(I planned to post this in a couple of days, but I’m posting it a little early.)
Will this be your first time reading native Japanese material? If so, get ready to face the hardest thing you’ve encountered yet in learning Japanese!
Now is a good time to assess your readiness.
ひらがな
Being able to read ひらがな without trouble is perhaps the biggest requirement if you want to keep up with book club pace. If you haven’t mastered it yet, but choose to move forward with reading no matter how many grueling hours it’ll take each day, expect to find your recognition and reading speed gradually increasing over the following months.
カタカナ
Are you decent at reading カタカナ? You may be surprised at just how often it gets used. Loan words from English and other language appear in カタカナ, but so do certain Japanese words from time to time. And have you seen all the カタカナ on the book cover yet?
漢字
Although WaniKani has you fairly covered on 漢字, that’s the least of a first-time reader’s worries, as this manga includes ふりがな readings beside all kanji in text boxes.
Vocabulary
Do you know many vocabulary words yet? We’ll be populating the vocabulary spreadsheet as we go each week, so hopefully that will make looking up all the unknown words easier.
I have to be honest with you, though. Reading words you don’t know can be a real drag. Here you’re just trying to understand a simple sentence, and you’re needing to figure out each. word. you. come. across.
Even once you know the meaning of a word, your brain just isn’t prepared to smoothly read words it’s only encountered for the first time. You just have to accept this fact, and keep going.
The more you see a word, the better you’ll get at recognizing and reading it. It’s sort of like seeing a word repeatedly over time in WaniKani, except with elementary school kids rather than a 
.
(Your eyes did go over that panel right-to-left, didn’t they?)
Grammar
Welcome to the elephant in the room.
Here at the Absolute Beginner Book Club, it’s recommended that you know some basic grammar going in:
I’ll let you in on a little secret:
You can start reading with almost no grammar knowledge.
But it’ll be hard.
I mean very hard.
Each manga panel, you can literally spend hours reading up on grammar, trying to learn it as best you can, in hopes that you’ll at least vaguely understand what’s going on in a scene.
At this pace, it’s very easy to fall behind the book club reading schedule quickly. Even asking questions in the book club threads and getting detailed answers may overwhelm you if you’re starting from no grammar knowledge.
The thought of learning enough basics of grammar in the next month may be intimidating.
But, there’s a trick you can use to help your chances.
Take a look at the following dialogue.
If you’ve made you way through WaniKani level one, you may have noticed the word 入り口 above.
And if you’re at least through level five, 近く may have stood out.
Why is that? Because you’ve been exposed to them before.
That’s the trick. Initial exposure.
If you’re starting learning grammar from scratch, with the intent to start reading a manga in Japanese in four weeks, you don’t have the luxury of spending a lot of time learning a few bits of grammar in depth.
Instead, a shallow understanding will get you a wide breadth of knowledge, increasing the chances you’ll recognize grammar when you see it, even if you don’t yet understand it.
It gives you a greater scaffolding, from which you can refer back to lesson material later, or ask questions in the weekly book club threads, and you can build your understanding up from that.
Four weeks is all you need to expose yourself to the basics.
Will that make reading your first native material easy?
No.
But you’ll feel you have a fighting chance.
Resources and Pacing
Do you own a textbook, such as Genki I?
Read through one lesson every two days. Don’t worry about understanding everything. This is all about initial exposure. Depending on the length of your textbook, this pace may be enough to get through the whole book within a month.
Don’t have the cash for a textbook?
Tae Kim’s grammar guide is free. Work your way through a Basic Grammar chapter every two days, and you’ll be ready to go.
Are walls of text not your learning style?
Check out Cure Dolly’s fully subtitled Japanese From Scratch video series. Go down the playlist in order, and watch at least one video every two days. Even better if you can get in one video each day.
You can do this. Don’t give up!
Everyone’s rooting for you!
