Reading experience

Hi,
I was curious if anyone here h as any one here ever gotten to a level in which they could read the monogatari series and enjoy it? As this is a huge aspirations that I would like to one day be able to do. I understand it’s very difficult but what level do you think it would be best to start trying?

I’m in the same boat! I started learning Japanese to be able to read the Monogatari Series. I’m almost a year into studying and can start reading some of the more simple stuff. But still far from comfortably reading pages at a time! Happy Studying!

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Funny you ask this right when I am about to dive into Bakemonogatari. I read a few pages already and it seems quite doable.

As far as I am aware no one mentioned reading Monogatari on this forum but people read plenty of difficult books. Check out the tadoku thread.

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It has been nominated in the Advanced book club but it has not been picked yet:

You are very welcome to vote for it in the next poll if you like, but please be aware that it’s the advanced club, i.e. the club will probably read the book at a pace of 30 - 45 pages per week…

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Interesting out of curiosity what level are you currently in terms of jlpt and experience learning if you don’t mind me asking?

If i had problems understanding the anime with english subs, i can’t imagine how hard the books must be lol

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Haha yeah but apparently the experience of acc understanding it in Japanese is even better because of all of the puns made though.

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Yea, its a goal of mine too. But i expect to be able to read it in maybe 1-2 years :rofl:

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Lol that sounds pretty good forums I saw on redditt suggested that it would take 6+years

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Maybe im too optimistic then

I read 伊勢物語 and 源氏物語. Does that count?

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I aced JLPT N3 in Dec 2019 and was prepared for JLPT N2 in December 2020 but didn’t go because of corona. Now I am learning N1 grammar. I’ve read two novels in Japanese but my reading speed is slow. I’ve been studying Japanese for 4 years, including two years with a tutor.

Overall, I’ve been watching more and more content in Japanese, like vtuber streams, and I can usually understand almost everything except for more niche/specialized vocab. Vocab is my weakest point and I have to look up a lot of words and expressions.

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Funny you bring this up. Bakemonogatari is the next book I was gonna read, so I’ve looked into the writing to gauge how difficult it is. As I’m sure you’re aware, its on the harder end of the spectrum when it comes to light novels.

Now the problem is that your question has a bit of a variable in it. Not everyone has the same tolerance for struggle when reading. While a little bit of confusion may not ruin the enjoyment for one individual, it could completely ruin it for another person. I think a good level to start trying would be after you have worked your way through another big boy novel first. Like nothing meant for middle school or elementary school kids. Nishio Ishin has some very interesting writing at times and I think getting used to normal writing first would help with both comprehending the content and his own quirks in writing. After the first book, his next books should feel increasingly easier. Bakemonogatari is also on koohi.cafe if you wanna learn the vocab for it.

You can definitely give reading it a try earlier, don’t get me wrong. Do whatever is most fun for you. You’ll learn plenty either way.

Depends. I certainly haven’t put in 6 years yet. I was putting in like 3-4 hours a day every day and I would say it was doable after 2 years.

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I’d assume so unless there are variations in difficulty, so from someones that’s read what would you say the difficulty is?

Thank you for the response , its definitely more of a long term goal considering its difficulty, coincidentally enough I’ve been studying for a few months similar to what you previously did, although I unfortunately have to slow down next year, due to uni, if you dont mind me asking what jlpt are you?

Wow congrats best of luck for N1 and thanks for the response

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That’s a joke, those have no relation to the Monogatari series.

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I’ve never taken the JLPT and I don’t like the whole self-assessed N_ stuff, so all I can tell you is the J-CAT put me at N2 over two years ago and when I worked through an N1 読解 book out of curiosity months back it was pretty easy. Not a very satisfying answer, I know, but whatcha gonnado

After WK level 60 I learned about 10,000+ more words not counting katakana words obviously and there’s really no grammar in novels that I don’t know anymore. Maybe I’m missing a bit of nuance, but y’know.

Again though, thats not the requirement for reading the series. You could be far earlier on in your studies and read it and enjoy it.

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I guess it wasn’t obvious. The two stories I mentioned are two of the most famous classical Japanese stories out there and have no relation. A lot of classical Japanese stories are something something monogatari.

As to your post, I skimmed a little bit of one of the Light Novels right now, and I don’t see anything crazy in it. Like one can sit there and try and talk about a very specific difficulty, but I would just put “Light Novels” in one category.

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As evident by the typos in my question I’m slightly braindead, thank you anyway