Last night, I finished reading the novel Mina’s Matchbox written by the Japanese author Yoko Ogawa. I briefly touched upon this novel in my previous journal entry, in which I mentioned that I had found it to be a heartwarming story in the first few chapters. I don’t want to present any spoilers here, but suffice it to say that it stayed a beautiful story to the very end, and I loved every character in the book increasingly as the story progressed, including the two animals who played rather significant roles. In the end, I liked Mina’s Matchbox better than Hotel Iris, a novel by the same author that dealt with a much gloomier subject.
Incidentally, I didn’t know about Yoko Ogawa up until a few months ago, when I first heard her name mentioned in a YouTube video introducing popular Japanese novelists to Western viewers. Although I am originally from Japan, I am not very familiar with Japanese literature, so it was nice to hear this introduction to a few outstanding authors who are globally popular. When it comes to modern Japanese fiction, Haruki Murakami may come to mind for most people, but in fact there is a robust literary scene in the Land of the Rising Sun, with numerous excellent authors yet to be discovered by international readers.
As mentioned previously, I read Mina’s Matchbox in its English translation and not the original, because I wanted to learn English words and phrases while I enjoyed the story. The English version is 280 pages long, and I read it in its entirety while making sure to mark and look up every word and phrase I was unfamiliar with. It took me 8 days to complete the task—in total, I looked up 208 items in the dictionary, averaging out at 0.74 items per page. This may sound like an excruciating grind to most English learners, but I found the entire process rather enjoyable, as I felt excited at the prospect of my vocabulary expanding rapidly.
I may not be the most efficient or talented learner of foreign languages, but one thing I’ve got going for me is my fixation with acquiring an extensive vocabulary, not only for English, but also for Japanese, my mother tongue. Whenever I open a book to read, I always make sure to have my smartphone dictionary close at hand, so that every time I come across an unfamiliar word or phrase I can look it up immediately. Instead of frustrating me, this repeated act of consulting the dictionary brings me instant gratification at each occurrence—not unlike the sensation of fitting a piece of the jigsaw puzzle into place. This whole process makes me love reading even more as I devour one book after another.
Hosoki used to make regular TV appearances reading fortunes of guests to her show using her unique astrology-based fortune-telling method. More often than not, she uttered unkind or even violent remarks straight to the face of her guest, causing distress and consternation to concerned parties and viewers alike. Yet her show, while controversial, proved to be a big hit, boasting high ratings and earning her millions of dollars.
I could have watched this series in Japanese, but I watched it in English, again for language-learning purposes. Netflix’s dubbing is of very good quality, and I was able to get into the story and enjoy it without feeling any strangeness whatsoever. This time, I listened to the dialogue attentively for any English expression I didn’t comprehend, and interrupted the viewing at each occurrence to look it up in the dictionary before continuing the video. Much against my expectations, these interruptions didn’t take away too much from my enjoyment of the story, so I intend to keep practicing this method for the time being.
If you are not a language-learning enthusiast, this method of consulting each unknown item in the dictionary may strike you as rather odd or even masochistic, and I fully comprehend that position. I guess it all comes down to how badly you want to improve your proficiency in a foreign language. There will probably come a time when I finally stop employing this extreme method, but for now I will let nature run its course and keep practicing whatever method suits me the best.
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