(no subject)

[owlectomy]

Another round of thinking about my desultory efforts to improve my Japanese -- I've actually done pretty well this year so far, finishing one long novel and one short one and getting halfway through another long one --

I know the research on the affective aspects of language learning. There's a kind of vicious circle that can happen where you're not good at reading, so you read slowly and don't understand much of what you're reading, so you don't enjoy reading, so you don't read, so you don't get better at reading. But in my head I had never connected my problems with reading older literature with my Bad Semester that ended with me as academically anxious as I have ever been, racing through the last third of the English translation of Norwegian Wood at a noodle shop so that I could go home and write a make-up essay and not completely fail my modern literature class.

I have been bearing a grudge against Mori Ogai for a long time.

If I could see it as something I could enjoy, maybe I would be able to loosen up and enjoy it.

(And the other part of my brain says, You can't fool me, I remember how Kokoro ended! -- I would have better luck if I could recalibrate my sense of enjoyment to include books with grim endings about the impossibility of human connection and understanding.)

Comments

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Pish! to Mori Ogai. Besides, isn't all older Japanese literature about the impossibility of human connection and understanding? Someone will make a very short movie called 'I Even Met Happy Meiji Writers.'

That said, Sanshiro feels all fuzzy glowy nostalgia to me; and one needn't read Sorekara to see what Sanshiro turns into.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

I think so. I was going to ask about books with kittens in them, and then I remembered what happens in The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea.

Fuzzy glowy nostalgia sounds nice.