Anathema

I went to Sanseido book store this afternoon and stopped by several other bookshops on the way. Something came to my mind that will sound as anathema but here it goes : when the Kindle2 is released in Japan, I will read more, granted it displays furigana. Difficulties to read kanji is a major drawback for many - including a growing number of natives. Unless you are equipped with the adequate memory, imperfect knowledge of kanji reading is a major hindrance that inhibits reading habit, when you were not schooled here. Even Japan schooled Prime Ministers stumble too these days. It may sound weird for an interpreter to display his shortcomings in his B language, but I have referred time and again in this blog that many liaison interpreters face both issues of turning a better interpreter (consecutive) and upgrading their B language competence. We are not talking ESIT here, we are out of the booth, and there is a different world out of the booth that is still called the market for interpretation services. How do you turn not mastering a few thousands kanji while living in Japan? Well, that's life man, just life. I am not advocating scrapping kanji as such trials took place through history. I am advocating that reading a lot is a key to better reading kanji, more than working on kanji when you have reached a beyond advanced level in Japanese. I can hear the world cringe here. How can you boast a beyond advanced level in Japanese and suggest you don't read fluently anything around. Because it is reality, the reality of applied language. I don't need to work more on kanji the traditional way, that is reading list of commented kanji and writing those down. I need to read more, I need volume reading and flip less in dictionaries, because more than often, I can guess more or less precisely the meaning of the kanji I don't know the reading of. Kanji reading imperfections should not impair the will to read, so the point is not to replace kanji with more hiragana, but help reading kanji within the reading process. Because the more you read with a helper function, the more you can read without. That's exactly what Rikaichan allows with web based content, but most books I want to read are not in electronic version but on paper. That is why I want a Japanese Kindle2 with furigana display function because I want to read a lot more, and a lot less on the computer screen. I don't expect the Kindle2 to come anytime soon to Japan though. The publication industry here needs a bigger earthquake to be shaken out of conservative traditionalism. It won't happen anytime soon. Ironically, there has been several domestic trials at ebook readers diffusion but they all failed because of the publishing industry. The future winner will have a hard time but there will be a future reader. In the meantime, there are signs that reading is cracking at spots the majority do not want to look at. The Yomiuri national daily is now printed with way much bigger fonts than it used to be. Because of the growing aging population some say. Other dailies will follow the trail. The next step will be more furigana in grown-ups newspapers. Mind my words. It is actually already taking place in some category of books, too many grown-ups will not reckon on the fact.

But back in the bookshop, at Sanseido, I purchased the 2009 version of the famous 現代用語の基礎家式　学習版.
It's a way much thinner book than the annual door stopper crammed with news vocabulary and contemporary facts. It is geared at "grown-ups, and kids as well". That's the marketing blurb intended to cajole the grown-ups into buying a book where mostly all kanji come with furigana reading. The interesting thing for advanced non-native learners and beyond, and for interpreters - you know, the kind that never sat at an interpretation course - is that the content is not childish at all but compact enough to run through, scooping a hefty dose of contemporary vocabulary that pops up everywhere in the news, without putting the car idle on the sideline to check for the reading of this or that kanji. Holders of the holy canons of kanji learning will choke on that, but for fast integration of newsly vocabulary and facts as expressed in Japanese, I won't refrain from praising this book. And I wish there were more of that kind for more specific themes, like science. Actually, I spotted in the Blueback collection a two small volumes covering physics and chemistry as taught at junior highschools but geared at grown-ups only this time, The pages were quite small and would make for an uncomfortable reading experience but many kanji in that grown-up book were adorned with furigana, and it is a good things. Enough of anathema today.