I do, however, give Murakami H. the honor of funniest title for a book about an earthquake (神の子どもたちはみな踊る, not that after the quake nonsense). I've gone through the effort of buying it, though I haven't gotten around to actually reading it yet. Who has time for that?
I have enjoyed not only the story of Sixty Nine, but also learning some 九州の西の端 dialect. I was quite surprised to learn that the grammar for continuous action and states are, unlike in standard Japanese, two separate constructions. The power of reading!
Yudan Taiteki wrote:
It depends. I don't think it's ever a necessary evil to "read" through something where you have to look up 75% of the words. There are other, more efficient, ways to increase your vocabulary than this...
While it's easiest to learn through understandable input, I don't know exactly what that is. Perhaps the next best thing is enjoyable input. I only ask myself only one question, "Do I want to [continue to] read this?" I don't even bother with, "Do I need to?" There are very few things one needs to do in this life; there are many more things which can be apologized for afterwards.Shirasagi wrote:
If you have to look up everything you read, then you're in over your head, but using a dictionary by itself is not a bad thing, IMO. I still come across terms I'm not familiar with in my reading.
-Eric