Don’t get me wrong. I love Satori Reader. But I’ve been trying to read one story or another for about a year never feeling like I could get too far.
But finally! I read ten chapters of Kona’s Big Adventure without feeling like everything was a complete struggle.
I’m prepping for N4 and this is a bit of relief as for the longest time I felt like everything was just too advanced. Now it feels like it’s within reach!
Level 26 baby! ( /^ω^)/♪♪
Reading is always like that as far as I experienced. You start of not understanding basically anything, taking minutes every sentence, not because you don’t know the words, not because you don’t know the grammar, but because you aren’t used to reading. Once you read even a tiny bit, you will speed up quite a bit, and even difficult texts will be approachable. But if you don’t read every day, especially towards the beginning, your skill might drop off, that’s why the read every day threads are so great.
I was naive enough that I got a subscription and started using it back when I was barely starting WK and working my way through the early chapters of Genki - oh boy!! Even if I could look up individual words, I couldn’t make sense of sentences, and even if I could read each sentence I just couldn’t piece together the meaning of the episodes without looking at the sentence-by-sentence English translation. And I’d listen to the audio narration and the only thing I could pick up was 私は！
It’s not like I can breeze through episodes now, and each is still a bit of a struggle, but it’s getting better as I progress. Frankly I completely underestimated the grammar that you need in order to get through even the series marked as “easier” like ジャム屋さん or 聞き耳ラヂオ。Now I see that you kind of really need to have a good handle of most of N4/Genki 2 grammar to be able to really understand sentences in those series…
I am actually considering pausing or seriously slowing WK when I hit level 16-17 in a few weeks, since I will have covered most of the N4 kanji but I have still big gaps in grammar, reading and listening (not to even mention speaking) that I’d want to plug in order to cement what I’ve worked so far - so that I can also enjoy Satori more going forward!!
Agreed! Plus, if you pick an author you really like, then you can get used to their way of writing and it goes a lot smoother in the beginning, I think! I’m a sucker for light novel series, so if I could get through the first installment, I found I could breeze through the rest of em much easier. (plus it was a great boost to my self-esteem to say I’d read, say 10 books, even if they’re only 200 pages long)
Definitely, I usually do long manga series, and most of the time only the first couple of chapters are the hard ones, then you get used to it.
Especially if there is a recurring character with a weird speech pattern (chainsaw man is a pain to start).
I had a subscription really early on just like you. Eventually I did stop it for a bit because I felt way out of my league.
Oh I’m still getting plenty of value out of WaniKani at Level 26 so I don’t recommend stopping completely by any means. But yeah other aspects of the language are definitely super important at this stage and I can’t study kanji in isolation anymore. I started abusing vacation mode more for sure, but I’m still on here everyday.
Right? This is really exciting. They always say to increment your skill 1% at a time. And I finally feel like Satori Reader is getting to that incremental improvement stage for me.
I can recommend 聞き耳ラジオ as well. The easier difficulty was pretty approachable and even the harder difficulty is readable I just have to spend time looking up more grammar. On easy I mostly only have to look up words as the grammar is fairly simple.
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