Whenever I read something in Japanese it doesn’t take long for me to find some vocab that I do not know, sometimes I try to infer the meanjng based on the Kanji but most times I just look up the word on Jisho and add it to my Deck, however it sucks out all of the fun of reading if you interupt it constantly to look up what exactly are you reading.
Focus on expanding your vocab. WaniKani covers a lot of kanji, but it only dabbles in vocab for said kanji.
For Anki, try Core 10k breakdown, or the original Core 10k – in the thread “So Much Vocab!”.
I recently exported this into Google Spreadsheet as well.
I handle this by reading chapters (at least) twice. Keep in mind, I read paper books-- and have long since overcome my hangup of writing in books; this is a necessity for my workflow outlined below.
Basically, my reading technique is:
- Read one chapter at a time (maybe this takes me 3 mornings at the coffee shop, or one long reading session one evening at home).
- During the first read, I mark each word I don’t know (either I don’t know the pronunciation, but can infer the meaning, or perhaps I can’t determine either!)
- During the second read, I look up each word I marked the first time, give the word a number (if it’s the first word I’ve looked up on the page, I number it “1”, if the second “2”, etc), and write the pronunciation and meaning in the margins of the page with the associated number, so I can reference in (possible, but unlikely) future reads (why read something THREE times? hah).
- Move on to the next chapter, rinse and repeat!
This allows for uninterrupted reading the first time through, and a deeper understanding the second time through.
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