Cavesa wrote:Interesting, how this conversation fluidly continues after a few years of a break. And I stand by my points in it.
But those are two rather unrelated things. Reading genre literature is not "B1 and never really developing a high degree of mastery". This is the kind of snobbish attitude towards genre literature, that is rather harmful in our society and reading culture. Many "low genre" authors have rich vocabulary, solid or even excellent style, and definitely don't lack thought. Just like you'd find easier and harder authors among the canonical works, you will find them among the low genres too, even if some genres may have a more skewed % of each.
Someone fully appreciating Pratchett, Tolkien, Jordan, Dantec, Robert, etc. in a foreign language is definitely not B1.
Nope, that is not a general rule. Not only are most books I've read more interesting than most people I've met (just half joking. Or even less). Many people are simply primarily after reading. Not only most Latin and other classics learners. But also most scientists using English don't really use anything else than reading in their field. And tons of people learning a language primarily to enjoy what it offers on the bookshelf, not really for people.
Because what you describe is indeed a very successful learner. Sounds like someone either becoming a japanologist at university and translating or something like that for a living, or someone simply loving the Japanese culture (perhaps some difficult authors), but never planning to travel there. After all, let's not forget that travelling is not automatic, not even outside of the covid times. It is not accessible to everybody. So, why should that stereotypical successful learner, that you describe, feel ashamed about not having skills they'd never get to use anyways?
You're putting words in my mouth and attacking a straw man, so let's clear some things up. First, I have at no point said that only pursuing a reading knowledge of a language is not a valid goal, in and of itself. I have been specifically talking about people who represent having a low level of productive skills and the ability to read some relatively simple text as having a full command of a language, especially in the context of influencers trying to use this inflated estimation of their abilities to sell their methods to other learners. Next, genre literature is absolutely valid and there are exceptional titles and authors to be found within it. You are absolutely mad, however, if you want to try and pretend as though these exceptional works and authors are representative of genre literature at large. You're also disregarding the benefits of specialization for consuming genre literature. Yes, science fiction or fantasy, or any other genre can have some advanced vocabulary, but there is a limit to the breadth of it required it. You can absolutely be able to read meaty hard science fiction tomes, yet woefully lacking in even passive vocabulary in other areas. Heck, you could read through all of The Lord of the Rings and a fair bit of more modern fantasy, know the names of three dozen species of trees in English, be well-versed in terms for medieval weaponry and armor, yet never encounter such advanced concepts as making a phone call, participating in an interview, or going on vacation in any of them.
Heck, I primarily learn because I'm interested in reading, but I qualify my abilities accordingly, which is the only thing I'm advocating. If you say "I know Portuguese" when you really mean "I've read the major works of lusophone authors and can comfortably read anything, but I can't speak, write or understand it," you're misrepresenting your abilities and should be clear about them. Not everyone needs to have the same goals, and different goals are perfectly valid.
Don't get me wrong, reading CAN of course work as mainly a tool to improve overall skills, some people treat it as just a tool. But it is definitely not "only so useful as a proxy", no matter whether you read YA or the oldest and longest canonical work available.
Yes, it absolutely is only so useful as a proxy to your abilities to do anything except read, absent any other qualifications for your abilities. People can have entirely different goals. If you were to judge my ability to speak French based on the books I can comfortably read, you would woefully overestimate my abilities. If you applied for a job that required you to have a high command of written and spoken English and on the basis of only being able to read novels you said "I know English," without any qualifications, you would be fired and your judgement severely questioned if it came to light you only have a reading knowledge of English. Even if you are a highly competent reader and can fully appreciate the authors in your list above, if you couldn't sustain routine conversation in English, you would have misrepresented yourself. This is the whole reason we have terms to address various levels of competency to begin with, like saying you have a reading knowledge of a language, or that you are conversational in one.
As an aside, while I don't disagree with the thought behind much of what you're saying, you could stand to dial down the snark a bit and focus first on actually addressing what was said, rather than launching into your defense of genre literature and diverging learning goals.
Edit: To clarify on the point of the stereotypical N1 learner who can't speak at all, the issue isn't that they only have high reading and listening abilities, but that they generally want to be able to use Japanese in all forms and aren't. Some people just take the N1 for a lark, but for many people, it's a condition of being able to move to Japan to work in a Japanese company or to study in a Japanese university. Given that the JLPT doesn't test writing or speaking abilities at all, studying to pass the test tends to result in neglecting these skills unless deliberate efforts are made to maintain them. Within the Japanese learning community, I've seen two trends that aggravate this tendency. First, there is a heavy belief in the magic of test results, where people say stuff like "If you pass the N1, you're fluent." Secondly, there are a lot of questionable methods for language acquisition being pushed in the community, and it's easy for people to want to believe they'll work and give them a leg up, given how passionate they tend to be about Japanese and Japan, and the reputation the language has for being fiendishly difficult. I haven't participated in a while, but I would routinely see people advocating stuff like "Don't try to speak or write at all initially, just keep reading and listening until you can automatically form full, proper sentences by intuition. If you try to speak before this happens, you'll get fossilized errors you'll never be able to overcome and your accent will always suck." People follow this sort of advice or just study to pass the N1 and routinely wind up upset that they are unable to actually speak or write as well as they thought they would be able to. It's a pretty regular occurence from what I've seen. There's nothing wrong with people who get up to N1 reading because they just want to read Visual Novels full of obscure kanji, but they are not who I was talking about.
At the time, that was what felt exciting and rewarding for me.