I'm back from a trip up to Montreal, and subsequent week decompressing.
I saw my best friend from high school this weekend, and promptly remembered--she had most of the manga series Song of the Wind and Trees, one of my favorite manga ever in all its lurid melodramatic glory, in Chinese, which her mother had serendipitously picked up at a garage sale some years earlier.
I'm picking through it with the advantage of having my Japanese editions to refer to for help. Still, it's a painstaking process. I remember when it was like this for Japanese, looking up every character three different ways and often still not finding it, happy when I can make out so much as a sentence. It's long, it's fairly boring, and I know that I'd barely understand a word if I didn't have the original text to fall back on. Why did I ever push myself like this, years ago?
A couple years ago, I really dug Simon Singh's The Code Book. And there's something about codes that really gets to me...tapping away at some impenetrable message, bit by bit, by trial and error, until finally a little piece of it reveals itself to you and the rest starts to fall into place. It takes a bit of an obsessive mind. (No wonder I'm not nearly so diligent about my Japanese now that I can muddle through just about anything!)
Anyway, as thanks to my friend for loaning me her Chinese editions, I'm doing a translation--from Japanese, of course. It's accepted wisdom among a lot of foreign language teachers that you shouldn't have students translate, because they won't learn to think in the language, but I think there are some positives to it too. When I'm reading, I'm very likely to look up as little as I can look up and still get the gist of the story, relying on context to push me through. And that's not a bad way to read; it's fast. My AP French Lit teacher in high school tried to break us of the habit of looking up too many words, because we were reading novels at a fairly breakneck pace. But translating means forcing myself to look up every single word I don't know, and that can be a good thing too.
If my Japanese vocabulary isn't adequate to perfectly understand a manga written for 13-year-old girls, then I desperately need to look up more words.