I’m reading Murakami again.  I first fell in love with his writing in a Japanese lit class at Middlebury, reading him in the English translation.  Soon after, during my year at Keio University in Tokyo, I picked up a copy of his Wild Sheep Chase (羊を巡る冒険) in the original Japanese, and started reading it.

It took me 6 months to get through the 2-volume (thin soft-cover volumes) novel the first time.  I underlined every word I didn’t know as I read, and dutifully spent hours going back over and looking each one up.  I filled 3 small college-ruled notebooks with vocabulary from that book alone (often realizing that I was looking up the same works two or three times).

When I finished, I was basically fully literate in Japanese.  Not native, mind you, but there wasn’t much that I couldn’t read.  And I should mention that I was taking the highest level Japanese courses that Keio offered during that span as well, so it wasn’t independent.  But I credit that experience heavily in pushing myself from capable to fluent as a reader (and to some degree, writer) of the language.  I went on to gobble up many of his other books, and I was able to just enjoy the writing.

So I’m reading Murakami again, his new book 1Q84 (in Japanese, it reads as a phonetically like “1-9-8-4”).  This time I’m reading the Korean translation, and I’m writing down every vocabulary word that I don’t know as I go.  I’m filling up pages of a beautiful new notebook, and hoping that on the other side, I’ll have a new level of comfort with the language.

I think this is analogous to how I have taught myself to program.  I started out maintaining a big Java app at Higher One, testing it, then tweaking it, then rewriting it.  I would look up every class and function I didn’t know, initially in the JDK documentation, and then by reading Sun’s source code.  When I later read the Design Patterns book, for instance, it was all concepts I’d already seen and used.

I think this partially explains why I use Emacs, rather than some fancier IDE, for development.  The process, at first painful, of looking up how to do each task, and what functions each class has available, is a part of how I internalize code, patterns, and documentation.  In the end, I think it makes me a better, faster, and more well-rounded programmer.