, but something like it.

Miserable affairs

Anyway, despite this new-found place of learning, the N2 practice questions I was flogging myself with were miserable affairs, yet I needed to drastically improve my reading speed and general comprehension if there was to be any chance of passing the exam. What was I to do in the face of such adversity? Woe was me indeed!

Then it hit me.

I was in a library. A Japanese library!

What luck! Maybe, just maybe, one or two of the thousands of books there would be readable by someone of my shitty level of Japanese.

In truth, I’d never even considered it. In the foreign language game, there’s a lot of talk about graded readers, and even Steven Krashen’s comprehensible input concept is widely known, but I’d always felt there was an implication that materials intended for natives were off the table for people at my level. Suddenly, being surrounded by all these books, things felt different.

So I promptly paid the 800 yen for a new library card, the original one lost to the sands of time/クロネコヤマト, and began a new era of books, in the hope they’d be more interesting than the practice questions (spoiler alert: they were).

Do not be afraid

Picking up books written for Japanese natives for the first time, one is immediately confronted with a cruel fact: the kanji and vocab on the N1 doesn’t come close to what any normal native speaker encounters every day. Hopefully this isn’t a shock (and probably isn’t), but it is better to know sooner rather than later.

I’d foolishly assumed N1 to be near native when I was starting out, and the more I’ve approached that level the more foolish an assumption I’ve found that to be. The more you know, as they say.

That being said, finding a book that you like and can learn from is truly gratifying.

There are no other pages to click through to, no distractions. You’re in the world of that book and only that book, all in Japanese.

It’s just fun, and you’ll never forget that first book you read front to back in a foreign language (I’ll tell you about mine later).

Like a Google

So you’ve gone against modernity and most of its inhabitants and found yourself in a library. ‘Ere’s ‘ow to select a book for that perfect piece of language learning content that suits you and only you.

1. Make a beeline for that section of the library that suits your current interests (but quietly, please. Shh!). It’s probably been a while since you were last in one of these hallowed places and you may be chotto shocked at how chock-a-block with Good Stuff it is, possibly even slightly appalled. This is normal. Deep breaths. Take your time and have a good, old-fashioned browse. This is your new Alexandria, hopefully without the fires.
2. When you’ve intuited which bookshelf to park yourself at, as you sweep your eyes across each row pick the first book that stands out to you. Maybe it’s the cover. Maybe it’s the title. Whatever it is that catches your eye, go for it.
3. Open a page at random and try reading the first sentence your gaze happens to land on. Couldn’t understand anything? Assumed you’d accidentally ended up in the Cantonese department? Put it back. If you proceed with this category of books you’ll end up reading the bloody dictionary.
4. Repeat until you open a book and can read the first sentence you see, understanding it to a reasonable degree.
5. Give another part of it a quick read whilst still in the library to confirm the rest of it isn’t impenetrable. Congratulations, you’ve found your perfect content!

It’s so simple you’d think there wouldn’t be any need to explain that, but most people don’t even make it to the library in the first place. And if you do, it’s easy to endlessly pick out books aimed at PHD-holding native speakers and get disheartened, but there is something waiting to be found that is perfect for you!

例

Here are a few examples from 本 I’ve had the luck to encounter, and my thinking when deciding whether they’re suitable for study or not. (bold = new words/phrases)

Example 1:

スウェーデンの田舎暮らしby 森みどり & Bo Hallengren (p.107)

Remarks: As mentioned, I’d studied the kanji for the N1 by the time I’d read this so was able to read the unknown words in this sentence. Though I knew not what they meant exactly, was able to get a sense of their meaning within a context instead of simply firing the words into Google. This is what we naturally tend to do in our native language and is to be encouraged.

The grammar wasn’t particularly challenging, so I went ahead and gave the book a good, hard borrow.

Verdict: Comfy. This is personalized content in its purest form, being an unlikely crossover of numerous topics of interest of mine. It’s highly unlikely I would have stumbled across this book sifting through the endless sands of the internet.

Example 2:

浄土思想史講義 by 平岡聡

Remarks: This was a lot. While a lot of the vocab wasn’t new, it was too heavy. There were clearly high-level concepts explored that a bit of background knowledge would be necessary for were I to seriously consider trying to study this book.

Verdict: Not in this incarnation. Although the subject matter is fascinating, I had a look at this one knowing it was never going to work, and by jove it didn’t. I guess it’s back to English Wikipedia for me on this particular topic…

Example 3:

大人の伝え方ノート by 矢野香

Remarks: This book is full of explanations of certain nuances of Japanese, but written in simple language for native speakers. Written by an NHK presenter too, which surely adds to its claims of being a communication go-to.

Verdict: A big ol’ yes! This is a platinum-tier comprehensible input/interesting topic combination for some of us.

“If you tolerate this…”

It can’t be overemphasized that the books should be interesting enough that you can tolerate not understanding everything.

A book’s level is usually fairly consistent throughout, but there are going to be passages or chapters that have vocabulary sets or concepts that are beyond your current abilities. Don’t get your knickerbockers in a twist. Just enjoy reading and skip over that stuff if you have to. The reputable Olly Richards goes into this in much more detail and about mistakes people commonly make when reading in a foreign language here. Highly recommended if you’re into all this (which you must be if you’ve made it this far!).

Known Devils

Another thing you can do is choose a topic you already know quite a bit about. You’ll find yourself naturally understanding things you’ve never even read before. In this Hiroshima guidebook, I knew from the context that 蠣 must be ‘oysters’ (かき), having lived near there for a time and been asked on a weekly basis if I held the ability to consume the mollusc entities.

This book was especially cool as it went into detail about the recent history of the music scene in the city, reminiscing about now-defunct festivals and gig venues and theorising about why so many local bands were formed there. I used to frequent many a “live house” when I lived there, and it was great to get a few talking points for the next time I find myself in Dumb Records or the shreddy Club Conquest.

How much unknown stuff you tolerate is up to you. Going back to Krashen’s comprehensible input concept, some very serious heads plough on understanding very little indeed, even up to 90% of words! Others roll with things closer to Krashen’s i+1, that is understanding about 95-98%. I’ve found material at this level that’s compelling enough hard to come by, though. For me, recognizing around 75% of words is perfectly tolerable, but sometimes I’ll continue with less than that.

The story of my first time…

I mentioned earlier that you never forget the first book you read in a foreign language. I haven’t asked anyone else if this is true, but it’s been two whole entire years and has proven so for me thus far.

It took about three months to get through the two hundred and five pages, with several library rules-enforced breaks, but I did it.

The book is 日本語をつかまえろ！2 by 飯間浩明 and I can’t recommend it highly enough!

The topic was ideal, and the illustrations endearing. The chapters are short and laid out in two-page segments, and written for Japanese people of all ages. The author’s passion for the topic is abundantly clear, even to me, a lowly non-native barnacle attached to this whale of a book, and the nuggets contained within have proven nice conversation topics with locals on several occasions.

All these things combined to make it the perfect book for someone at my level.

It wasn’t all plain sailing

Having it around the house is one thing, but I found out that making time to read is another. Sometimes days would go by without me reading anything at all. Suddenly I’d have to return it and wait a couple of weeks until I could take it out again. At other times there were entire pages where I didn’t really get what it was about, putting a nick in that all-important confidence. But I persevered and got there in the end.

Finishing that final page, I couldn’t help but remember the early days. Waiting to go into the N5 exam hall. Ordering 広いワイン instead of 白ワイン in a restaurant. The sheer horror of recording myself speak Japanese for the first time.

This was definitely a milestone, and if not worth celebrating, it was certainly worth acknowledging positively.

I’m still not where I’d like to be (is one ever?) but it is important to lightly pat oneself on the back after certain achievements, before moving swiftly on and descending back into brutal self-criticism and flagellation, of course.

Bookends

Rediscovering libraries in the context of learning a foreign language has been a real joy, and has added much colour to my language study. As mentioned in the flashcards post, I wouldn’t be at the humble level I am without it. And yet I’ve never seen another foreigner in there apart from the other Language Crab (maybe libraries are simply perfectly set up for crabs…).

This is a shame as almost every foreigner in Yonago is learning Japanese, yet swan right past this enormous, free resource all the time. Hopefully this article can inspire one or two of you to integrate your local library into your routine. I’m certain you won’t regret it.

I’ve listed some of the books I’ve enjoyed below. If any tickle your fancy and you want to start your own Japanese library, feel free to support the authors and buy one.

To close, this quote from the latest book I’m borrowing, 夕暮れに夜明けの歌を(文学を探しにロシアに行く) by 奈倉有里, jumped out at me the other day, and is fitting for this post.

「言語の入り口に立とう。目の前にはどこまで続くのかわからない言葉の森がある。ぼんやりと光っているのはなんだろう。坂道の向こうの図書館から漏れている―あれは本の光だ。」

Recommend any books in a foreign language? Let us know in the comments below!

See you in the marine life section.

Books mentioned above:

スウェーデンの田舎暮らし by　林みどり and Bo Harenguren

日本語をつかまえろ！by 飯間浩明

大人の伝え方by 矢野香

夕暮れに夜明けの歌を(文学を探しにロシアに行く) by 奈倉有里

浄土思想史講義 by 平岡聡

Bonus cool book:

魔女街道の旅 by 西村佑子