How do I get into reading?

Japanese Language Reading
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Hey there,

I started learning Japanese beginning of 2023. As I have a quite time-consuming full-time job, I was not able to invest tons of hours each day. I went to a language class each Saturday and picked up Wani Kani at some point last year. I think I understand the general grammar and I basically do WaniKani every day. However, I will be moving to Japan in the next months and to be honest my slow progress is freaking me a bit out. I think I would not even pass the N5 exam yet :frowning:

My gut feeling is telling me that I need to get into reading, as the immersion will be extremely helpful and I will make significant progress. Something interesting + challenge sounds like a big win. I bought a few of the absolute beginner club manga, but feel like they are still way too difficult with my current WaniKani level.

So you could conclude, I am a bit lost, with a lot of questions on my mind:

  • How do you in general approach reading materials? Do you just read over it without looking things up? Do you look up every word? Do you create Anki decks then and do SRS? Read it again?
  • Should I pick something from Natively for the lowest level? Or rely on Satori Reader?
  • Should I just continue learning WaniKani without any reading and wait until level x?
  • Should I in parallel learn any anki decks to build up vocabulary on top of WaniKani?

Thank you upfront for everyone trying to help me.

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NHK News Web Easy is a nice, free, low-committment way to start.

EDIT: Satori Reader has free content as well, now that I think about it, so there’s no harm in trying.

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This isn’t Japanese specific, as I’m still a baby beginner at Japanese, but I did learn German as a foreign language.

I started off bringing menus home from restaurants and making myself flashcards out of everything I didn’t know on them. Then I moved on to buying a magazine about a topic that interested me (in my case, I bought a Rolling Stone) and did the same thing. Went through the whole article with a dictionary and made myself flashcards. Then I moved onto an actual newspaper and did the same thing. Finally, I took one of my favorite books that I knew very well (The Hobbit) and read it in German.

Eventually, I didn’t have to make myself flashcards of every word, but I would just look up the word in the dictionary if it was really preventing me from comprehending what was going on in the sentence. But as you progress, you’ll figure out most words based on context and vibes.

On some ebook apps you can generate flashcards out of highlighted words in the text which would have been nice to have back in my day. :joy:

I started this whole process when I moved to Germany and it took me about six months to work up to The Hobbit, but obviously the whole time I was pretty immersed in the language and also I was highly motivated to learn so that I could like, buy things and do stuff like go to the bank, lol.

But everyone learns differently and what worked for me might not work for you. Also I am only learning Japanese for fun now, so I doubt I’ll be that dedicated to forcing myself through Japanese texts. I guess it depends on how you learn and what your goals are!

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As a beginner, I started with News Web Easy and https://hirogaru-nihongo.jp/en/. I used a pop-up dictionary to look up all the words I didn’t know, and just focused on getting used to Japanese sentence structure and basic grammar. Adding words to an SRS isn’t really necessary since you will get plenty of vocab through WK anyway, and anything really common can just be learned through exposure.

Also, keep in mind that you will never really feel prepared for actual native material. Eventually you will just need to dive in, with the understanding that it will be hard for a while.

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Seconding Satori reader. I just had a discussion the other day that the familiar rhythms and patterns in storytelling are pretty universal no matter what language a story is written in, so reading fiction is usually much easier than nonfiction. I havent use Satori myself, but have heard great things about it.

Other than that, I can also highly recommend graded reader sets, there’s this post on reddit with a huge number of them available for free.

Or if you have a university library nearby, it might have physical graded readers (mine has them, so others might too).

Oh yeah, the above post reminded me, download yomitan, it’s THE tool for reading Japanese in your browser.

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I started off buying very young japanese children’s books (with lots of pictures, which only use hiragana, and then used jisho.org as a dictionary and DeepL translator to translate sentences i didn’t understand (which was almost every sentence). After a few of those i moved on to books for slightly older children with simple kanji then onto books with more kanji.

I think an important step forward for japanese learners is to start learning how to look up kanji on jisho.org (or any online kani dictionary). It’s time consuming at first but the more you do it the quicker you get and with the online translator every Japanese text is now comprehensible for you.

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My general approach to is only look up enough to get the gist. Especially when starting out there will be more you don’t know that you do know and spending a day on a single page is discouraging. My philosophy is if I can summarize what I read to someone who hasn’t read it, that’s good enough. I save intensive reading for special sessions. IMO if you really want to SRS vocab, choose the ones with the highest frequency in the book or in general until you have a strong vocab foundation. Too much SRS IMO takes away from practical use of the language.

Either works. The ABBC or BBC are a good place to start since you can ask questions and they have weekly deadlines, but Satori is nice because it takes most of the planning and setup away.

Definitely not. Use what you’ve learned if you want to cement it

Eeeeh
be careful of overloading on SRS. Maybe stick to the most frequently used vocab at most. There are sites like jpdb.io and koohi.cafe where you can pick books you are actively reading and narrow down by frequency of use. Satori might have added something similar as well.

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On the contrary, the earlier you start the more efficient everything will be!
Once you’ve seen a word even once in actual use, it’s much easier to remember it. (This is why I ended up quitting new WK lessons at level 20 and just started sentence mining instead.)
You’ll also drill in the most common kanji 100s of times by reading. I think that getting this familiarity with them makes it a lot easier to keep learning new kanji. It kinda frees up brain space in some weird way.

You can start reading anything that has affordances (furigana, Yomitan, Satori’s WK integration, etc.). The only things you might want to ‘wait until level X’ for are things with no such affordances, like paper books. Looking up unknown kanji by hand isn’t fun.

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For me personally I look them up as I go, it does make the process a bit more tedious since I have to go to a site like Jisho and search for the kanji or vocab I’m looking for (which can be time consuming), But I like it because once I’ve seen the word and its translation, I can remember the general meaning if it ever comes back up again, even if I don’t fully know how to pronounce it. I recommend making an Anki Deck for those words as well too since it helps with recalling it and pronunciation.

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If you want to improve your reading ability itself, I would recommend Tadoku, it will allow you to simply read without checking every second word.
Since you’re moving to japan soon, you might want to check out irodori to see if there are topics you haven’t gone over in your weekly class, their series suppose to get you to speak the essential for work and everyday situations, which might be more beneficial for you at the moment, since reading doesn’t focus on specific needs, and you need to be able to converse.
Satori reader has sections of real life situations you can read and listen to, so it could really help you as well.
Try to focus more about the situations you’ll need to tackle when you’re there, than srsing random words from books, it will be more practical for you at this point in time.
And when you read - read out loud, try to shadow if it’s your thing, if not go old school. Choose some dialogue memorize it until you are able to recite it verbatim. It can really help you when you get there.

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Welcome!

Personal, I think the best way to learn vocabulary that you’ll need in real life asap is to focus on prose (like children’s books and Satori) instead of manga. I’ve tracked my vocab gains and what I’ve taken from that is reading teaches you so many words, , at least for the first few thousand words that are so common you’ll read them frequently enough not to need flashcards. I have some lessons learned on my home post and there are tips for Satori reader here

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That’s exactly what I did, too, and graded readers, and it was a lot of fun reading the stories. I can now read at about an early third grade level.

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I second the Tadoku recommendation. They have a huge collection of free books starting from the most basic level imaginable. Nearly all of them have audio available, so you can read along with someone.

They’re not the most polished “books” in the world- many have a very handmade feel- but they’re effective and there’s so many to choose from that you can slowly step up and up without spending any money or running out of resource.

Aside from that, buy yourself a copy of はらășこあおむし, the best book ever written :triumph:

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You can give a try to my site. Some like it some don’t. You might belong to the former group.

https://drdru.github.io/stories/intro.html

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I think you have some good ideas, and like you I have and still face the same problem!

I found level appropriate books, that I had some amount of interest in reading, in various ways. Natively, the WaniKani reading book clubs, Reddit, YouTube videos about starting to read Japanese, various website/blogs etc. There are plenty of ways to go about it but find a few books that are level appropriate.

What I have come to do is, I get my books in epub format and open them with my computer browser on the reader.ttsu.app website. Once it’s opened, I then use the Yomitan extension to look up whatever I need to. It’s the best lookup method I have used, speedy, accurate and can parse conjuncted verbs.

I have found that as long as i understand the grammar being used i can put up with needing more vocabulary lookups. But, if I have to do too many lookups, more than 2 in every sentence for example, and I also don’t even understand the grammar then It becomes too much. I need to be able to generally understand what is going on grammatically, not always but in general, to be able to follow along with the story.

My recommendation therefore is, study basic particles to get a feel for what they do and how they work. Study some basic grammar, I like youtube videos that take apart sentences, and learn vocabulary. Once you have enough vocabulary that you can look through the first few pages and recognize a fair amount and also the grammar is not going over your head too often, then i think you have found a good book to start reading.

Good luck!

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My five cents, as someone learning Japanese while currently living in Japan:

First of all: Deep breath! Obviously nothing is going to magically stop the idea of “moving to a foreign country where I don’t (fluently) speak the native language” from being some level of scary, and to be fair there are a lot of challenges to doing so, especially depending on how much outside support you have for the process.

That said, try not to let it tie you up into too many knots. (I’m not kidding about the deep breaths!)
If you’re going to a more urban area, I guarantee there will be at least a decent level of English support in your daily life – things like train station names, English labeling at the コンビニ, cashiers who know enough English to go “bag?” when you blink in confusion at ăƒŹă‚žèą‹. If it’s more rural things might be a bit trickier, but there’re still resources, you just might have to go looking for them.

Point is, don’t let your current skills get you too worked up. The immersion will be really good for your learning, and I’m sure you’ll find a lot of things over here that you can enjoy regardless of your fluency.

As for your actual question, my first reading practice was in a college classroom so that’s probably not an option for you. That said, my current system is to read manga that I’m very interested in – to counter the “Oh god this is so hard why am I doing this to myself” sensation with “holy shit it’s my boy Heiji I’m so excited for this chapter-” – AND that I have read before in English.

By going with something I’ve read before, even ages ago, I know at least the broad strokes of the story and characters involved. It’s manga, so the visuals do provide some support for what I’m trying to read at any given moment. Personally, I look up words if I truly can’t understand the sentence without it but I don’t try to add them to SRS – odds are they’ll pop back up shortly, and I don’t want a massive pile of SRS for every single word I don’t know.

My current poison of choice is ćæŽąć”ă‚łăƒŠăƒł, which also means there’s a lot of normal daily language in it as opposed to what you might find in, I dunno, é‹ŒăźéŒŹé‡‘èĄ“ćž«(fma) or é’ăźç„“é­”ćž«(blue exorcist).
Yes, this ALSO means there’s a lot of murder mystery and criminal investigation language/kanji. Which is harder, but it’s also kinda funny to see someone’s reaction when I know the word for “victim” but not for “hallway”.

Once you get over here, if you want to look into manga or other hard-copy reading practice, check out someplace like BOOKOFF, which is a Japanese secondhand book store. Japanese second hand stores tend to have very good condition items. I can’t tell you how many volumes of manga I’ve gotten for 300 or even 100 yen, and the only sign of age is some fading on the spine or the odd dented cover.

But tldr; I read something that I am highly interested in and have read previously, and look vocabulary up as need be.

EDIT: Sorry about the accidental reply, Escalus, I had meant to second your comment about never feeling prepared but lost track of the thought. I definitely agree, though, I never feel prepared :joy:

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You will not feel ready to tackle reading for a long time, but the only way to actually be ready is to just start doing it! Simple manga for children and/or stories that you know like the back of your hand are the easiest way to not feel like you’re completely drowning. The most important thing is consistency (which is a lot easier to maintain if you’re enjoying what you’re reading!)

Also, don’t feel limited to specifically books for reading. Visual novels are often recommended for new readers, because they often have voice acting or an English option to help check your understanding, and video games also count as reading if they have dialogue and such!

this is so real LOL. I know words like æ†Žă—ăż, 毆柀, and èȘ˜æ‹, but I do not at all know how to refer to a bush, other than just describing it as a “small, round tree”. Learning vocab by reading does have some interesting downsides :sweat_smile:

But seconding the bookoff recommendation! Books in Japan are literally so cheap it’s insane. I got the first four volumes of a manga I’d been wanting to try for 100„ each recently. Take full advantage of that!

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Speaking as someone who moved to Japan sub N5, working on speaking will be more useful to you than reading. That’s not to say that reading’s worthless, far from it. But if you’re looking to get the most benefit out of your study time before your move, focus on speaking, not reading. In my first few weeks in Japan, I was rarely handed something and expected to be able to read it, but I frequently had to talk and interact with people. iTalki is a great resource for booking tutors for speaking practice.

Once you get to Japan check out your local community center or international exchange organization. They’ll likely offer some sort of Japanese class for foreigners.

Focus on trying to read the things around you in everyday life. It’s easy for signs etc to just become white noise, but try not to let that happen. If things are labeled bilingually, don’t just default to the English, but try to figure out what the Japanese says

When you reach N3ish, I recommend signing up for Kumon’s ć›œèȘž course. It’s the one made for small Japanese children. That course is literally the reason I passed the N1 and will massively improve your reading ability. I would just recommend having a foundation before starting it since it is ment for children who are already fluent in spoken Japanese. They also have a æ—„æœŹèȘž course that’s made for foreigners learning Japanese, but I’ve never taken it so I can’t vouch for it. From looking at the sample pages though it seems heavily translation based, which I don’t love

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Yeah, I’d say overall folks are more surprised by reading ability than speaking ability we don’t talk about the æ—„æœŹèȘžäžŠæ‰‹, they mean well- – I’ve gotten folks who’re surprised I can read hiragana/katakana, let alone a decent handful of kanji.

Seconded. Even things like the “燃えるギミ” signs at a cafe can be helpful, because the English will sometimes be something like “paper” or “plastic” instead of just burnable/nonburnable, which is the actual sorting that’s occurring.

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