Do you mean books for immersion practice? There are a ton of resources, legal and less than legal, but strictly from the legal perspective one of my favorite resources is Japanese Kindle. Yes, it has a subscription of about $10/mo, but you get a trial, and it has thousands of books. About 1/4 of the manga and light novels I look up on Japanese Amazon, at least the first 1-2 volumes are available for free on Kindle Unlimited, so if you use it weekly you do get your $$ out of it.
Adding to this, you don’t need a KINDLE reader device to use the subscription. Most of the Kindle content you can view in a browser, or if you have any old tablet lying around that isn’t already synced to a Kindle account, you can log in with that. I have a mammoth 12.2 inch tablet from 2011 that is old and clunky and can’t do much well, but after booting it up and waiting 10 mins, I can use Kindle on it all day relatively lag-free.
Yeah, when I have tried to read the sentences sometimes they don’t feel like they match quite well, or I guess when I read it, I read it more literally than the translation does. But yeah, I can see if I get along with them in the future cause I get that they’re useful.
Okay, good to know, though I don’t think I feel ready yet to read so much, so I don’t know if I would be getting my money’s worth just yet. But good to know for future, thanks.
Also quick question to everyone, if anyone will still see this, but it’s something I’ve considered doing, but would it be worth to go back to the context sentences I didn’t read and work through them over time?
Booklive.jp has a fine selection of light novels, manga, books and magazine issues + tons of free stuff on a regular basis and for every work you can read at least the first 1-2 chapters for free. I use it on a daily basis and am frankly overwhelmed by the amount of free content .
Okay great, thanks. I guess where there are so many choices I can feel overwhelmed about what to even try haha, especially without being able to read well yet.
Booklive might be a little hard in this sense, because the inventory is not sorted by proficiency level in any way (it’s a native platform, after all). Many of the titles don’t have furigana either.
Perhaps something like Natively would help in narrowing it down a little? https://learnnatively.com/
But also, as long as there is furigana and you like the genre/theme/story it might be worth just powering through. One has to read to become good at reading.
I only read the easiest sentence, unless I really do need more context to understand the meaning of the item. If there is an example/pattern of use section I quickly read through that as well. But, I find it too distracting, and not very useful to go through all the sentences. You lose flow, focus, and forget the other items in the batch in the meanwhile. Some of these sentences are pretty hard, with new vocabulary and grammar, and you could end up spending 2x-4x… the time to get through new items, especially if you encounter difficulties.
In the past I used to go through all the sentences and try to translate them entirely and add all new kanji and vocabulary to Anki, but that quickly created a huge backlog of new items that took me long to get through after I stopped doing that.
Yeah, makes sense I guess. That’s kind of what I feared, them making me take longer and lose focus. But since I started this thread I’ve been mainly just starting to read the context sentences in English for now, which I guess helps give some kind of context for the word, and doesn’t slow me down too much.
The English sentences do give some context, but because the translations are liberal they might not align with the Japanese sentence and you won’t be able to tell easily “why” a certain word was used.
As for the context sentences being too difficult early on, this site gathers all the sentences from WK that only include kanji you know so you can focus more on just trying to understand the sentence. I’ve gotten so much use out of it and I genuinely think it’s helped a ton!
I think the sentences on here are great but unfortunately they’re very inaccessible and its super clunky to try and study them. I do hope one day we get some kind of native app added to WK that properly utilises this huge collection of high quality sentences…
Yeah, better than nothing though I guess. I did also start taking a look at reading the Japanese sentences of some of the earlier kanji as well though.
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