The Importance of Reading Comprehension

Adamu at MutantFrog Travelogue has written an excellent piece on the importance of developing good Japanese reading comprehension skills. Adamu points out a number of great resources for practicing reading and the discussions carried on in the comments sections make some good points too. While I am of the "learn the sounds of the language first" camp I have to concede that for anyone seeking to use Japanese for work, simply being fluent will not cut it - you have to be literate as well, and this means lots of reading. One comment accused Adamu of being harsh in his assessment of the skills of many Japanese language graduates, but I think he is being realistic - if you put the hours in you can achieve literacy in Japanese, but most people just don't put the hours in.

Comments

[adamu]

Very perceptive post!