(25 of the 50 books I’ve read this year! These are the books I own - the remainder are on Kindle or were borrowed from the library.)
Introduction
I’ve always wanted to learn another language. About 5 years ago, I came across Japanese novelists like Haruki Murakami, Hiromi Kawakami, and Michiko Aoyama. This helped to spark an interest in Japan, which later led to me moving to Japan, and trying to learn Japanese. Eventually, after several failed attempts to get into reading, I finally committed to reading my first novel in late October 2024. I finished that first novel about 6 weeks later, in early December 2024. Now, in October 2025, I’ve finished my 50th novel (note: when I say books or novels, I’m referring to novels, light novels and non-fiction books combined - basically any prose books aimed at adults), along with ~600k characters of VN reading. By time, by effort and energy put into it, by results it’s given me, and really by any other metric, prose reading has been the main focus of my Japanese studying this last year. Being able to read books I’d read in translation which I love so much has been a highlight of this whole language learning process.
Tying into that, since starting WaniKani, I’d always wanted to write my own level 60 post, because I think they’re really inspiring. Every single post I’ve read has at least 1 unique and transferable bit of knowledge. However, since I left WK behind last year at level 45 to focus more on reading, this is my kind of “substitute” level 60 post, focused on novel reading, partly because some other people seemed to be interested in a writeup about my experience. If you’re interested about novel reading in Japanese, hopefully there’ll be at least something of use here.
It probably goes without saying, but I still have a long way to go with my own Japanese, and reading. It’s both crazy to see how much progress I’ve made in a year through reading, and yet how much further there is towards something approaching native-level. I haven’t “made it” yet, but I have made it to a level where I can quite comfortably read modern Japanese novels, and that in and of itself is a pretty big achievement to me. I’m somewhere around an N1 level now, and can finally understand why other people who have made it to this level have talked about how there’s still so much further to go - especially with output and productive abilities, but with reading too.
Most importantly, everything I say here is only about my own approach (and what I’ve observed from other people I’ve talked to a lot on here). There’s a chance I sound a bit prescriptivist at times, but fundamentally I believe that any approach to language learning works with enough time and effort, as long as you adjust it over time to fit your own situation. Feel free to ignore anything/everything I say, and take only what’s useful for you. Along with that, if you have questions about anything I’ve written, would like clarifications, have comments, or just want to talk about how your own experience has differed to mine, by all means please leave a reply!
Thanks:
First, let me say thank you to a couple people who played a big part in helping me with the reading journey:
@NihongoLearner19 for their study log, for always being someone to look up to in reading ability, and for being one of the people on here who talked about their reading journey with more specific details that I was looking for when starting out. And for their own recent wonderful post about reading below (beat me to it)!
@pocketcat for being one of the biggest promoters of reading on these forums, giving encouragement to me and others, and their list of early good-to-read books!
@taiyousea for hosting the quarterly readathons, which are the single best events on these forums. I still credit the winter readathon in 2024 for pushing my reading on to another level.
@cezarL for showing that approaches completely different to mine can still lead to becoming able to read novels in Japanese, sticking with reading with unerring consistency every day (unless it’s about Pancreases) and for always asking questions and keeping me on my toes about reading!
@mitrac for hosting impromptu discussions about reading (love me some community events), running the Slam Dunk book club, being incredibly analytical about their own learning process, and just for generally being one of the nicest people on the forums!
And to dozens of other people who have commented on my study log, given advice, provided inspiration, run book clubs, and much more! There are simply too many of you to list out individually without making this even longer than it already is, but you know who you are (Bidoof, Prath, Akashelia, Lisaveeta, Shannon et al.), and you’ve all contributed to my learning in different ways. Thank you so much.
Other posts/lists you should read
Here are some of the posts that helped me along the reading journey. There’s a lot of insight in these and plenty of other posts on the forums here from people who have read a lot more than me and who are much higher level. Plenty of it probably matches what I say here, and plenty of it probably doesn’t. Seeing what worked for different people can help you work out what’s important, what’s not, and what you can take away into your own approach.
Reading/study timeline:
December 2023 - restarted Japanese study from zero, started WK
March 2024 - moved to Japan, started studying consistently
June-July 2024 - started playing Pokemon Shield very extensively
July 2024 - failed N4 (89/180)
October (~20th) 2024 - started reading first novel
December 2024 - passed N3 (126/180)
December 8th 2024 - finished first novel
January 1st 2025 - left WK at level 45
February 24th 2025 - finished novel 10
May 25th 2025 - finished novel 25
July 2025 - passed N2 (165/180)
October 12th 2025 - finished novel 50
December 2025 - planning to take N1
What did you read?
I have a full list of all the books I’ve read here (novels+LNs+non-fiction):
For Visual Novels, I’ve finished the first two arcs of ひぐらしのなく頃に.
I’ve also read about 50 manga and played through a few video games.
What were the best things you read?
These are some of the best books I’ve read (in order of how good they were), with how I perceived their difficulty next to them. Easy means I think it would be good as an early book to start with, easy/medium means it would be good as something like a 5-10th book, hard ones it took me 25+ books before they felt manageable, etc.
These are mostly just personal preferences, so take it with a grain of salt. One of the most important things when starting off is finding what kind of books you enjoy and want to read, especially as you get past the early stages and more stuff becomes available to you.
Best books I’ve read in Japanese
- 赤と青とエスキース - medium
- 六人の嘘つきな大学生 - hard
- 君の名は。- easy/medium
- センセイの鞄 - hard
- ノルウェイの森 - easy/medium
- 成瀬は天下を取りに行く - easy/medium
- 木曜日にはココアを - easy
- 火花 - hard
- 言の葉の庭 - medium
And here’s the books I read which I think were good to start the novel journey with:
Good books to read early on
- 木曜日にはココアを (short, split into lots of smaller self-contained chapters, quite simple writing, highly recommend)
- また、同じ夢を見ていた (easiest book on here)
- 夜が明けたら、いちばんに君に会いにいく (very easy, good romance, but quite long)
- コーヒーが冷めないうちに (lots of people don’t like this book, but I think once you get used to the writing style, it’s full of repetition and is quite easy. I like this one a lot)
- 変な絵 (great mystery, I think it’s better than the one below)
- 変な家 (solid book, also a good mystery, quite easy writing style, but has a decent amount of more formal writing/keigo)
- コンビニ人間 (short, relatively simple writing style, more complex themes than other typical easy books)
- 運転者 (A bit too pop-psychology-esque for me, but well-written and quite easy)
- 君の名は。(slightly harder than these other ones, but also the most exciting and well-written of them all. Very similar to the movie)
Before I started:
My reading before novels mostly consisted of playing through ~40-50 hours of Pokemon Shield in Japanese very very extensively, reading NHK Easy news, and trying to decipher signs/documents around me in Japan. However, I had spent a lot of time on SRS and grammar study. Around level 35 on WK was where kanji was no longer a barrier (lots of unknowns, but it hit the critical mass needed for reading novels), and where my vocab was good enough to at least make a start. I’d also done anki for about 30-45 minutes a day most days on top of near-full speed WK for 6+ months before starting, which contributed to my vocab. I’d never read a manga, because to me they were even more intimidating than novels. I’d also never read a children’s book, and maybe 1 graded reader.
I had several failed starts with novel reading. I owned a couple Japanese books which I really wanted to read, like ノルウェイの森 and コーヒーが冷めないうちに. The first one in particular, I had sitting on my shelf. Every month or so, I’d take it down, and try to see how “reading” it went. Inevitably, this ended up with me feeling like it was just too hard. Initially I didn’t understand the format, the vocab, the grammar, break points between words any of it really. But each time I tried, it felt closer to what I was aiming for. After a dozen or so attempts at trying to read the first few pages of various books (involving buying lots of books I wanted to eventually read), in October 2024 I had a breakthrough. I bought the novel そして、バトンは渡された after watching the film adaptation on Netflix, and when I opened it to have a look, to my shock horror, it felt almost like reading. Not just simply picking out stuff I knew, but actually possible to parse with effort. This was what I’d been waiting for, and I threw myself into reading. At 425 pages, and being a physical book, it wasn’t the easiest introduction, but level-wise it was exactly what I was looking for. At a pace of usually 5-20 pages a day of trying different reading techniques, I finished the book 5-6 weeks later, right after sitting the N3 exam. Knowing that reading Japanese was now possible, it opened up a whole different world of studying, which I’ve tried my best to take advantage of over the last year. A few months later, I made it back to ノルウェイの森, and finished both books in a couple of weeks, which was a true highlight of my Japanese journey.
Leaving WK + SRS and Reading:
A few months into concerted reading at the end of 2024, I decided to leave WaniKani behind at level 45, when my 1-year subscription ended. The reason was pretty simple - going near full-speed through WaniKani was taking a lot of my time, even though I was taking quite an efficient approach. 1 or 2 hours a day is a big time commitment. Once I started reading and had figured out my own way to look up/mine important things from what I was reading, that stuff just became more important for me to learn. The final thing that tipped me over was when I realised I already knew about half of the kanji in each new level from encountering them in reading, and spending vastly less time on anki targeted towards what I was picking up from reading was providing me with better results. So I switched my whole setup around, cut down vocab SRS massively, and switched entirely from pre-learning (e.g. WK, JLPT-focused vocab) to Japanese that I was encountering. On top of that, I now take a much less strict approach to vocab SRS. I don’t do it every day (not recommended, I know), I rush through cards as quickly as is feasible, and it’s bottom of the rung on my priority list. Now I spend about 15 minutes a day on anki’ing vocab, probably 5-6 days a week, and it acts only as a support to reading, nothing else. Once reading became important, SRS became secondary.
My exact setup for anki now is quite complicated, with 2 decks - one for vocab exported from my phone dictionary/novels, and one for vocab from previous sources + yomitan (primarily from news articles, wikipedia, VNs etc. In an ideal world, I’d combine them, but this setup works fine as it is for me. All in all, I have 17.5k cards (double-counted for English and Japanese, so about 8.75k vocab), about 14k of which are in circulation. Approx. 6k are from pre-learning prior to starting reading, 6k from my phone dictionary (novels), and 5.5k from yomitan’ing news articles and VNs.
For me, leaving behind WK wasn’t a difficult choice. It was still providing me with benefits, but it wasn’t efficient any more, and it’s expensive. Also, reading was obviously miles more fun. Up until the mid-level 40s it was definitely useful, and provided me with a really strong base, without which I’m not sure if I’d have made it to novel reading. I’d recommend WK strongly to anyone looking for a solid structure to work through, especially from the start, but I’d also say that people who want to read a lot might well be better off leaving partway through (or at least adjusting their approach once they start reading more). Once you learn how kanji work and have built up that baseline of vocab/essential Japanese knowledge, at some point it’s simply more efficient to transition to learning from content you interact with in Japanese. I think a lot of this has to do with domain-specific vocab, which is easier to get from interacting with the domain you’re interested in once you have a solid foundation. Maybe that’s at level 60, maybe it’s earlier, it depends on you and your own approach/goals. I think if you start branching out into other ways of picking up kanji/vocab early enough, though, you eventually realise that WK is not so efficient for the later stuff. At least, that was my experience. If it works for you, it works, but for me, reading is more fun. I have no regrets about staying until level 45, and equally have no regrets about leaving at that point.
When it comes to SRS-reading balance at an earlier stage, I’m not quite sure what advice I’d give someone. I think spending lots of time on SRS followed by getting into reading works (as I did), but I also think spending less time on SRS and more time reading with easier materials earlier on alongside works too. Really, anything works, as long as you’re encountering things you don’t know yet and putting in effort to learn them. I think like with everything else I say here, pretty much, the only advice I’d give is to experiment with what works for you regularly. Keep putting time into learning Japanese, focus on fun and gently challenging yourself, try new ways of doing things, and you’ll make progress. I don’t regret being at 90:10 SRS - more contextual learning for the first 6 months because it’s a good way to front-load basic knowledge, but I also don’t regret being at a 90:10 context - SRS balance now.
As a general rule, I think SRS is always the thing to drop if it’s getting in the way of more fun stuff like reading or listening to things you enjoy. It’s easier to put more time into the fun stuff, and putting (quality) time in is the most important thing. Both approaches work, so prioritise fun and keep the boring bits as you see fit. Overall, as a sensible approach, it’s quite possibly more efficient to spend more time on SRS early on, with reading as a bonus side-activity, and then just gradually increasing reading time + decreasing SRS time proportionally from there on out as your general level increases and you open up more content to interact with. SRS is still useful for me now, just in a different way - mostly for keeping rarer vocabulary a bit fresher in the memory, and keeping a wider variety of stuff active rather than stuff specific to what I’m currently interacting with.
What was the “magic” level for starting novels?
I really strongly feel that by far the hardest part of novel reading is getting started and sticking with it. Specifically, knowing how and when to start, what level it’s possible, and then being consistent with it from when you dive in. To hopefully help with that a bit, here’s where I was when I got into it. Remember like everything to take this with a grain of salt - other people have started at a lower level than me, other people have started at a higher level.
The level where reading became possible was simply when I was able to follow enough of the book without major external assistance to be able to follow the gist and enjoy reading by itself. I hit this point at around level 35 (roughly) on WaniKani, and after having completed Genki 1, Genki 2, having worked through approx. 50% of 新完全マスター文法N3, and most of the Kaishi 1.5k Anki deck. I was at a bottom of N3 level, and might have just about scraped a pass had I taken the test right when I started. From having seen other people get into novels, I think this very early-N3 level is about the earliest it’s realistic to get into reading novels without it just feeling like deciphering, but of course it depends on stuff like your mix of kanji knowledge, grammar knowledge, and lots of other factors.
By estimation, there were probably 10-15-ish things on each page of my first novel which I didn’t know (at the start of the book), and would have needed to look up for full comprehension. I never looked up everything - I’d look up the 2 or 3 things on a page which were acting as the biggest barriers to my understanding, and let context deal with the rest. This initially meant I missed quite a lot of detail, obviously. But I’d got to a level where it felt like there was smoothness which had previously been missing, and even as my understanding ebbed and flowed, for the most part I could follow along with a couple of lookups per page. That was enough for me, but any less than that wasn’t. Flow is incredibly important to my reading, and either having too many unknowns to be able to follow the gist or spending too much time looking up unknowns got in the way of that flow.
An important note about starting novel reading - your first novels will probably be full of lookups for specifically more common novel-ish vocab. Things like 頷く, 躊躇, 俯く, 覆う might be stuff you’ve possibly encountered before, but you’ll see them a lot more in prose. As daunting as it might be initially, a lot of this type of more descriptive vocab (people expressing unspoken emotions, facial expressions, stuff like that) will be something you get used to quite quickly as you read more. Sticking with the same author or series can help to get you used to a specific style of using descriptive language, and then branching out to new authors can help to broaden it to other commonly used stuff. Essentially, as I see it, this vocab (and set phrases like 眉を顰める) is one of the main foundations of novel reading. You have typical common Japanese vocabulary as you’d learn from something like the JLPT, anime or any other resource, you have novel-domain-specific stuff like this, and then you have the icing on top of stuff which is more domain-specific to the individual book - e.g. vocabulary about stars, skies, weather, telescopes in a book about stargazing. A large part of the adjustment process to novel reading is getting used to the novel-domain-specific stuff (along with developing higher-level reading skills), and that’s the part which won’t really get easier from outside study unless you get to a very high level before starting to read. Know that this stuff does get easier a few books in (you’ll feel the progress even within the first book), and don’t let this be the thing which puts you off. Once you get used to this and essentially “fill in the gaps” of novel vocab, as I like to refer to it, you’ll feel so much more comfortable branching out to new types of material.
How is my reading/Japanese level?
I’m pretty comfortable reading typical modern novels/LNs (natively range 27-36ish). I can read easier books (below level 30) at around 45-50 pages an hour (bunkobon pages), and more typical books (30-35ish) at closer to 35-40 pages an hour, generally. For VNs, I read ひぐらし at about 16-17k characters an hour pretty comfortably (using texthooker and yomitan, which I don’t use for novels). For novels, I still read with my dictionary app on my phone close at hand at almost all times, but I read without a dictionary on me when necessary, and don’t feel any real difficulties following anything when that’s the case, just sometimes missing specific nuances. For harder books (level ~36+) I rely on dictionary checks more often, and have to put more focus in, but am still able to follow along relatively well. I got full marks on N2 reading when taking it in July, and while that probably won’t happen for N1 in December, I’m pretty sure I’ll pass the reading section quite comfortably. I can pretty broadly read across different contexts, like documents distributed at work in Japanese, signs, bills, letters, news articles etc., and usually it’s things like name readings or historical references that trip me up the most.
In terms of non-reading skills, I’m pretty comfortable watching anime, dramas, listening to podcasts, and following conversation as long as it’s not about more specialised topics. I watch most of my TV/movies with JP subtitles, because it’s more fun, rather than because it’s 100% necessary. Sometimes I turn them off for easier slice-of-life stuff, but more often I just don’t pay full attention to them, and listen along/half watch TV shows or Youtube while cooking. I can understand basically everything in conversation about daily life topics, and when it gets a bit more technical, I lose a bit of comprehension and struggle more. N2 listening was pretty comfortable (50/60), and N1 listening will also hopefully be the same. My writing is acceptable (daily-life stuff is fine, again more formal or technical writing I’d take a lot longer and it’d sound a little strange). My speaking is getting better, it’s still the worst of all my skills, but I can get by entirely in Japanese if necessary. Reading has always been the best of my skills, and probably always will be, but I’m getting better at other areas as well. I think this is helped along by interaction effects with reading, but definitely isn’t solely because of it.
How did you read 50 books in a year?
How I’ve managed to read this much this last year is pretty simple - having a high baseline, and maximising the peaks.
- High Baseline - After a couple months adjusting to novel reading in 2024, I have read at least 20-30 pages minimum most days in 2025. For the last 6 months it’s been more like 40+ most days. There are days I don’t hit this, which I don’t stress about, because life happens. But unless I have reasons not to (very busy, very tired, ill, unavoidable commitments etc.), I try to get a good amount of reading every day. It’s not that hard for me personally, because I have quite a lot of free time and enjoy reading.
- Reduce friction - Tying into the above, I always have maybe 4 or 5 things I’m reading at any given time. If I’m not feeling like reading one of my books, I switch to something else. I always take my kindle with me everywhere, and usually a physical book too. I can read anywhere, anytime because it’s always there, available to me. I can fit in 10 minutes on the train, on the bus, read at home, or in the park. Having easy access to books, easy access to lookups, and lots of material to choose from makes reading feel so much less daunting. This allows me to relatively consistently find at least an hour a day to fit reading in, because it can be broken up into chunks whenever I’m free, and can focus on reading what I actually want to read at any given moment. When I’m on transport, or sitting at home bored, reading has become my default activity (excluding times when I’m exhausted).
- Maximise the peaks - On days where I’m really in the flow of reading something, or when I have lots of time on the weekend, I binge a lot. Usually at least 1 or 2 days a week, I’ll read about 100 pages-ish, sometimes more like 150 or 200. This one’s pretty self-explanatory, just basically don’t limit yourself if you’re really in the flow. Take advantage of it and let it carry you towards a higher level.
Beyond that, the single most important thing was sticking with it. Reading 50 novels is a lot, but it really breaks down into ~1.5-2 hours on average every day (obviously, that’s still a big time commitment). Excluding a 10-day break for family earlier this year, I’ve put effort into reading Japanese every single day for the last year. 98% of those days I’ve read from novels. The streak itself isn’t important at all, but what’s important is that I made it a habit and consistently have read, read, read.
What tools do you use?
I read approximately 65% physical books, 35% kindle books. Which format I read each book in really just depends on availability - whether my library has a book, whether I already own it physically, whether it’s on Kindle Unlimited etc.
For physical books (and for storing vocab I think is important from Kindle) I use the Takoboto app on my phone as my all-in-one dictionary. I also use it for lookups when watching TV, checking words from conversations with Japanese people, everything. It works, it’s simple, I can save lookups to export to anki, it’s just perfect for me, and I’d recommend it 100% (other apps I’m sure also work well). When you start reading (especially physically), having an easy, quick, consistent lookup process is incredibly important. Find a way to deal with looking things up which is quick and works for you. Otherwise, it’ll introduce friction, stop you from feeling like you’re reading, lower your enjoyment, and you might struggle to get into it. I think this is one of the main friction points that people encounter (I know I did). It’s not completely necessary, but it’ll just make everything so much easier.
If you use your phone as a dictionary, setting up handwriting input on your phone keyboard for searching kanij you don’t know the reading for is very useful, as is looking up by radicals, both of which can be done in takoboto - if you’d like specifics on setting these up or getting used to them, feel free to ask.
For Kindle, I use the default JP-JP dictionary (switched from JP-EN dictionary about 25 books in). It’s a physical Kindle Paperwhite, and lookups are pretty responsive. The kindle apps on phone/PC etc. are pretty bad for lookups due to not being able to deconjugate well, but physical Kindles are much better at this, and good enough for almost all cases. It’s good to have a backup phone dictionary for some stuff, but a Kindle alone will get you 98% of the way there. If you’re outside of Japan and looking to read novels slightly more extensively, I’d 100% wholeheartedly recommend getting one, and I think it’s probably the best way to read if you don’t have easy access to physical Japanese books.
I know lots of other people read on PC, or on tablets configured to be able to use Yomitan, Mokuro, all kinds of other programs etc. I’ve never done this for novels, because it doesn’t fit my use cases (being able to read anywhere, anytime), and I like reading novels a bit more extensively. I also don’t like using a non e-ink screen for too long - I get enough of that already. If you’re interested in how to set something like this up, plenty of other people here can probably answer any questions you have or point you in the right place!
I have never used translation tools like DeepL, ChatGPT or Google Translate for novel reading. Plenty of people use them frequently, and it works for them. For me, I think that attempting to process everything in Japanese directly as much as possible is better for my own enjoyment, and better for progression. This means I miss stuff sometimes (early on, I missed a lot), and that’s a sacrifice I’m more than willing to make. Again, try both approaches, see what works for you. The only piece of advice I’ll give is that if you do use them, try to use them more analytically - try to work out why the sentence it tells you doesn’t match what you were picturing, and what you were missing. If you do this, I think they can be useful tools, but for my approach to reading (flexibility, accessibility, focus on “flow” over specificity), they don’t fit.
The focus of this isn’t on Visual Novels, because they make up a small portion of my reading, but when reading them, I use a texthooker and yomitan for vocabulary lookups.The same for news articles or Japanese websites - I usually read with yomitan. Having some of my reading being much more intensive and instant-lookup like this is helpful for building vocabulary, but overall it makes up a minority of my reading time.
Finally, for SRS, I use Anki, linked to Yomitan and my dictionary app on my phone.
How has reading affected other areas of Japanese?
I was just about scraping N3 level when I started reading. My listening was a bit worse than my reading, and my speaking and writing even worse still. Due to living in Japan, I could stutter through simple conversations, get the gist of most signs and menus around me, and generally get by, but not much more.
It’s hard to isolate the effects of reading on my overall Japanese level, because I do a lot more than just read. By time, it probably takes up about 30-40% of my time spent on Japanese, with the rest going towards watching TV for about 1-2 hours a day, Grammar study, Kanji/writing practice and speaking. Pretty much every single week this last year, I’ve spent more than 30 hours actively on Japanese. I’m currently studying for both N1 and 漢字検定４級 in December (hopefully), and have been using textbooks alongside my reading/immersion pretty consistently for the last year, so my progress is definitely not all down to reading. Still, it’s no coincidence that my progress has springboarded since starting reading. Mainly, my vocabulary has shot up, my general processing of Japanese has improved, my knowledge of idioms and similar phrases has gone from bad to acceptable, stuff like that. Unfortunately, it turns out that doing lots of reading doesn’t make you fluent in spoken language. But it does provide a very strong base of general comprehension for you to work from, and of course, it does mean you get very good at reading Japanese in lots of different forms. I’ve personally found that there’s quite big synergies between reading, listening and formal grammar study, which have really helped me a lot. Learning grammar from a textbook in isolation sucks (obviously), but then encountering it immediately in a novel makes it all click. Similarly, reading a word or phrase which you don’t quite understand the use of, or the reading, then hearing it in a drama makes it similarly stick together. Spending time just on reading will get you good at reading, but you need to also practice other areas to improve in those too. The good news is that putting lots of time into one area (like reading) means that there are lots of synergies to work with when you also put time into other areas.
How has living in Japan affected the reading process?
First, let me just say that if I didn’t live in Japan, I don’t think I personally would have ever got to the point where I can read novels. This isn’t because it’s impossible, or even because it’s necessarily much harder, but just because for me personally, I wouldn’t ever have had the mixture of motivation and opportunity that it provides, and so I think in 80% of scenarios I would have given up before reaching that point.
The good news is, I think that of all the areas of Japanese, reading is the one which is easiest to get good at while living abroad. There’s so many tools, so much content available, and honestly no need for Japanese people to help you along the way. So if you’re motivated, approach it correctly for you, and have enough time, I think it’s incredibly doable. I know plenty of other people on the forums here who have managed to get to a very high level of Japanese reading ability without ever having stepped foot in Japan.
Things that Japan helped me with:
- Easy access to physical books - I like reading physical books, and they’re ridiculously cheap and easy to get a hold of here. It’s not impossible overseas, but it takes longer, and is more expensive.
- Motivation - I wanted to get good at Japanese more broadly because I live here, and reading novels is a very useful tool to help get there, as well as an end goal. Living in Japan provides me with broader goals towards which I can work, which are more powerful than just “I want to read ノルウェイの森 in Japanese” (as powerful as that still is!)
- Libraries - I have access to several different libraries around me full of Japanese books, and have befriended a librarian or two along the way to give me recommendations. This isn’t unique to Japan, and if you have access to a larger university library or similar near you, maybe have a look and see if they happen to have any Japanese books.
- Day-to-day exposure - seeing Japanese around you day-to-day on signs, menus, documents, things like that exposes you to slightly different writing styles and vocab than you’d be exposed to if you only read books. These synergies do help the process along a bit.
- Other skills - living in Japan has forced me to focus more on listening and speaking, which have helped the reading process indirectly.
Things that Japan didn’t make a difference towards:
- Access to digital books - kindle and many other ebook providers are available abroad, and there are ways to get physical books too. Essentially any book is attainable relatively easily and affordably even if you’re not in Japan.
- Tools - dictionaries, Yomitan, websites explaining grammar points, all the content you could ever need to help guide you along the way to learning Japanese is available online.
- Community - If you’re looking for book clubs, recommendations, people to discuss reading with, anything like that, there’s more here in this community to help you than if you lived in Japan. Even despite befriending librarians, participating in library events, and talking to dozens of Japanese people about reading, I’ve been helped far more on these forums by people who actually know what it’s like to start reading Japanese books from a second-language perspective.
What would you do differently if you started again from scratch?
For me, I think my approach worked well, and I wouldn’t change much. I wasn’t interested in learner-focused material, so I didn’t use it, and instead essentially speed-ran to a point where I could jump straight into novels (with obviously quite a big necessary adjustment phase once I got there). However, this only worked because I’m stubborn, motivated, and have lots of free time, which meant I could do that in 6-9 months. If you aren’t in a similar position, I’d recommend easing your way into it more than I did.
I’ve heard very good things about Satori Reader from a lot of people. Book clubs on the forums are another good way to ease in, such as the new Children’s book club. If you are taking it slower, and don’t want to either jump straight into “deciphering” novels from a low level or to spend years stuck on more learner-focused content, I’d recommend these middle-ground stages, especially more of a prose-focus like children’s novels and satori, if you want to get to novels. Alternatively, reading through something like video games or manga, with a large visual component, is very helpful early on. However, especially manga suffers from the problem of lacking in descriptive language, which is really the base of novels. You could read 1000 manga and still probably would struggle a bit when switching to novels, because they’re just different mediums with different domain-specific language.
If you want to be able to read novels, reading more prose is probably the best way to get there - I’d recommend starting easy, and working your way up. Whichever route you take, though, there’ll be an adjustment period when you start reading prose, and yet another one when you switch to novels/LNs - it’s unavoidable really. Know that the adjustment process to reading novels is hard, but that you can definitely push through it if you’re at the right level and motivated. A lot of it is due to domain-specific stuff and higher-level skills as I talk about elsewhere, and that stuff improves quite quickly as you keep reading more prose.
I want to read novels. Do you have any advice?
Here are some of the things I think are generally helpful or important - but not for every case, so take as you see fit:
- Find a consistent, easy look-up process for unknown things you encounter. It’s simple, but this might be the single most important thing for reducing friction and helping you feel like you’re “reading”.
- Make a big list of books you want to read. This might be hard when you’re starting if you don’t know what you like, so make use of recommendations from other people, novelisations of other media you’ve interacted with, and adjust over time as you figure out what you like. When getting into novel reading, keep trying easier novels on your list, until you hit something that feels doable and enjoyable, and run with it from there.
- Use Natively to find new books to read and check difficulty levels. It’s not perfect for difficulty ratings, but having an idea of roughly what difficulty something is will help you figure out what to read, and when to read it, and it’s a great tool.
- Be consistent - read as often as you can once you get started. Reading even just a little bit every day (or most days) is good. You get where you want to go a lot faster if you keep moving. Joining the Read every Day Challenge 📚📚 Read Japanese Every Day Challenge - Fall 2025 🎑🌕 can be a good way to get into the habit. Once you get into reading, try to stick with it, and don’t be afraid to prioritise enjoyment in order to do so.
- Celebrate all the milestones, identify as a reader - a feeling of identity is important, and powerful. Once you get into reading, identify yourself as someone who reads Japanese, and don’t put yourself down or add too many caveats to your reading accomplishments. Celebrate your first chapter, your first book, your second, third, fourth books, and keep doing it! If you’re reading, you’re reading.
- Embrace (some) ambiguity. Some people are able to be much more diligent, and look up every single unknown thing they come across while reading. If that works for you, great, keep with it. I know lots of people here for whom that approach has worked. It doesn’t work for me, and so I’d recommend at least giving both approaches a try. There’s a sliding scale between looking up everything and looking up nothing, and I think it’s best to experiment and find where you fit on that scale. Like I said before, for me that means about 2-3 ish lookups maximum on a page in order to stay in the “flow” of reading. Find the magic number that works for you! My own approach to ambiguity has evolved over time. Early on I leaned towards ignoring some stuff if I couldn’t understand it with a bit of looking up, leaving it till later - there’s always other stuff to learn. Now I’m higher level, I focus more on filling in the remaining gaps in understanding.
- Experiment - Try different books, different devices, different reading styles, different locations, and more. Find what works for you and what doesn’t.
- Read what you enjoy - Don’t force yourself to read things that you think you “should” be reading if you’re not interested in them. If you want to read cheesy teen romance, or Murakami, or isekai LNs, or high-fiction, or 19th-century epics, anything is ok. Not everything has to be something you’re obsessed with, but don’t make yourself read things that just aren’t fun, because you’ll quite likely be put off reading as a whole. Don’t be afraid to drop things you aren’t enjoying! As a general rule, if what you’re reading is pushing you away from reading overall, switch to something else.
Where next?
I’m not planning on stopping reading anytime soon. My study breakdown is constantly shifting, as I take exams, try to get better at communication, and navigate life and work. But I love reading Japanese books, and plan to continue for as long as I can. I’m pretty confident that in 5 or 10 years time, I’ll at least be occasionally reading in Japanese. This is something I want to continue on some level for a lifetime - which is good, as there’s at least 300 more books I want to read, and the list keeps growing exponentially.
A detour about higher-level reading skills:
As important as vocab knowledge, WK level, grammar level, all of that is to reading, I think that something that gets missed a lot in discussions about reading is the importance of developing higher-level reading abilities. I think every single person who’s read a lot of Japanese has had the experience of knowing seemingly every word in a sentence, but not understanding what the sentence means. Reading is not just a function of simple factors, like vocabulary size + grammar ability = reading. The ability to predict what words are likely to follow in a sentence, being able to distinguish break points between words, the speed at which you can recall readings, picturing events in your head, making a best guess at a reading/word’s meaning in context, picking out things which are left unsaid from contextual clues, thinking more deeply and comparatively about what you’re reading compared to other books, there’s a million different things which go into the reading process. I strongly believe that these broader skills are very important, and that the best way to develop them is to spend lots of time reading more extensively, and keep putting effort into understanding. Just as looking up unknown words helps to increase your vocabulary, putting in effort to understanding things from context, processing things in Japanese, and thinking more deeply about what you’re reading helps to develop these areas which help make reading smoother, quicker, and more fluid. This is the main reason why I think that once you get started, doing a mix of some more extensive reading and some more intensive reading is probably the best way to make progress. One way to achieve this can be to read 2 books at a time (or back to back) - alternating between easier and harder material can be great for motivation, and can also help you by allowing you to naturally switch between different reading styles, working on different skills while enjoying the process.
Conclusion
If I’ve learnt anything from this process of learning to read in Japanese, and seeing other people learn at the same time, it’s that almost everything is useful, and almost any approach will work with a combination of time and effort. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. In fact, the process itself of overlapping different approaches and trying new things helps to fill in gaps, and helps you to work out what works for you. Try lots of different approaches, keep putting time in, be stubborn, read what you’re passionate about and enjoy, and anyone can get to the point where reading in Japanese feels second-nature.
Like I said at the start, if you have any questions, comments, or just want to talk about your experience, regardless of whether you’re just starting out or are far higher level than me, feel free to reply. Reading Japanese novels has been transformative for my own learning, and I’d love if more people managed to get the same benefits out of it that I and many others have.
Thank you for reading!
The first readathon was just a silly excuse for me to read manga all day but now they are my main motivator for improving my reading and setting completion goals. I’m so glad you’ve found them motivating, too!!
I like to imagine myself as a lady in a trench coat, opening one side and muttering, “Hey kids, you want some books?”
It’s a big milestone, especially in such a short time frame. While I know the stars may not align for it to make sense to do every year, here’s to 50 more 
Thank you kindly!
thank you for your kind words, they mean a lot to me
