Reading and decoding

Firstly, I've found a rather amusing site on Japanese kanji.
Kanji with really long kun-yomi, kanji with the highest stroke counts, kanji that look like they're upside down.

I want to look at reading material from a position of "I can just barely start decoding," first of all. I've often heard that if what you're doing is "decoding" rather than reading--if you have to look up every second word in the dictionary and you still have a very weak grasp of how everything goes together in a sentence--you shouldn't even bother. I'm not so sure about that. I'll happily agree that it's not good as your sole method of learning a language, but... well, here's what happened with me.

I was fifteen, sixteen years old, and I liked Sailor Moon. And one day I saw a Sailor Moon manga at the local comic book store, and I bought it, and at that time my sister and I still had that adolescent naivete that says that summer is a perfect time for starting impossible projects. So we got a dictionary, and a grammar book, and we started painstakingly decoding it with absolutely no knowledge of Japanese. But here's what happened. First of all we learned the hiragana. And then we started to learn the katakana. And there were a couple of kanji that kept coming up again and again, so I started to recognize those too. The pictures kept me following the story, and by the end I had a slight, very slight, grasp of reading in Japanese. At the same time I was getting textbooks from the library and working through them, and I doubt I'd have made any progress at all otherwise. Japanese can be such a difficult language to learn that you feel like you can't read authentic texts even after struggling for three years, and if I had thought that to be the case I would have just given up. Somehow, reading, and looking everything up in the dictionary, gave me enough sense of the story for me to have a sense of achievement and mastery.

On the other hand, there's French. I was brought up Anglophone in Quebec--I had a year and a half in France, and my English schooling had partial French immersion until I moved to the U.S. when I was twelve. Then, when I started high school, I was enrolled in French, mostly because it was easy--I didn't at that point have any particular linguistic inclination.
Year 3 of French was textbook dialogues and endless verb conjugations and I think maybe we read one poem.
Repeat the above for year 4. I think at the end of the year we read Le Petit Prince.
And the thing is, even though I was functionally bilingual at 8 or 9, my French is pretty poor now. For one thing, I largely have the vocabulary of a 9-year-old. This is what happens if you wait on reading authentic material until you've already been slaving through it for four years. French is hard, I'll admit, because fiction is mostly written in a tense that doesn't exist at all in spoken French--one can make an argument for not reading it based on that. But I think that the curriculum just doesn't allow for really challenging students to go beyond their boundaries. When I was taking French, no one ever suggested to me that I ought to be doing anything more than copying over my verb conjugations. (I refuse to blame the teachers. I had a kick-ass French teacher--and some who weren't so good).

So I'm highly in favor of jumping in anywhere you're able to and seeing what you can understand.

I've been studying Spanish for maybe a year, and I'm reading a novel. For adults. Actually reading, not decoding, though with frequent dictionary lookup. Partly that's because Spanish is so closely related to French, but I think it's also partly because, from the first day I started learning Spanish, I wasn't afraid to muddle through things.