I’m on the Japan Times Bilingual page this week with a piece about learning how to read in Japanese: “Look to ‘senpai’ to help take your Japanese reading to the next level.”

These are all true stories. Paul laughed at me a couple of times (being laughed at is good, remember), and Sakakibara-sensei sat with me and fielded questions about those novels week after week for a whole semester. By the end, she admitted that she was glad we had done the activity because it allowed her to go over the novels closely (which she might not otherwise have done…because they aren’t very good…although they are interesting, perhaps, when considered together).

I previously wrote that I was reading those novels at five pages a day, but I feel like it was much slower than that. Maybe even just two pages a day. Progress is progress. And having someone willing to explain things to you patiently is one of the greatest gifts for language learners. Recently Daniel Lau asked me how he might go about mixing up his Japanese conversation lessons which had gotten a little stale, and I think incorporating a text (a novel or a set of short stories) might be a good idea—it would give you a set discussion topic rather than leaving it up to the random topics your conversation partner does (or doesn’t) pick. Being forced to talk about it in Japanese would be even better.

As I mention at the end of the article, I finally set up a Japanese reading group for the JETAA Chicago chapter. (I had totally forgotten that I thought up the idea years ago in that blog post.) We’ve been going strong over the past year. I’ve started logging the readings we are doing on this page in case you are looking for good reading material. Some of them are accessible on the web. I’ve gone back to some published material after a string of web stuff, so I’ll have to make an effort to find websites again in the near future because that makes it easier to share with folks who don’t have easy access to Japan.