📚 I Conquered My First Japanese Novel!

16 May 2021

33 hours of reading later, I finally finished the first Harry Potter book in Japanese!

A few years ago, I decided I’d try to read my first real Japanese novel. Because I love Harry Potter and already know the story quite well, I thought it would be a good place to start. So I bought ハリーポッターと賢者の石 (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) for my Kindle. The nice thing about using a Kindle is that you can look up words instantly if you get stuck (great for learning languages!).

However, even with the aid of my Kindle, I could barely make it past the first few pages. It was just too difficult, even though I had studied Japanese for a few years at that point.

A year later I tried again and got a little bit further with a little bit less effort - however, I ended up quitting again without getting past the first chapter.

About a year after that, I tried once again and got even further but still didn’t get past the first chapter.

Finally, after 7 years of study, I tried for the fourth time. This time, things just started to “click”, and I got through the first chapter in a single session (although it took 2.5 hours). Even though it was quite slow going, I could feel my reading speed get faster and faster as I read more and more. I decided to write down how long I read for each session and how many pages I read.

As I went through the book, chapter by chapter, I could see my speed increase - this was a great feeling.

I finally finished the book just over 2 months later, after 32 reading sessions, reading for just over an hour on average per session.

Once I finished, I decided to take the statistics I’d written down and plot them - I was quite satisfied with my results!

You can see that my reading speed (yellow line) increased from ~6 min/page at the beginning to around 3.5 min/page by the end. My fastest chapter was chapter 13, which is the part where they are trying to figure out who Nicholas Flamel was - there was a lot of dialogue which I think made it a bit easier than other chapters which tend to have more narration.

I also plotted the length (in minutes) of each reading session. You can see that at the beginning, I was super motivated and read for a long period of time even though it was really hard. This quickly dropped after the first session, although I was able to read for longer periods of time as I got through the novel.

All in all, I took 33 hours to read this novel. For context, I should be able to read the same book in English in 4-5 hours… so I’m still quite slow. However, I was super excited to see my improvement!

I think for my next book, I’m going to read something easier (and shorter), but I’m not sure what that will be yet.