I’ve been dipping into reading more by playing videogames and have had some moderate success, I was able to play Gyakuten Saiban and Pokemon Violet pretty easily, but in more challenging content I often find myself needing to look something up or having to skip past sentences without really grasping what they mean. For people who can read more fluently, how did you get past this stage?
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This may be controversial, but I generally ignore things that I don’t understand, except I look things up when I feel like it. Sometimes I just don’t have the energy and I just want to enjoy what I’m doing, and in those cases, I simply don’t worry about it; as long as I get the gist I’m good. Sometimes a word will seem interesting to me and then I look it up. Often when I look things up, I had actually just guessed the meaning correctly, although it’s obviously harder with pronunciation (although I have sometimes also correctly guessed pronunciation from the radicals).
I find my curiosity is enough to teach me new things through lookup without having to be absolutely certain about knowing every word.
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And that’s perfectly okay! It depends on the media, but what helps me is to screenshot/bookmark/quickly note new vocab or grammar in a new work. You can then quickly Ctrl-F that list and make sure you’re not adding duplicates, plus it can serve as a mini frequency list of content you’re not familiar with.
But I assume you probably won’t be satisfied with that fully (I wasn’t), so here’s a separate idea: why don’t you try studying works that you’re already familiar with in English or your native language in Japanese? This way you already know the gist going into it so if you don’t get something it doesn’t ruin your enjoyment. It’s been working quite well for me and has been good at letting me punch above my weight with what I can comfortably read (not 100% “I know every phrase perfectly” readings, but like “can read it and have fun without constant dictionary” readings).
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I’m happy to hear about your success! My main difficulty when I started reading was not having enough vocabulary. What helped me was reducing the steps needed to look up words by using tools like Yomitan. I also started by engaging in media I already experienced in English. If I couldn’t understand a sentence, I could rely on prior knowledge to continue to follow the story.
For people who can read more fluently, how did you get past this stage?
If you mean the stage of stopping to look things up, I don’t expect to leave it any time soon. Since I progress the difficulty of the media I engage with, that also means more challenges. But I’m having fun, and the challenges inspire curiosity rather than frustration. I couldn’t say the same about my initial attempts at reading.
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This is key! The easier it is to look something up, the more likely it is not to frustrate me or take me out of the story.
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I tried to consume content that I already had an idea about. So books I’d read, games I’d played (or at least in series that are cliche enough that you can predict what’s happening based on tropes alone).
And if I didn’t understand something, I just accepted that I’ll learn it later. If I did consume fully native material that I didn’t know in advance, with the goal of understanding it 100%, then it would only be for short things: a trading card, a short story, a little blurb on a website, a single page of a picture encyclopedia.
Eventually I got to a point where, unless I had a strong belief that a word was REALLY related to the overall plot, or if it just keeps showing up a bunch of and it’s annoying me that I haven’t figured it out, I would not even look it up. I just tried my best and whatever I understand is whatever I understand.
And now in the intermediate stage, that is still what I do. I learn via learner material, and test myself on native material. Some people disagree with that, and that’s cool, but it’s working out ok for me as I find that a lot of learner material (ex: WK vocab) actually does show up in my native material. So it’s a joy to see something I learned 2-3 levels ago show up and be like “WAIT A SEC I KNOW THIS NOW”. I still see things I don’t know, but now that I have a good 5-6k words in my toolbelt, it’s just not as big a deal and it’s much easier to say “ok this one word might be important, I’ll look that one up”.
I will say that to go into a more fluent-like reading pattern, I did find that not using lookup tools helped me try harder, as before that there were often times I would doubt myself and end up looking up something I actually did know, and I felt it wasn’t helping me retain it because I would give up within barely a second since it was so easy to just press.
Some people achieve this by getting vocab lists and instead of focusing on learning all words (which gets exhausting), to sort them by frequency and just learn the most common ones. So at least they see some progress even if they don’t understand everything.
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If you don’t hate the process too much, I usually found that slowly pushing through something clearly a little too hard for me with however many lookups, internet searches, and occasionally even asking people for help with sentences felt like it led to the most obvious quicker gains in my reading ability.
I’m pretty comfortable now unless I’m reading something particularly hard mostly only doing occasional lookups to double check readings and the like, otherwise just checking the odd word here and there… but honestly I never did anything but accept it was going to be slow and look up pretty much everything I didn’t know, every time. For my personal neuroses I knew I wouldn’t be happy if I felt like I was skipping anything and basically opting into what felt like a lesser experience by reading in Japanese at that stage. Not to say people reading more “extensively” without as many lookups have resigned themselves to a worse experience, but that I knew for me I wouldn’t be happy doing it. The lookups ultimately bothered me less than the feeling of giving up on solving the “puzzle” would’ve, heh.
I don’t necessarily think this is recommended for most people, you need a high level of stubbornness, but it’s certainly one way that’ll get you past that stage after a while and worked very well for me over the course of a few years. No way of knowing if I’d be just as good if I was more chill with ambiguity, though.
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definitely recommend rereading books you are familiar with but in japanese editions. done that with the hobbit, lotr series and even Orwell’s 1984. not only will it build your vocabulary but also cement things you already knew more firmly into memory. plus you might also get a new look at something familiar.
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I prefer to read physical books and use the bunpro app as a dictionary to look up words and bookmark quickly to review again later. Currently reading Sailor Moon manga. I already watched the anime in Japanese and English so most of the vocabulary is familiar and I’m noticing as I advance through WK, it’s getting easier every volume. Also planning to read Kiki’s Delivery Service. Since I already watched the anime in Japanese and English. There’s already so much fun native Japanese content to get through that I don’t want to waste time reading old content translated from English. 
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Honestly that’s great. For me the most frustrating part is the start, when basically everything is in the “I need to look things up all the time and I still don’t understand everything” category. But it looks that there’s already content that you consider to be “pretty easy”, so you’re in a pretty good position. Just keep reading whatever you feel like reading and it’ll become easier and easier.
What I do is alternate between challenging content and easier things. Both have value: more accessible content lets you build confidence and you get a lot of practice because you can go faster. Meanwhile more challenging content pushes you out of your comfort zone and teaches you new things.
And go for things you actually care about even if they’re a bit harder. It’s easier to find the motivation to power through something a bit above your level if you really want to read it.
In the end there’s no shortcut, the more you read the better you read, the better you read the more you read.
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The literal answer to your question is just “learn more words and grammar”. What you’re going through isn’t a problem, its the process. If you’re not looking up words and you’re able to understand all the sentences, then you’re not really learning. It’s not really a distinguished stage so much as it just is learning from input. I wouldn’t expect any of this to go away anytime soon unless you deliberately pick easier things to learn from at the cost of your own progress.
As for the related and possibly more important question of “how do I enjoy it”, I would suggest things like
- yomitan for instant lookups
- reading a series or really long content so the words you learn you get to see more
- using something like jpdb or a freq dict to make sure the words you are learning are more frequent for a higher ROI and more 分かりやすい progress.
- Read something you care about
- Possibly read something you have already read through in english/watched the anime for/etc. to where you know the story and wont be lost even if you skip
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Thanks everyone for all the helpful responses. I think I just need to become more comfortable with looking things up often and perhaps use easier stuff like Pokemon as a palate cleanser. I’ve actually been doing one suggestion I’ve seen already, I’m playing VNs that I have already completed in English like Death Mark. I generally look things up with Google Lens and Takoboto which is fairly swift. Thanks for the motivation everyone. Just hit level 41 so I’ll keep chipping away at reading and hopefully see some progress along the way. I’ve also been experimenting with emulators recently so I plan to play Machi (PS1) and some Saturn games like Princess Crown in Japanese too.
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I want to emphasize this. Don’t hate lookup, even if you can’t practically look up all the time. Web search sometimes too. (AI chatbots can also search the web, though most don’t search by default except for Gemini and Perplexity, afaik.)
Grammar may also be learned by web search (or ask AI? I didn’t try this much myself). Yomitan can indeed be loaded with grammar dictionaries, but you might still need to drill a lot of basics.
Kanji shapes are difficult, but going through much of WK could be proven useful. (Maybe also with semantic-phonetic compositions, and some handwriting.)
Reading a long series might be a good idea, though, or at least I believe so.
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