Should I give up?

[ChristopherFritz]

I agree with @kalfritz mentioning grammar. That should be near the top of the list.

Here is what I wrote for first-time readers planning to join the Absolute Beginner Book Club, with regards to grammar:

Grammar

Before you dive into reading your first native material with the Absolute Beginner Book Club, it’s recommended that your grammar knowledge is around “N5”, the lowest level of the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test.

It’s not required.

You can start reading with almost no grammar knowledge.

But it’ll be hard.

Very hard.

You can spend hours reading up on grammar, trying to learn it as best you can, hoping you’ll at least vaguely understand what’s happening in a scene.

Deciphering at this pace, it’s very easy to lose all motivation.

What if you’re the type of person who can’t learn grammar inside and out from a textbook?

That’s actually not a big issue. What’s most important is initial exposure.

Rather than trying to understand the grammar-teaching material, aim to expose yourself to the material.

A shallow understanding will get you a wide breadth of knowledge, increasing the chances you’ll recognize grammar when you see it, even if you don’t understand it.

It gives you a greater scaffolding, from which you can refer back to lesson material later and build your understanding.

Four weeks is all you need to expose yourself to the basics.

Will that make reading your first native material easy?

No.

But you’ll feel you have a fighting chance.

Pick a grammar resource and aim to read one chapter or watch one video every one to two days to fill the time between the Absolute Beginner Book Club vote and the start of reading.

Grammar Resources

• Genki I [textbook] + ToKini Andy’s Genki series [video]
  • Aim to read through one chapter and watch ToKini’s associated video every two days.
• Tae Kim’s Basic Grammar Guide [text]
  • Aim to read one chapter every two days.
• CureDolly’s subtitled Japanese from Scratch [video]
  • Aim to watch one video every two days, then switch to one per day when you are comfortable doing so.

If one resource doesn’t seem to work for you, dropping it and trying another is okay.

But ensure you give each resource a fair chance before moving to another.

@MadWatch

I still can’t recognize the kanji I burned.

I think this is most commonly an artifact of not reading enough. I saw this based on my own experience spending two years learning (and forgetting) vocabulary before I got into reading manga in Japanese.

@MadWatch

I keep messing even the hiragana even though I use them absolutely every day.

What ways do you use hiragana daily?

@MadWatch

I can’t read anything because there are tones and tones and tones of kanji and words I didn’t learn yet,

When I started reading manga in Japanese, I was looking up every word. Over time, that reduced, as I learned more words.

One of the manga I read earlier today, I have to look up roughly one in ten words. Sometimes more, sometime fewer.

But it took a few years of reading manga to reach this point.

Learning the basics of Japanese grammar gave me the biggest initial boost for reading. Then I re-learned the basics as I read through manga and needed to better understand the material.

There are other manga I’m reading that still require manga vocabulary look-ups. It will probably take me a few more years to get better at more intermediate difficulty.

@MadWatch

And the kanji I don’t know I can never find in the Jisho

Focus on reading material with furigana until you are more used to the vocabulary.

@MadWatch

I have been trying to read all kind of manga

Join us in the Absolute Beginner Book Club, or read through something we previously read. There are discussion threads talking about a lot of the grammar in the material.