hi!! i’m mattie i jus recently started learning japanese n using wani kani which has been amazing !! i’ve watched a bunch of stuff abt dif methods to learning a i saw a lot about getting japanese books to help learning to read ! any japanese book recommendations? obviously love manga but some regular books lik novels or fictions would be cool too ! thanks ! ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ
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Any book that you yourself are interested in, if you’re not that good or used to reading in Japanese, it easily becomes a chore that you force yourself to do, so your best bet is something you desperately want to read.
That being said, if you’re new to Japanese, I don’t really think being interested alone will cut it, you’ll have to search up basically every word, every grammar point, and you probably won’t even know when a word begins and ends.
I’m not trying to discourage you, rather, if you start a book too early, that can be discouraging. When people recommend reading to learn, that usually means after someone gets their basics down.
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Hi Mattie and welcome! Best of luck on your study! The most important thing that stuck with me is someone saying “Learning a language is a marathon, not a sprint.”, meaning it takes a hell of a long time. I’ve been at it for good few years now and still struggle reading manga and books. Another thing that stuck with me was “You can never be too good at the basics.” which helped me a lot with mentally powering through multiple stops and starts.
All that being said, the first thing I started reading was exam papers and sample questions for the JLPT N5. Might sound boring but because I started really basic it meant I was learning stuff that I could grasp, I didn’t want to jump in too quickly and end up overwhelming or discouraging myself. But everyones different. Maybe something like Doraemon would be a good starting point. If you end up having conversations with Japanese people, literally EVERYONE will know Doraemon.
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Depending on how you approach the language, and how successful you are with the approach, first books are probably a struggle (as @ChristopherFritz said). (Just picking up a textbook doesn’t guarantee success.) Probably begin with an analytic mind, and slowly, very slowly, digging through.
I started a little differently. Went through Tae Kim’s guide, remembering several vocabularies also from SRS outside WaniKani, then going up from Tadoku graded readers. I also tried Satori Reader, and easier children’s books.
Parallel Japanese-English readers, or just buy translated English version along, may help. Similarly, Netflix with Language Reactor can help both Japanese and English at the same time. Perhaps light novel reader with Google Translate works too.
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woah thank u so much!! i like that phrase a lot! i have been feeling random stress to learn as fast as possible i guess i feel lik there’s not enough time but there is! was definitely getting excited and treating it lik a marathon! thank u so much for the advice everyone on here has been to kind and helpful!!
not discouraging at all! actually so helpful n i totally get what you’re saying! thank u!!
Crystal Hunters is a manga that teaches Japanese. Each book has a guide so you want to read the guide first then the book. Currently there are 7 books with an 8th one coming out soon. 