Do you buy them a drink first? Complement their cover art?
Joking aside, I have been struggling to get into books. I have been trying to read web novels of series I enjoy the anime of, but it is just a taxing chore. I love reading manga, and while I could technically just keep reading I feel like I should be trying to acquire this skill as well.
The other issue I am having is I want to get into LNs because I have grown fond of the fantasy genre in Japanese through Berserk (manga) and Shield Hero (anime) but get intimidated by how long it takes to read vs watch. This is a problem I have in English too, but itâs a different kind of limitation I guess.
I like the allure of more content in less pages, but I am really struggling to make the transition. I tried to do some books from the beginner club and could only finish Your Name, and I read the novelization of Eizouken. Like, I can do it, but itâs really hard for me to find something and stick with it. How can I ween myself onto reading? Any recommendations? Is it even worth pursuing at my current level? (I have N3, and am able to produce N3 level Japanese in speaking and writing).
Tbh, the level I started reading at seriously was around 30. This was because, indeed, reading is hard and I was putting it off. My advice is that you shouldnât start with the beginner book club, because those will be quite hard as an absolute beginner, so you should try abbc first. ăăăăč and Teasing master Takagi-san were two, that are really easy to get into, and they are fun. After youâve read a bit, it will be much much easier when you start getting used to it.
I do recommend some grammar knowledge tho, you didnât mention your level there, but itâs best to get through the very basic stuff first (genki I, Human Japanese Beginner, prolly around N5 or so. You wonât know everything you come accross, but knowing 75% of the grammar you meet is way better than knowing nothing.
Ah, sorry, Iâm blind sometimes. My statement still stands though, start with absolute beginner, as it will be the least painful, and then as you get more comfortable, you can go up the levels.
Alternatively, stick with what you like, but change your mindset to reading them.
Whoâs saying one has to finish a book in a certain amount of time? Whatâs wrong with putting it down and picking it back up again later?
Some folks will say that if they step away from something for too long, theyâll forget whatâs happening. I mean this kindly: so? Read a few pages back to refresh your memory. Or start over from the beginning. Maybe youâll surprise yourself on how much easier it is the second, third, or hundredth time.
It can be very hard to get out of the mindset that anything attempted has to be done to completion, preferably in one sitting. I struggle with this all the time.
Ween yourself onto reading by weening yourself onto reading. Do a little bit at a time. Be okay with putting something down and picking it back up again later. Read what you like because you like it and donât discount it because âit was only a pageâ or âit was only a sentence.â Fun is fun.
Heck, I should log off right now and pick up Kikiâs Delivery Service again because itâs been about a month since I last read anything out of it. Thanks for the nudge.
Thanks, I suppose I often feel envious of people who can pick up a book (English or Japanese) and have nothing stopping them from finishing. My wife, mom, grandma, and most of my friends are that way. So being the one that always struggled academically, I take it maybe more personally that I canât be into books the same way. I envy them. Thanks for the the advice, I guess ultimately I need to be ok with only reading what I can and stop forcing myself to do more than that.
I think this really depends on the kind of person you are. If reading easier material makes it more approachable and allows you to stick with it, great! Thatâs a totally valid approach that works for a lot of people. Personally, I was never really able to consistently get into easier content like that, so Iâll come at it from the other side in case thatâs also true for you.
My best advice is to find something that you genuinely want to read. It doesnât really matter if itâs hard; if youâre invested enough in the content, thatâll push you to keep going even when itâs challenging. As an example, I worked through about 100 pages of éć°ăăăčăł a while back just because I enjoyed it, and it was absolutely way harder than I had any real business messing with, but I did it anyway because I wanted to and I got a lot out of it. At a certain point itâs hard to tell how hard something actually is, like if you donât know a lot of words it really doesnât matter if the ones you donât know in the book are common or weird, it feels the same either way At the time I was also reading éąšăćŒ·ăćčăăŠăă and I felt like they were pretty similar in difficulty, but looking at them now éć°ăăăčăł is definitely much harder, I just didnât know any better. But it sounds like you have a really good base to work off of already! So yeah if you can find something where youâre going âwoah, I have to know what happens nextâ thatâs really powerful as a learning experience.
On that note Iâd also say to try reading something youâre not already familiar with; I know thatâs like the opposite of what people say, but in my experience Iâve struggled to maintain the motivation to fight through reading something where I already know the story. Reading something new makes it feel less like reading to study and more like reading to genuinely enjoy a story, which Iâve personally had a lot more success with.
And yeah itâs not like anyoneâs forcing to read dense novels; read whatever you want! You donât have to read like âserious literatureâ if you donât want to; I know Iâve ended up reading way more through VNs and such than with literal books and thatâs totally fine, itâs all still reading And the easier reading gets, the easier it is if you wanna pick up a novel down the line. So I guess my point is try not to stress about it too much; just do stuff you like, thatâs the whole point right?
Sorry I didnât mean to just throw like all of my thoughts on reading at you, but hopefully itâs at least a little encouraging
Thanks. Thatâs been my modus operandi for a while now, and it hasnât failed me until recently I just felt like I really wasnât pushing myself enough. The last two weeks I got REALLY into the anime for Conan and then Shield Hero and I have this idea I can apply that same enthusiasm to reading and it just hasnât come. I still read about a volume of manga every day or 2 (sometimes Iâm just busy) but its becoming this almost like FOMO effect where I feel like maybe I should be applying myself more and reading book books and not picture books.
Lots of stuff I agree with in this thread, but definitely this. I like reading detective mysteries personally, because I want to know whodunnit and that keeps me reading on â because while it does get easier itâs always going to be work at some level, IME.
I also like having two books on the go at once (maybe an easier one and a harder one) â that way if I feel too tired to plough through a difficult slow book I can pick up the easy one instead of reading nothing.
Donât worry about accumulating a pile of books youâve given up on as too hard or too boring, either â thereâs no point pushing through something youâre not enjoying. Move on to something else, and come back later or not at all.
Figure out how you like reading and make the experience as easy and pleasant as you can. I like printed paper books (four decades of habit are hard to break), but a lot of people like ebook readers. Whatever you like, figure out a setup thatâs comfortable, as distraction-free as possible, and as easy to do dictionary lookups as you can make it.
It seems like you are putting more value on reading a book, than on other forms of entertainment (manga, anime). Is that how you feel personally or just something youâve picked up from society/family/friends? Iâm asking because you mentioned that you were happy with your approach until you focused more on anime in the last few weeks.
Iâve found personally that when I feel bad about the entertainment choices Iâve done, I find it useful to ask myself if I personally would rank those options that way or if I even find it useful to rank them at all. If the goal is entertainment, does it matter which medium I get it through? If the goal is something else, then what is the best way to achieve that (and also still have a ton of fun)?
Iâm a bookworm and a gamer myself, and Iâve spent a lot of my life feeling like books are a superior hobby and I should give up gaming. Any day now, Iâve thought, I will give up gaming for the superiority of book entertainment and status. But, I think Iâm finally coming to a stage where Iâve internalized that there is nothing wrong or inferior with liking and playing games. If Iâm having a lot of fun, then why shouldnât I play a game?
I also still read a lot, and personally, I find both manga and books are enjoyable, the satisfaction and enjoyment comes from the story being told, not the exact medium.
To answer your actual question though. I too often in the last few years fall off the wagon off reading, even though I enjoy it a lot. And the only two ways I know how to get back on it is:
(a) Reread books I love until Iâm reading consistently (daily or almost daily)
(b) Start small, tell myself Iâll just read for 15 minutes before bed, and I will seldom stick to that short time limit once I get into a fun book. But it helps keep the commitment small, I can quit as soon as I hit my time limit.
For Japanese specifically, joining the Read Every Day challenge and interacting with a community of active readers helped me a lot to start reading more Japanese and challenging myself to tackle material I might not have otherwise.
I had the same problem trying to get into reading. Each page was a slog, and I was always wondering if I got things right or not.
What I eventually did was the following:
Pick books that are interesting to you. This is the biggest thing. If youâre not into the material, the fact that itâs in Japanese isnât going to magically make it better.
Read several books in parallel. I found that switching to another book when one felt like a slog really helped keep me going, especially if the writing style was easier in the one I switched to.
When starting a new reading session, reread the last few sentences before you start the new material. This helps you reinforce parts you already read and going over material again gives a bit of a confidence boost when you get to the new stuff.
Use an English translation and then check meaning after a page or so. This really helped me gain confidence when I correctly understood things and also helped me correct mistakes. After a while I found that I could go multiple pages without referring to the English version but still had it to help me through tough passages where I had to refer back every sentence.
While I still have a long way to go, I now feel like I really can pick up any book and read it as long as I have a way to lookup words and Google for tricky grammar.
Thanks for all the advice. I know its not the typical âwhere do I startâ coming from a beginner and demands a little more nuance but you guys gave me a lot to think about. I think ultimately Iâm just being overly self-conscious about my input ATM. I read a lot today as a result and am thinking about your advice at the same time and just going with the flow for now. Thanks everyone.
Iâll add my 2 cents as well, because I also have a similar struggle with reading books in Japanese. I have yet to finish a whole book (though Iâve started quite a few), and this somewhat bothers me because I read voraciously in English (like at least 2 hours of reading for pleasure each day, even if it means doing it late at night and forgoing sleep to read).
Some pitfalls I had and things I did to work around them:
Trying to read a book I liked the subject of, but where the amount of work I had to do to read it put me off completely:
This was âéæłç§é«æ ĄăźćŁççâ / âIrregular at Magic High School.â I love the Anime, and really wanted to learn more that wasnât covered in the animation but trying to read the LN it took me 20 minutes to read the first page. Using koohi.cafe to pre-learn some of the vocab helped a lot with this, but eventually I decided to put this one on the shelf for a while until I build up some more general vocabulary as this one is challenging enough if all you have to learn is the made-up magic vocab.
Trying to read a book where I already knew the story too well:
This was âăă±ăăăąăłăčăżăŒïŒăăăăăăâ / âPokemon: I Choose You!â for me. The book wasnât too challenging grammar or vocab-wise, but itâs a retelling of the original Pokemon story and after the first 20 pages I realized I always knew what was going to happen next and it wasnât that interesting to read the story given that. If there were a lot in the book that wasnât included in the previous Pokemon series or movies I probably would have loved it, but as it was it didnât work for me. Iâll likely pick it up again someday when my Japanese is better and I can read it in a day or two, but for now it doesnât keep my interest when I also have to look up 3-5 words per page.
What did work for me:
Short stories (including some graded readers like äžćŠă»èȘæžăźæéă«èȘăæŹ and bilingual books like âJapanese Short Stories for Language Learnersâ or âăŸăăæ„æŹæă°ăȘăâ)
I would agree with @potatonaught that maybe changing your mindset is the way to go. There is no rush and itâs totally okay to keep multiple books going at once, or alternate with manga or anime if thatâs more comfortable. Since taking a break from one of the books I was struggling with and joining the read-along for the the âæăźăšăâ manga, Iâve found even just reading manga was upping my reading level a lot. It made it a lot easier when I went back to pick up that book again.
Also definitely agree with @pm215 that having an easier read handy for those nights when youâre struggling to read something tougher can work wonders at making you feel like youâre not âgiving up,â youâre just doing something a little easier tonight, but itâs still reading.
Your Name isnât particularly easy. If you really want to get into books, thereâs plenty of easier real novels available. You could try to use jpdb or koohi.cafe to try to find books of easier difficulty. Thereâs learnnatively as well.
Yeah it was a challenge but I got through since I was so familiar with the story that it was hard to get lost, which is usually the opposite when I am reading. That was a good first read for me. Right book at the right time I guess.
I mean I kind of already knew what I was expecting. It wasnât anything wild or out there. If youâve seen the movie, its the same dialogue + padding of descriptive text. The descriptive text was the more challenging part for me as there was vocab I wasnât familiar with due to it all being implied in the images.
Yeah, I am bad at it in English too. Its a skill for sure. Years of Social Media addiction eventually fixed it but I got off all that and donât plan to return for the sake of learning Japanese.
At the time I was also reading éąšăćŒ·ăćčăăŠăă and I felt like they were pretty similar in difficulty, but looking at them now éć°ăăăčăł is definitely much harder, I just didnât know any better. But it sounds like you have a really good base to work off of already! So yeah if you can find something where youâre going âwoah, I have to know what happens nextâ thatâs really powerful as a learning experience.
And the easier reading gets, the easier it is if you wanna pick up a novel down the line. So I guess my point is try not to stress about it too much; just do stuff you like, thatâs the whole point right?