This afternoon, I finished reading The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, a novel by the Japanese author Yukio Mishima. This is the second novel by Mishima that I have read, after Confessions of a Mask, and I read it in the original Japanese.
Mishima is famous for his ornate and exquisite writing style, using a profound and literary vocabulary that is rarely used in modern spoken Japanese. He often discusses highly abstract concepts, making his works not easily accessible to general readers.
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion was no exception, and it was definitely not easy for me to read. Similar to what I did with Confessions of a Mask, I carefully perused the novel and stopped to look up the meaning of every unfamiliar word I came across with the help of ChatGPT. It took me a little over a week to go through the whole book, covering 326 pages in total.
From a language acquisition perspective, consulting the dictionary for every word you do not recognize may be dismissed by most linguistic experts as a bad idea. I can certainly understand that point of view, particularly for beginners and intermediate learners of a foreign language: the number of words you need to look up can simply get too overwhelming, bordering on torturous. The whole process can become excruciatingly tedious, not to mention woefully inefficient.
As for me, I can only practice this method with books in Japanese, English, and—to a lesser extent, Chinese—as I possess sufficient vocabularies in these languages to avoid feeling too frustrated to read a medium-length novel.
There were certainly times in the past when I found the act of reading painfully labor-intensive, even with Japanese books; it was only through repeated practice and intensive vocabulary building that I gradually overcame my fear of difficult words and began to genuinely enjoy reading, which only happened after I became an adult—I was definitely a late-bloomer when it comes to reading.
Now, with these languages, instead of finding it a tedious chore, I feel a great deal of joy looking up unfamiliar words, which have become relatively few and far between in most popular books as I have expanded my vocabularies. A virtuous cycle has finally emerged, whereby my robust vocabulary makes it easier for me to read, which in turn facilitates my acquisition of new words.
Regrettably, my French has yet to attain that level, so it’s probably not a good idea to insist on looking up every unfamiliar word I see in a book. With French, my primary task will continue to be learning the vocabulary from a dictionary with the Anki flashcard app until I can breeze through most popular French novels in the future.
By the way, the advent of digital learning tools like Anki and ElevenLabs, as well as AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude, has undoubtedly been a boon to learners of foreign languages like me. However, this does not mean that we can skip the act of studying itself. If anything, acquiring basic knowledge such as vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation has become even more important in this age of artificial intelligence.
This is because, as real human beings, we are increasingly expected to play the role of someone who ultimately checks and controls how artificial intelligence performs in tasks related to foreign languages, such as translations. AI can help us generate massive volumes of translation in sheer seconds, but we still need a set of human eyes to verify whether the productions comport with natural human language. Without the basic knowledge of language, we will not be able to perform this most human and critical function.
Returning to the topic of reading books like The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, I do believe that trying to tackle such abstract literary works remains relevant today, as a good foundation in reading comprehension directly ties in with strong critical thinking skills—a must for us to maintain the upper hand in our coexistence with modern technology. With this in mind, I am more determined than ever to keep nourishing and challenging my mind with the cultural riches left by our ancestors.
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