Thanks a lot! I think I’ll probably get it. I love the idea of jumping in at the deep end and reading materials too!
What is your process between book and yomichan? Is there a way of checking the characters if it’s a traditional paper book? I actually work out of a Japanese library, and have hundreds of books and manga at my disposal, so I would love to make use of that!
Again, thanks!
99% of my reading is digital. Having said that I literally have the biggest Japanese library in Europe one kilometer away from me and I can get some of their old books for like 1 euro per book. Using yomichan (yomitan) with epubs just makes things so much smoother since you can just instantly get the translation or correct spelling of everything you need in less than a second.
If you are okay with it taking a bit longer, one approach to physical books that you can do is to take a picture of the page with your phone. My phone (iphone 11) has OCR built in and I can just copy and paste text from the picture by just holding my finger on the part with text, and paste that into a Japanese dictionary if need be. Shirabe Jisho is a good dictionary app for this.
Quick example; if you have IOS just press the OCR button on the bottom right corner so you can select and copy text. You even have a button for machine translation on the left if you’re really desperate about understanding something (try to avoid using that button…).
This may be the best way! Thank you for your help! I’m going to try it out, and see how it works out. I have an Android phone, so Google Lens can copy text from the camera. If it doesn’t work out, I can just switch to doing it on my pc with ebooks.
Thanks, and congratulations on reaching 60! 
I think your post has also inspired me!
In addition to the Google OCR method, here are some things I’ve learned from others here and there (especially @javerend) about reading paper and getting quick at kanji lookups. These might work better or worse depending on your overall level and experience reading. For reference, I know about 350 kanji and enjoy reading most around the Natively 20-25 level.
Finally, one of the most important things I’ve learned is not to look up everything right away. Read what you can to get context, e.g., a page or two. Then go back and and read again, this time doing lookups if needed. I describe that here in the dropdown about prose reading. It saves me a lot of time because with the context I’ll recognise more words than on the first pass. Also, it’s good to have several strategies for lookups because they all have various success rates and affect reading enjoyment and fluency differently.
Oh nice suggestions! Actually I just searched on Amazon for a reading stand, and they had a 50% off deal on one, making it only 1000 yen! Call me daring, but I had to get it! 
I did wonder about a kanji writing app. My colleague has one on her iphone and gets a definition for the kanji she doesn’t know pretty quick. I’m going to search the app store and see if there’s an app, as I don’t have a tablet.
Thank you!
yay, I hope you enjoy it! I’m really happy with mine, it removes a lot of friction putting the book down and picking it up again
Good luck! Post if you find a good one, I’m sure others would be interested and these things are always getting updated so you may well find something new that hasn’t been recommended yet
I did wonder about a kanji writing app. My colleague has one on her iphone and gets a definition for the kanji she doesn’t know pretty quick. I’m going to search the app store and see if there’s an app, as I don’t have a tablet.
Most good Japanese dictionary apps, even the Japanese-English ones, have an option to search by radical or by drawing the kanji you see. The one I use allows me to do (Shirabe Jisho, since it uses the Jisho repository I think).
See the options next to the search bar, the apps have something similar:
Okay, so I downloaded an app called “Kanji Study”, and was trying it out, and just found out that my phone has a kanji writing tool for finding a kanji. It comes as part of Gboard. I think it’s because I have added Japanese on my phone. It requires you to write it pretty fast, but I was able to write this kanji 居 using it 
I wonder if there are some settings to make it give more time.
Another screenshot of me using it in Chrome.
The third button from the bottom right 
opens a fullscreen handwriting pad.
I have another handwriting keyboard, Mazec, which doesn’t require writing fast (but doesn’t have a very big writing pad).
Nice! that makes writing a little easier. So I can use any dictionary alongide this feature and it should allow me to check any kanji without too much trouble!
I need to test it out xD
I will need to check Mazec! Thanks!
Hi Ciox
Congratulations on reaching level 60. What strategies have you found useful for talking practice?
I barely do any form of talking in Japanese. The one exception is that brief stint with Tandem, but I did not practice for that one at all. I just wanted to see how well I would be able to communicate, I just talked to measure my ability rather than to improve my ability.
There’s a person who did something similar to me but is a few years ahead of me, just read and watched a lot and then tried to interact with others after 2 years. He did not practice speaking or writing at all, but apparently did really well. The app has a correction function, and he barely got corrected. He recently made a video where he actually speaks and he sound really good. So I think the strategy of; read and watch things till you fluently understand things and then just talking should be fine. Of course, this is assuming you are not in an environment where you have to rapidly become conversational at a basic level.
I am not at the point of applying this to Japanese yet, but one thing that really helps with sounding better is doing a bit of phonetics research. You can find the sounds used in the Japanese language here. The /r/ sound is infamous in Japanese, but you can find it’s phonetically a apical tap, either alveolar [ɾ] or postalveolar [ɾ̠]. After this you can look up the diagram and video of the mouth movements required for the sound. Practice it a few times based on the animation and then get an ideally mono-lingual Japanese speaker to tell you when you sound natural. This should allow you to pronounce and recognize sounds which are not present in the languages you currently speak.
Interesting - thanks.
