I often warn my literature students, especially those whose language skills have reached the stage where they can handle new texts with some degree of independence, that, as they read, they should try to maintain a distinction between literary pleasure afforded by the work itself and what might be called "linguistic pleasure" stimulated by the sheer satisfaction of making their way successfully through an orthographical garden, the gathering of whose fruits is only becoming possible for them after years of disciplined study. For the fact is that Japanese, especially for those of us who have learned to read it after childhood, never loses its exotic appeal; each page turned reveals to the eye a new spectacle of outlandish squiggles that momentarily takes the breath away. And written in those squiggles or spoken by the people who were raised in the language are equally outlandish syntactic structures -- not only passives but causatives and passive-causatives and te-forms with oku's atttached or morau's and itadaku's and zu's that make our minds work in ways that can never be conveyed to those who do not know the language. There is a thrill in realizing that you can process this stuff with your very own brain.

I have long been convinced that, as we speak -- but especially as we read this foreign tongue -- just beneath the threshold of consciousness, a voice continually shouts, "Look, Mom, I'm reading Japanese!" And these subliminal cries arouse in us a pleasure that can easily be confused with the satisfaction of reading a good story or book. In fact, there is a danger that the simpler the style of a work and the less challenging its content (which is to say, the easier a piece of writing is to "understand" on the purely lexical level) the more likely it is to grant us that instant gratification of having read something of exceptional interest.

qiche wrote:i ordered a german book just recently,that should help you to memorize the kanji. i hope it works.