Yeah I personally read through all the texts just for enjoyment and then went back and read through them again to answer the questions. It was a nice change of pace, but unfortunately the texts themselves werenāt very interesting in my opinion. With that being said, it would probably be a very big controversy if they did have the sort of texts im interested in, so I canāt really complain
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You canāt just reduce it to test strategy. It helps a little, but it doesnāt cover a big reading speed gap. With my reading speed, this small optimization wouldnāt have been enough to not completely ālose on timeā (to use chess terms) in my exam. I actually used this strategy a bit, but my reading was just too slow for the time limit and exam. I mostly have to increase my reading speed.
Good idea! Iāll probably start with goodreads (a western site), since I already have an account there, so I can just create a Japanese shelf. Itās nice because it has a large user base and many reviews, comments and discussions. Though they probably donāt have as many Japanese books or a big Japanese reading community, so I might try booklog or bookmeter as well.
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Sorry to bother you with this, but could you tell me in short words how you read books?
It seems to me now after a lot of input here to be the best strategy just to read more and to do it more scientifically than before.
The books I would like to read contain a lot of unknown vocabulary usually and I would like to hear from an expert reader whatās the definition of āreading one bookā.
Does it mean for you to look up all the words you donāt know or just some?
Do you make a SRS deck from these?
What books did you start with and how did this help you to proceed?
On kindle or as a paper print?
Do you mark words in the book? (I used to hate the idea to draw or write in books, but to be honest if I donāt do it I would never proceed to making a SRS deck and I like to see graphically how bad I am now to be able to imagine how cool it would be if at some point not every other word is highlighted in neon pink 
And, the books I am reading are not interesting for anyone in my family anywayā¦)
Btw, is it OK to count sewing books or the like? 
Not common to me. Iāve never really taken tests where speed was a factor, and multiple choice questions werenāt very common. JLPT test style is something really foreign to me, and which I really dislike as a measuring tool. Really have to adjust my mentality. Did lots of essays in high school. Uni was mostly science so kind of different (lots of calculations).
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I think it is a good idea to talk about test taking strategies as well. Especially for the N1 because they seem to test difficult to understand texts sometimes but donāt allocate a lot of points to them if a lot of people fail to answer them correctly. At least my memory tells me that someone wrote about it here.
In real life there are times when you are ok with reading the manual for a camera or the recipe for a food you never prepared and sometimes not. Take a fidgeting proctor directly in front of you and a heavily breathing guy behind you plus the efforts to prevent ideas of murdering people with a pen not to speak about the eraser from the person next to you.
It should be forbidden to be allowed to take an eraser to this exam that has been pierced multiple times with a pencil. But as a misanthropic loner I am sure I would get at least ten points more just by being able to do this in a room alone
Also in my impression essays that start with āmy French philosophy professorā could trigger people into dissociation. It doesnāt happen to me because āluckilyā I had to read mille plateaux in university but for the typical office topics I also made sure to read them at the end 
I start at the beginning, keep going until I reach the end, and then stop 
More seriously, I aim for books I enjoy, that are not too difficult/slow for me to read, I try to avoid spending too much time on dictionary lookups, and I try to make a habit of putting in the hours. Back in 2008 (ie some years before I passed N1) I wrote up a probably over-long thing with my views. It includes answers to a few of the questions I skipped here.
There was a thread about this a little while back with other peopleās takes on the reading process.
I usually only look stuff up when it seems critical to understanding or the same word has turned up multiple times in quick succession. I donāt SRS the results. This is partly because I enjoy reading and I donāt enjoy SRS and dictionary work, and partly because I have a personal preference for reading paper books. If you prefer e-books you can probably make the dictionary and capture-for-srs workflow less obtrusive, but I would encourage spending most of the time reading nonetheless. Separately, in the run-up to taking N1 I ran though one of the pre-made Core10K decks in Anki (at which point I already knew at least two thirds of it).
Nope. I donāt like doing that, and see above about not SRSing vocab. If I did (and recently Iāve been experimenting with jpdb.io) Iād probably either try to find a pre-made deck or else work off my dictionaryās history of recently looked up words.
Anything with some Japanese text is better than nothing, but personally I count only books with large chunks of running text that I would read cover-to-cover.
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Other way around ā if very few people get a question correct then it is effectively considered more difficult, and worth more points to the few who do get it right. On the other end, if almost everybody gets a question right then it must have been easy, and itās weighted so answering it correctly is worth less.
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I used to do that but realized that for me the learning curve is rather flat.
Literally I caught myself looking up the same word on kindle like ten times and always forgot it soon afterwards.
So thatās when I got frustrated because the hurdle of really making a deck seemed to be overwhelming.
Now I identified another problem, I mentioned earlier that I am interested only in books with rather rare topics
Anyway, I think I do the brute force method for a while otherwise I will never step up.
The dictionary in kindle doesnāt help at all for words like eg ćēę or č¢č£ because I need to make a google image search to be sure how it looks like.
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If youāre reading on kindle (or any electronic medium) it ought to be possible to automate the create-an-srs-card process; this is worth investigating because you want to make common actions associated with reading as friction-free as possible. Iām not the right person to give specific advice though. (Thereās probably a relevant thread somewhere.)
I know neither of those words, fwiw. And yeah, oddball words like that a simple dictionary can be unhelpful for. On the other hand, either youāre reading on those topics a lot so you get used to the field-specific terms because they keep coming up, or else you arenāt, in which case it doesnāt matter if you donāt remember them. If the book seems like itās all obscure terms all the time, itās probably too difficult for your level; try something simpler.
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In a way that was the main point of my question 
I was hesitating to read the books I want to read and the topics I want to be able to talk about because it ends up with a speed of one page per two hours.
But there is no slowly stepping up I realized. Either you read about Buddhism and Shodo, or not 
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That is way too slow. That sort of careful intensive reading of a tricky text is educational, but it is not the sort of extensive reading I have in mind and it is not going to do anything to improve your reading speed. You are going to have to find either easier books on these topics or else different topicsā¦
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Practically I am reading without dictionary and just mark the words.
I was able yesterday to understand the book anyway, but now I am trying to make a deck with it.
It might slowly change into marking all the words but just adding some key words to the deck.
Itās kind of funny to see advertisements like this for ę³č”£:
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If vocab remains a big killer for you, I would seriously just consider making an anki deck. You can add pictures on the back of the card, which I do for certain fish, cultural items, and other animals that I donāt even know the english for (or that there is no english for).
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Thank you, actually thatās the image I added to the anki deck this morning
The only problem is, that I donāt seem to be able to create a habit of SRS- ing my decks.
With Wanikani that never was a problem.
You only need to do it once a day really, so if you can just incorporate it into your morning routine somehow you should be good
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Passed N2 with 146/180.
Ironically enough, what I thought was my best section (reading) scored the worst, at 40/60, and what I thought was my worst section (listening) scored the best at 54/60.
The create a sentence portion of N2 was unexpectedly difficult, even more so than previous practice papers
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There are are surprising number of Japanese books on Goodreads - not that my reading list is very long yet, but most manga are on there. Iām not always sure if the reviews are of the Japanese version or maybe an English translation, but thereās a wide spread of languages being used for reviews.
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I do Anki immediately after WK in the morning. Tying a new habit to an old one is an easy way of creating it. It will feel wrong to do anything but Anki after WK. Although Iām not sure how much thatās going to help you at level 60.
By the way, Iām sure you already know this but if you didnāt: Thereās a heatmap add-on for Anki as well. Does a lot for me because of how boring the front page of Anki looks otherwise.
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Thank you, I will do that from tomorrow. It sounds like the best idea!
I am not sure if I understand what you mean by that 
I totally didnāt know it and I like how it looks.
There might be a conflict with other as one that require an old Anki version but maybe it works.
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I donāt know how long youāve been level 60, so I just thought you probably donāt have any more lessons left with the review count decreasing day by day. Though if youāre saying that, it seems youāve still got some work left!
I recently decided to update Anki and I donāt think it did anything to the heat map. Iām not an expert when it comes to Anki add-ons, but at the very least I can guarantee that the newest version + heat map will definitely work.
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