Anki-free Zone! It's time for Extensive Reading

Hey! Long time no see, huh?

Since my last post lies, well, far away, I should give you a short update.

Here it is:

• In the last months I was active on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. That's why I've written no blog posts since then. Everything's there. You may follow me there for more updates.
• I finished reading an whole book written in Japanese.
• I started my second book in Japanese. Only a few chapters left.
• I've experimented with different methods. I discarded Anki completely and concentrate on Extensive Reading.

My first book.

My second book. Only a few chapters to go!

As I wrote above, I concentrate on Extensive Reading right now. That means, I try to understand as much as possible without/rarely looking unknown words up. I want to train myself to become more independent from the dictionary. There are many things I don't understand. There are many sentences, sometimes even paragraphs, wich are mostly gibberish to me. But even though I can follow the story quite well which is a huge victory! 

Before I began with Extensive Reading, I was very nervous about it. I've read an whole book while looking up every single unknown word, which was sometimes very exhausting... There are many words I don't know. How much would I understand without this crutch? Would I even learn something new? 

After reading half through book #2 I began to read extensively. It felt great to read in Japanese nearly the same speed as in my native language! I was not only able to follow the story I also noticed that I was reading more attentively than before. 

I've learned to let unknown words go and move on. 

This is kind of an experiment. I have no idea, how much I can learn longterm with extensive reading. I plan to read new books first extensively and after that I will going through them again, looking for sentences with only one unknown word and put them into Anki (sentence mining).

This way I can read first for pleasure and challenge myself, while the classical learning part comes later. It may seem "ineffective", but it is more enjoyable for me. 

Do you have any experiences with Extensive Reading? Or with Anki-free learning approaches? I would like to hear from your experiences! ;)