I was mostly referring to the mock tests / sample questions you can find on the JLPT website which are considerably easier. The Shin Kanzen Master series is really good from what I know, I have one of the grammar books which goes into really good detail. I don’t think I went over the practice tests though. So maybe I was overstating the difference a bit in your case.
The only other factor is of course the test stress / time limit aspect, which makes the actual test a bit harder than doing it at home at your own pace. But it’s arguable that’s more testing your test-taking abilities rather than Japanese.
If you’re trying to read for entertainment (extensive reading) and find yourself having to look things up often, it’s too hard. Try something easier.
If you genuinely want to break it down sentence by sentence (intensive reading), go ahead, but recognize that doing so is likely to impact your enjoyment of the text. This kind of reading is work.
What I would recommend is to start a book by reading intensively for a bit, in order to learn some of the vocabulary and writing style of the author. Then read the rest extensively. In order to reach your goals, you’re going to have to read a certain amount of text, and it’ll take a lot longer to get there if you try to do it all with intensive reading only.
The 4-5 is a totally arbitrary number that I’ve been using for Japanese, mostly because I finish the reading for the book clubs on Sunday/Monday and then I keep re-reading it until Friday/Saturday when a new chapter starts.
I think for better results I’d need to re-read it maybe 10 times at least? But even with the 4-5 by the last read I am picking up grammatical nuances that I didn’t see the first times or I am assimilating vocabulary or sentence structure that feels “natural” (and before it just seems weird). I sometimes see those structures again on future chapters and it feels easier.
Whenever I have a bit of extra time I try to re-read earlier chapter and they also get easier.
I do this regardless of the difficulty, because most materials that I am reading are above my level in one way or another… Either I don’t know slang or vocabulary or grammar… so It makes sense for me to re-read them. But if I got 100% comprehension the first time, I wouldn’t do it.
I’ve also read a lot about some other hyperpolyglots who use the method of listening to 50+ times the same thing even as an absolute beginner. The reasoning behind is that it seems like your brain starts processing the information as more natural sounding and picks up on the structure even if you don’t fully understand it yet. But that only works if you are re-listening to the exact same thing rather than listening to the news or TV without understanding it.
Read what you know, if you can’t figure it out just go to the next spot. I don’t look up anything, just “read it” If you see a kanji again and again, maybe look that one up. But you’ll pick up a lot through context as well. It feels weird, and I suggest using TV shows with Japanese subtitles instead of this method but it’s the same idea, just slower and with no sound. So, IMO inferior. (And I mean this for manga or something you can use context to understand) Just reading a book or something just seems
like frustrating yourself for no reason.
I can barely read and I don’t spend nearly enough time practicing - but when I did, I wouldn’t worry about perfect comprehension. I’m still trying to master some pretty elementary grammar and vocab, I can’t be worried about understanding every nuance! As long as I have a good idea of what’s going on, even if I don’t understand a sentence perfectly, I’ll just keep going - maybe it will become obvious in hindsight from context.
If I start getting coimpletely lost, okay, then it’s time to back up and try to translate whatever it was I got lost on.
If you’re reading anything that forces you to constantly stop and look things up, or you can’t make heads or tails of the grammar, maybe you should read something else.
Wow! I’m getting a lot of responses! Thanks, guys! I’m gonna try to reply to your answers one by one.
You’re right. I think I’m forcing myself to understand the Japanese nuances as if they’re written in English, which, in most cases, is a bad thing to do. Different languages have different nuances. Even when I’m learning English, I never really force myself to understand it in Indonesian because sometimes there just isn’t anything equivalent.
Oof. This hits me the hardest. Whenever I was trying to translate a book, I had such a hard time trying to craft a beautifully written sentence in English. It just took too much of my time and I think the book I was using was actually WAY beyond my level (I had to ask a lot of help from my Japanese friend to know the meaning of some of the sentences and even words because they don’t exist in the dictionary). To be honest, it’s really satisfying and I really want to become a translator at some point in the future, so it might be a good practice for when that time comes. But yeah, maybe I should just differentiate my “serious” reading time and my “just for fun” reading time.
Oh yeah! I definitely have experienced this. It really is one of the most eye-opening and satisfying experiences in my Japanese studies haha.
Oh, I’d say I’m more like the latter! I can differentiate parts of a sentence just fine. It’s just that most of the time (depending on the difficulty of the book) I need to look up words. But I don’t think it’s such a big problem tbh. I use electronic devices to do all of my reading (kindle, iphone, ipad) and they all come with built-in dictionaries and even built-in wikipedia searches. But still, sometimes I would find words that I can’t find anywhere in any dictionaries and I’d have to ask my Japanese friend for the meaning.
I see. It really is better to just read it and not worry so much about the details, then. But sometimes I’m kinda in between those two areas of “fully understanding” and “not understanding” which makes me confused because I’m worried that I might’ve misunderstood the sentence and it might ruin the story later on. I had this experience when I was still learning English and was reading Catching Fire. I totally misunderstood some parts, therefore the picture I had in my mind when I was reading it was totally different to what the author had intended, and I only noticed it when I was reading the Indonesian version haha. But I guess it’s just how it’s gonna be when I’m still learning.
Hmm, you’re right. That’s exactly what I meant. But understanding things in Japanese is just different, I guess.
I think we’re pretty similar. But in my case, I keep putting off compiling the words into my SRS deck up until the point where I just don’t do it at all. But, sometimes, when I actually get around doing it, I end up not adding some words because I’ve seen them so many times when I was reading that I had the meaning memorized by then haha.
Thank you for your advice. I really appreciate it!
Ohh this is a great idea! I actually have some Japanese books right now that I haven’t read (manga, light novels, and novels). Maybe I’ll try reading several books with different purposes in mind!
Thank you! I checked it out and it was an interesting read. I’m actually thinking of joining the コンビニ人間 book club but it’s been a few weeks already that I’m not sure I can catch up. But I’m definitely thinking about it. I’ve even bought the book haha. Maybe you guys can nudge me a little?
Hmm…you’re right. I think I just need more practice. Just read more and more. I’ll definitely keep this in mind.
Ah, I see. I might need to exercise even more, then. Thank you for telling me this!
Yeah! I’m definitely gonna start distinguishing between the two. I’m probably gonna use two different books, too.
Oh, I’ve never thought about this. I usually just use a JP-EN dictionary. What JP-JP dictionary do you usually use?
Oh wow. This is crazy but I can see why it works. I did this back when I was still learning English. I read the whole The Hunger Games series back to back so many times that I’d practically memorized the whole thing. I just loved that series so much (still do). It definitely helped me a lot and improved my vocabulary way more and faster than any other methods could’ve done. Reading my next books got a lot easier after that.
I see! I should think more like you. I tend to care too much about the grammar whenever I read. Maybe it doesn’t matter so much as long as I can understand it. I mean, it’s not like native speakers actually nitpick every single grammar point in everything they’re reading.
This sums up my experience perfectly. I tend to avoid books that are “too easy” for me because reading them is no challenge, but I spend way too much time whenever I read more challenging books. Balance is definitely the key.
I’ve never given graded readers a try. Maybe I should! Thank you for bringing it up
Hahaha yeah I think I should stop translating it in my head. It’s a whole other story, though, if I really want to practice my translating skill by actually translating it and writing down the translation parallel to the Japanese version (which is what I’m doing with 余命10年).
Huh. This is interesting. So, you’re saying that I should read a book seriously at first (nitpick the vocabulary, grammar, etc.), then “for fun” after that?
I see. The lack of “translating inside my head” is what I should be aiming for. Thank you for the insight
Whew. That was a lot! Thank you guys for the responses! I’m sorry if I didn’t reply to yours
Now that we’ve got a bunch of answers here, I will tell everyone the true way to read a book.
Step 1.) Buy book for at least 3 times the price printed in yen on the book (you may skip this step if you are in Japan.
Step 2.) Let book sit around for a few months in a bag until it starts to look old like someone read it.
Step 3.) Grab book and try to open it, only to realize you are holding it like an English book and have opened the back cover.
Step 4.) Turn book around, struggle for 4 and a half minutes to try and figure out what page 一〇五 and 二六八 are.
Step 5.) Spend 20 minutes trying to read the first sentence of the book, and realize you’ve picked a book way beyond your skill level, putting it down. But making sure to put the bookmark somewhere in the middle of the book. Tell yourself you’ll come back to it later.
Step 6.) Go back to book store, buy 平家物語 and tell yourself it’ll be completely different this time.
Step 5.1) You manage to come back to it later. You slog through the first chapter only to realise it is in fact too hard. You’ve started now though so you have to finish it or you’ll feel guilty.
well technically if you translated it sentence for sentence it would be the most efficient way to go. Making sure you understand it tit for tat. With time you’d stop needing that since truth be told the number of sentence structures/words people use are limited and they’d just be repeats…
But honestly I can’t do that, and I can’t imagine anyone could without a huge amount of discipline. It just becomes a chore and I soon find myself procrastinating. In a way “eh I get the gist of it let’s move on” ends up bringing in way more results in the long run.
I’m saying this based on my experience with other languages though. I’m still trying to figure out a way to be able to apply the ‘usual method’ with japanese, since it’s impossible to read it directly. But generally using double subtitles and stuff like that has been working kind of fine. So I’d recommend getting the english version of the book and reading them side by side.
Or just checking it if you don’t get something, but you’ll probably get in the situation where you realize you’ve been getting the entire story wrong because 20 pages ago you thought one sentence meant the opposite of what it really was. But I guess it’s part of the process and you can laugh it off as you prepare the noose to hang yourself…
Well, there was indeed a lot of answers already, but considering I have some experience reading Japanese novels (81 over the past 12 months), I feel I can at least talk about what I did.
Before reading books, I had spent a lot of time reading manga (since N4), which got me over the habit of trying to translate things in English or my native language, except in cases where I really didn’t get it and needed to organize my thoughts.
My first few attempts were around the time I got the N3. As people have mentioned previously in the thread, I basically had to look up everything and gave up after a few pages. Those books ranged from 楽しい ムーミン 一家 (so technically children book) to 獣の奏者 (but the furigana version, so also a book aimed at kids). I managed to make a dent into 獣の奏者, but that was it.
I kept reading manga for the time since it was much easier (and thus much more rewarding).
Around N2, with a lot more grammar and vocabulary knowledge, I came back to 獣の奏者 and actually managed to read it until the end. It took me 3 months, but I started from the last part I remembered; actual total time (including my first attempt) would be close to 6 months. I thought “yep, I did a thing, back to manga and anki”
I only really made progress in terms of reading when I was close to N1 (I read my second book ever days before the JLPT test, that I failed by 3 points). At that level, it took me about 2 weeks to finish a book, so I just kept reading. Reading itself started to feel much more natural toward the middle of the first book and after 3 months (i.e. ~6 books) I was actually fine not understanding everything I read. I would only look something up if really I couldn’t get the point.
I kinda plateaued at that level for a long while. I did get the N1 6 months later, but still, past getting better at the reading skill, my level of understanding and my reading speed did not improve.
At that point, I started using WK for real, which helped a lot with filling some of the holes in my kanji knowledge. Despite my N1 certification, I think I only “knew” 1500 kanji, which was a hindrance. The main problem (for me) was that the rest was not frequent enough for me to pick them up from exposure alone (especially in the case where there’s no furigana and I don’t look up the reading).
The last push that really helped was to use FloFlo (now koohi.cafe). Basically an SRS with vocabulary list generated from specific books. I used it both as a prescient dictionary (it knew exactly what I wanted to look up next), a way to actually learn those words, and a way to gauge book difficulty (since it told me how many words I didn’t know yet in a given book). That helped both getting book recommendations and finding books that would not be too challenging. (NB: you obviously need to use the system for some time to teach it properly which words you already know).
Another way to look at it is based on my kanji and vocabulary knowledge (approximated from my old anki stats).
Around N3 grammar, 600 kanji and 3000 words, I couldn’t read, it was too painful
Around N2 grammar, 900 kanji and 5000 words, I could read by looking up almost everything; still painful
Around N1 grammar, 1200 kanji and 8000 words, I was fine-ish looking things up
Around 1500 kanji and 9000 words, I got to a point where I felt comfortable not looking things up if I got the gist (note that it might be because of my experience reading rather than the slight increase in numbers
Around 2000 kanji (thank you WK) and 13000 words (thank you WK + FloFlo), for the first time I reach a point where I didn’t need to look up anything in a book chapter. Arguably, it was in a later book in a series, and I had learned the vocab of the first book on FloFlo, but still it felt good.
Later (I’m basically not using SRS anymore, but have read more than 100 novels since then), I basically do not come across words I don’t know in most light novels. I’m reading the 薬屋のひとりごと series right now, which is set in medieval China, and err, yeah, I do need to look up things, but not that many anyway, so it does not really break the reading flow.
So, I think the tl;dr has been said many time already (get more experience; get more grammar and vocab), I just thought my experience would help getting some actual numbers. Note, though, that I have seen people on those forums manage books way earlier than I did, so I guess it also depends on your pain tolerance .
I wouldn’t feel too pressured to „have to catch up“ or anything; you can just read the weekly readings at your own pace and ask questions whenever! Simply the fact of having a group of people in the threads who have read the same book and who can help answer questions makes it less daunting.
Lots of people are still watching the threads, so you’ll get answers and comments even though the club might be further along already.
I would recommend checking out the 試し読み (the first few pages) of an ebook vendor or on Amazon and see how it goes
(The next book the Intermediate Book Club is reading is 君の名は btw, and we haven’t started yet)
Bookwalker.jp provides a surprising amount of the title for their preview so that’s a good place to start. They also frequently have titles for free for a limited time.
The selection is pretty diverse too. I just saw an illustrated version of the Steve Jobs book when I went to get that link:
My first foreign language was German, and I learned it in junior high and high school (age 12-17). I was terrible; I had the vocabulary, and I mostly had the grammar, and I could read it slowly, but hearing and speaking? Nope! Because I would hear the sentence in German, translate it mentally into English, build the response in English, translate it mentally into German, and… the conversation had moved on by the time I was ready to say anything!
My second foreign language was French. I had 30 hours of lessons in the US at the age of 29, then 60 hours of lessons after I’d moved to France. When I got to France, I put my foot down and said “I’m living in France, I must understand the language.” I asked people at work to speak French to me and spoke French to them, I lived “among the French” rather than in an anglophone area, I struggled with French media. It was painful sometimes, but I can read French newspapers, listen to for example press conferences on TV, etc, and have conversations and work meetings, all without translating it along the way.
Three years after moving to France, I relocated to Germany for a couple years. I had about 30 hours of refresher language training, and again put my foot down, asked people to speak to me in German, lived “among the Germans”, etc. As with French, I can now read or listen to German media, and have conversations and work meetings without translating. It can take a couple hours of “code switching” when I travel from France to Germany or vice versa, and during that time I’m a bit slow on the uptake. I’m never perfect, I’ll never be mistaken for a native, but I’m comfortable in either language.
And that was key for my language progress - no translating! Read or hear it, see if you think you understand it, but don’t mentally translate it. Say it the best you can without building it in your native language first, and see how you did. It’s best if you work with a native speaker or very good non-native speaker, so as to learn fewer bad habits.
Now, learning Japanese, I am trying to force myself to use Japanese when I think idly to myself (I already do for French and German), and I force myself to read-without-translating. I’m taking group lessons, one hour per week by zoom, and am forcing myself to not translate but hear, understand, respond.
So - I would come down firmly on the side of “read it for understanding but don’t translate it, even in your mind” ! Maybe, after you’ve read-for-understanding, then go back and see if you actually got it - that can be a good way to learn grammar and idiom, depending on what you’re reading - but that should be a second step.
I’m part of the Repeat Club! Come join us!!! Don’t worry about catching up; the forums are pretty active, and I’ll make it a point to look through the previous chapters if you need someone to discuss the book with. I’m really enjoying it so far, so the more the merrier.
After reading this thread I’ve come to realise something that might help some people with reading without translating.
Chances are, you are reading without translating some things if you’re at a good (high beginnner) level already. But then, perhaps out of habit or not realising you understand, you translate it into a language you’re comfortable with. Speaking from my own experience, I would read something and understand it, but the understanding was a little foggy. Maybe it was because I didn’t 100% get the nuance behind everything, or maybe it was because I was unconfident in my abilities. And so I would translate it to check myself, when really I was already understanding.
There are probably words you see and understand the ‘image’ of them. Like 猫; you see 猫 and think .
So next time you read something try to imagine the words rather than translate them
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