Hello everyone, I am looking for suggestions for books, or reading materials to bridge the gap from graded readers to native materials.
I have already read through everything on Satori, and recently finished all the books on JGRPG website from E through H. At this stage I can trudge through native materials like newspapers, but at the same time I am looking for easier materials that I can still read through fast while enjoying the content at least a little. The latter has done wonders to my reading speed and comprehension. JGRPGās grade F-H were just right but they were very limited in number, only 2 in H category.
I looked into aozora of course. There was an excellent related topic that was closed last year [ Here, Have a List of Aozora Books by WK Level - #14 by NicoleIsEnough ]. kemily88 very kindly had listed the books and the percentage of Kanji that should be covered at every wanikani level. The Kanji in hundreds of the available books appeared to be covered at above 90% rate even at level 40. I thought great, but, actually I found out, and later realized that it was already pointed out by WeebPotato on the same thread, that one of the reasons why these books looked so accessible in terms of the number of Kanji is that many of the Kanji were actually written in Kana, so they were not factored in to kemily88ās calculations. Not only this meant that the percentage of āKanjiā that i should be able to understand is much less than 90% I also had to struggle associating the kana with Kanji that I already know. Coming from the school of WaniKani my strengths are recognizing shapes of Kanji more than their kana. This pushed the Aozora books that I tried into trudging category rather than read fast and enjoy category.
Sorry for the long post, but I would appreciate any suggestions.
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Have you looked into Learn Natively? Itās a site where you can browse books by user difficulty gradings.
If youāve read everything on Satori, then itās a good time to start reading native content. You could try childrenās novels- some have full furigana, some partial. The downside of childrenās novels is that some words that are normally spelled with kanji will be spelled with hiragana.
But, you should find plenty of what youāre looking for on Natively. Thereās a ālistsā feature that has a lot of great stuff for browsing, user-made lists of approachable novels, etc.
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Looks like Natively is the place to pin point exactly the level you need. I guess I was too focused on finding free online resources. Thank you for the suggestion.
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What about joining a Book Club here in the forum? There are Clubs for every levels, they are organized by giving reading assignments with a few pages per week to read, vocabulary sheets all filled up, threads full of questions and answers, plenty of people ready to help, a lot of choice if you look at the previous picksā¦ what more to ask 
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Sounds like youāre going to have to jump into regular novels and manga.
Keep in mind that sites like Bookwalker.jp often offer the first book of a series for free (sometimes even more). And sometimes they just have fully free novels that come up, or heavily discounted ones. (Which you can combine with their coin cashback to buy even more books. Thereās a 50% cashback for orders over 1500 yen right now until 12/17 so itās great. Bought myself 5 books earlier and now I have enough cashback to buy 2-3 more. Not bad for around $22)
Thereās a really useful thread here that sometimes gets updated with new free stuff. I know I bookmarked it and I grabbed a few from genres I like before their offers expire. The BookWalker Freebies Thread - #855 by rodan
Natively is great, you just need to figure out what level you want to read.
But also you can just pick whatever sounds interesting and just chance it on the difficulty!
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at a certain point it might not be a bad idea to just start reading novels you may have already read in your native language but in the japanese translation if you can get a hold of a copy.
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What a fantastic thread, thank you for pointing it out. I visit the forum time to time, and I know it is an active community, but I was not aware of these gems.
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I checked bookwalker, and realized that it is not possible to remove DRM from books purchased through them. Is that what you usually do? Just use their apps for reading?
Yeah I read straight from the app.
Some of us buy on Bookwalker and then use Mokuro to read in a browser with selectable text.
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