Comments

Participating in the Tadoku Reading Contest — 6 Comments

  1. I heard about tadoku but i did not join I am still on RTK So I can’t read japanese just yet lol.

    • I think reading is more about grammar than kanji, because you can find books with furigana, or just look up the kanji in an online dictionary, but grammar is a harder thing to look up. Eventually, seeing repeated kanji will reinforce the ability to read them. You can still enjoy a book.

  2. Jordan, you can ALWAYS start reading. Don’t hold yourself back just because you are still working on RTK. Find something easy, either all in かな or else that uses ふりがな and get started. Tons of manga you could start with, or begin by using picture books (to find out where to access lots of simple children’s material check out these posts: http://bit.ly/knvHeh and http://bit.ly/rc7rx9 ) . Look things up as you go, or don’t and just guess at what’s going on based on the pictures, but start reading now. The sooner you do, the better.

    I’ve entered every contest since 多読 began, over a year ago now, and my reading has improved massively because of it. Going from a couple hundred pages in the very first contest, to 1,800+ pages in this most recent one, and going from struggling through fairly basic material to reading short novels and playing RPG’s. While other aspects of my study have of course contributed to this, competing in the tadoku contest has been one of the huge sources of improvement and motivation for me. I would argue that as its grown bigger, it has also gotten more intense, and more fun. Competitors communicate with each other via twitter, irc, and other social media platforms, and I’m constantly making new friends as they discover the contest and begin to get involved. And while it has certainly become more difficult to “win” the contest in the sense of taking 1st place as it has grown, that was never the point anyways. The real competition is always with yourself. For fun, I usually find a couple of contestants reading about the same pace as myself and battle it out with them to see who can claim the top spot amongst us, but even that is just for additional fun and a chance to talk trash. The tadoku contest is really about pushing myself to read as much as I possibly can for a month, while building a habit of reading daily.

  3. ~The slowest reader, measured by nano-chips implanted in all of the readers’ eyes and brains that detect speed and understanding, will be executed on site, and have their family shamed. Will you survive?~ Battle Royale: 3 FTW!! Let’s turn it into a movie.

    I hope I can take part of Tadoku one day. My friend told me about it too late, after the summer round had already finished. I heard there’ll be another round in October.

  4. I just found this article and though Tadoku sounded fun and challenging, however the linked page has not been updated for a while. After searching around I found that there is a new page here: http://readmod.com/ if you want to update the link :)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>