No I can't, and I never tried to claim I could. I even stated I'm a <i>beginner</i>. But I do find reading younger oriented books to be helping in increasing my reading comprehension
That's nice. But you can't extrapolate that into it being a necessary step on the path to Japanese literacy.
I would disagree. It may not be huge, but its there. Young children read slower, and often have to sound things out, and their vocabulary is smaller. Just like a foreigner
Old people and toddlers both need help walking and sometimes have accidents in their pants. Be careful what assumptions you draw from irrelevant commonalities.
Young Japanese children run circles around foreign learners in terms of vocabulary and grammar. If you are truly talking about kids of around ten years old, as you state earlier, and not diaper-clad urchins then there is simply no comparison. I've raised a pair of monolingual Japanese children of my own and seen them into adulthood. The age at which their facility with the written language outstripped that of their foreign father who had a decade long head start on them is nothing short of humbling.
Good for you. You probably put in many many hours reading textbooks, maybe even took real classes.
I flunked the first Japanese course I ever took. I purchased all four volumes of "Learn Japanese: New College Text" (long out of print, and I never got the
cassettes), which committed the currently unforgivable sin of using romaji throughout the first volume. I self-studied the first two volumes and the other two are untouched.
I thumbed through a Tuttle volume on the 当用漢字 (a term not even used any more), never really studied it. By today's standards it was a thoroughly inadequate reference book. Most stuff I just picked up through observation in daily life.
It's this elitest attitude of yours that I find most disheartening. Because you are good at Japanese, somehow that makes you the master. You're attitude wasn't 'I don't care for it', but 'thats stupid and anyone who does it is stupid.'
If you will review the thread, you will find that I listed specific points which make children's books inadequate learning materials for foreign learners. Instead of refuting them, you choose to be offended and misrepresent my objective statements as personal insults. I made no statement that can be construed as calling you or anyone else "stupid" and I really don't appreciate the mischaracterization.
The poster came looking for suggestions, but you present your feelings as cold hard fact.
As did you.
The difference is that I gave specific reasons why I find children's books inadequate learning materials and speak from the perspective of being able with some degree of facility to read Japanese intended for adult native speakers and extensive experience of actually doing so. You, on the other hand, posit that thematically juvenile and boring materials are a necessary step on the way to a place you haven't even reached yet and thus are speaking entirely from conjecture and not experience. You then tell us that anybody not willing to wade through boring children's books should just just give up learning to read Japanese at all.
So you're mad at me for characterizing people as stupid...which I never did....and give yourself a pass for telling others to
quit if they're not going to do it your way?
That seems a bit of a double standard, don't you think?
The parallel is that you're telling someone not to try and do something because they're not good at it. "Don't try and read anything unless you can do it very well"
Again with the self-serving mischaracterizations and putting words into my mouth....
Please point out where I told anyone not to try to do something unless they're good at it. You can't do it. Would you like me to point out where you told others in no uncertain terms to
quit unless they do things your way?
And before you lecture me on what the OP came here for, ask yourself how pertinent it was to suggest acquiring books for reading practice to a person who hasn't even started yet.
