Interesting Japan Times article
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2026/09/11/language/japanese-reading-basic-books/
I donāt think that that article was written by someone who has ä½éØā¦
I thought it was a fairly accurate assessment, thoughā¦ 
Iām sorry Iād like to have a thoughtful reply but reducing the gating of getting into reading to mere kanji / grammar knowledge just show for me (recently āscarredā by my own learning) that the writer doesnāt pass on the agonizing effort and countless hours it takes to get into it and the many many underlying aspects and flavors it covers.
Starting out by punishing yourself by studying grammar is an excellent way to steer yourself towards quitting. Tadoku books are the intro anyone needs to start reading Japanese. It even includes audio so you arenāt frozen guessing how the kanji sound.
Audio + Tadoku books is a powerful combination that will make you a Japanese reader. Studying grammar is like studying mathematical rules. Its like studying the chain rule and all the rules for derivation and integration in calculus.
I donāt think itās a deep or detailed article but I thought the categories and examples were a bit interesting.
Oh yeah, granted, the article is very much reduced to the mechanics and leaves out the grind. If thatās your complaint, I am with you. Itās just that the article sounded pretty much like the route I took, in a nutshell
Thatās probably why I like it 
Iām with you, the jump from picture book to childrenās books and manga is huge. I get that people manage that, but for me personally, graded readers and Satori reader were indispensable and made the transition way more satisfying and less grindy. Itās a shame the author took a ācontent aimed at natives onlyā approach.
I wonder if that position was taken because they seem to have experience of people with spoken fluency (the start of the article mentions this). So I suppose if someone had developed a wider vocabulary due to eg living in Japan and being conversationally fluent, ok, then I guess childrenās books are manageable.
definitely agree, the audio in graded readers and Satori was extraordinarily helpful
After I read it I get the feeling they deliberately avoided naming specific services that (might) be a free add for those services. Which could be why they did not mention Tadoku or Satori.
From that perspective it can be read as a list with levels of difficulty, which might allow someone to find other things they might not have thought about when looking for what to read.
I guess itās okay to post here - a very impressive English language test result from a young Japanese student:
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20260917/p2a/00m/0na/063000c
emphasizing no pressure tadoku as the main study method.
AI description about the test:
Eiken Grade 1 is extremely difficult. It is the highest level of the Eiken English proficiency test in Japan, featuring a low pass rate of about 10% and requiring an advanced university-level vocabulary of 12,000 to 15,000 words.
Seemingly it includes writing and speaking.