That’s my opinion at least

How do you SRS sentences from these non-fiction books?

I can understand SRSing sentences for language learning, such as Japanese and Chinese where you have the original sentence on one side and either a translation or an L2 explanation on the other side.

But if I’m reading an L1 self-help book and I want to SRS a sentence (as Khatz seems to like to do), I put the sentence on one side and…. what, exactly, goes on the other side? Or do you not need anything since the point is just to drive the sentence/meaning of the sentence into long-term memory?

Any comments are appreciated. Thanks.

Well, I am taking an English Lit. MA, after all. <3 reading.

As other’s have established, though, this is definitely more useful for non-fiction.

Why would I want to read just 30% of a good book? Where’s the fun in that? There’s more to reading than the “information” contained within: the setting, the writing, the characters, the developments, the dialogue…so much more than just “information”. Sometimes if I like a passage/page a lot I even go back and read it again. Me? Skim City Hunter? Never!

In other words I completely disagree with Khatz and the rest of you on this topic.

The swiss-cheesing method for non-fiction therefore sounds great and I will no longer feel guilty for skipping bits, thinking a book must be read from A to Z, in that order. The trouble is, with certain non-fiction, particularly philosophy, it has ideas that build on one another which require linear reading. It’s worse when one section refers to an earlier section which refers to an earlier and you ending reading it linearly, but backwards in order to fill in the required gaps. I guess it depends largely on the work, but I suppose it would work very well to “swiss-cheese” a book like “The History of the World” by JM Roberts, which I ACTUALLY read in it’s entirety – all 1200 pages, start to finish and almost died from boredom and exhaustion…So I guess you could set it up as follows, at least this is how it seems to work for me:

Books in a “SERIES” format (their sections are independent of one-another):
Encyclopedias, reference works, history, biographies, readers/compilations
These books are swiss-cheeseable.

Books in a “CO-DEPENDANT” format (their sections build on and refer to one-another)
Fiction, much of philosophy
These books aren’t so suited to swiss-cheesing

This is just a rough sketch, but looking at it, it seems most genres would do well to take the swiss-cheese approach, which I shall be doing from now on! Thanks!

“I think Khatz is getting a bit ahead of a lot of his readers and forgetting that many of them need to be like children and not to be afraid of watching that one film or reading that one manga over and over and over again because they *enjoy* it and want to read it more.”

I don’t think Khatz has forgotten this. He has said to read, watch, or listen to things you like over and over again. I think he has even mentioned it in this post.

Unfortunately, it’s too boring to go back and check. :p

I think Khatz is getting a bit ahead of a lot of his readers and forgetting that many of them need to be like children and not to be afraid of watching that one film or reading that one manga over and over and over again because they *enjoy* it and want to read it more.

With fiction (which um… what else is there to read? Why would you want to read boring non-fiction stuff in Japanese? Khatzumoto is such a nerd ), I do highlight and dog-ear on my uh… 5th time through I think. By that time I already understand the story and content very very well, but I was always too damn lazy to enter the few things I didn’t know it into SRS. You should see my copy of One Piece 第一.

I don’t know, it makes a certain amount of sense to me, as well. With fiction, when starting out, skimming is a necessity or you will get bogged down with details. It will kill you, if you do not go from bit to bit. Full understanding of fiction books is just not something a novice can do.

I hope no one has made that joke in the comments yet… I skimmed them, too.

Then I realised it does apply to fiction too, at least in the context of AJATT.

Remember the advice where Khatz says to read/watch what you already understand?

Well, if you’ve read a book already in English and you liked it, why not start by cherry-picking your favourite scenes? You’re not going to miss anything in terms of plot etc and you already know what it means and it’s a part of a book you really like, so why not? Even if you really love the book, there’s going to be parts of the book that you didn’t enjoy as much as the rest; that probably not going to be different in Japanese. And the oppistie too; if you really liked a scene and are hanging out to read it, why wait until you’ve trudged back through the less interesting bit to get it?

Just my two cents, back off – ブリジット・ジョーンズ is waiting for me.

I used to be a main-idea person. My GPA reflected it, and I was fine with that. But then I did an internship over the summer (I’m a comp sci senior) and I realized that what I had learned in school was foundational, and most of the knowledge I needed for the job was learned while doing it.

So if the knowledge you need for your future line of work is learned while doing your job, learning how to learn is really important. That’s why you’re at college. Consequently, this is also one of a hundred reasons why learning Japanese is a great hobby. Nothing like learning 3000+ kanji to teach you about learning, right?

Applying that to reading textbooks, if you know how the test looks, or you know what will be required of you when you write an essay, you can target your reading specifically for that. Unfortunately, those things will vary class to class. There’s no way of knowing exactly what kind of details the test will go into. You can ask the professor to get a good idea, and that’s about it.

How applicable is this method to university books? We usually have 1-3 books that we’re supposed to read and learn in depth per course. Should I just skim the recommended books (learning only the important parts) and then skim other books to get more knowledge? Or should I stick to learning the recommended books in depth?

I think that skimming a larger number of books would be more conducive in terms of actually learning more, but I’m worried that I’ll be tested on smaller details that were only in the recommended books (details that I’ll probably miss out on by skimming). Does anyone here have any experience with universities in North America that might be relevant in answering my question?

Actually what I’m really wondering is: is it more important (in university, for a liberal arts degree) to have lots of facts memorized, or is it more important to have a general understanding of the ideas? If it’s the latter, I might as well sell my boring school books on e-bay and head straight to the library for some mad skimming.