Probably about 15-20 minutes for the physical books and about the same for the screenshots, and then actually uploading all of them also took a few minutes, so just under an hour in total 
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I was wondering why you had so many paper dictionaries. I should really get a 古語辞書. I have a bunch of paper dictionaries because I bought them all at Book Off for $1 each.
I started learning Japanese in the early 90s, so paper dictionaries were the only real option. I cannot remember the last time I used one, now.
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I dismissed the idea of posting pictures since my books are too messily organized, but now I see I don’t need to care too much 
Also, I’m glad to see 弟の夫, 入間, or 紅霞後宮物語 in there. Why do you have both the novel and manga version of 本好き, though?
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You seem to have a similar thing for hoarding books. 
I’m glad to see 累 has made its way there.
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セブンデイズ! I’d love to read that one in Japanese at some point! 
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Nope, but at least I’m working on it! If you count both books and manga, I’m at 237 read so far according to bookmeter
Because part of the manga was free It’s actually not even the only series I have both the manga and the books for though – for instance I also have both for Sword Art Online Progressive(because the manga and the books are partially written from different perspectives) and for 安達としまむら(really just because I like the series)
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As it looks like you have read a lot of books Syphus, can you please give me some tips as I struggle with reading a lot… I’d be grateful to you.
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I only recently moved to Japan, so the few books I have are either books I’ve brought with me or books I’ve bought here (mainly manga). Ignore the notebooks
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Chizuru best girl
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Now I’m going to have to post a picture of all my Japanese books, though they’re scattered all over the house and some are in another state…
This my small collection from BookWalker, anyway:
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I haven’t seen/read more than the first book / two episodes, but yes I completely agree.
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I’m not sure if I have any great answers. Certainly doing it a lot helps, and in this respect I think books and manga are different. In Manga you have a lot of context clues and it’s mostly conversation, while most books give you nothing but the text. (Obviously non-fiction books can be either here). So you need to work on making sure you understand text as text.
One thing I did is read a lot of short stories in places like Aozora Bunko. That way, even if the stories were hard, they weren’t super long, so I could read them relatively quickly. As opposed to reading something like 沈黙 (Silence), which took me a longggg time to finish.
On a simple technical level. I would say to err on the side of looking up words you don’t know in the beginning of the book, as they will likely continue to appear. For instance, to stick with the example above, due to the theme of the book, there are a lot of words like 司祭、神父、背教、踏み絵 etc that I was very unlikely to know, but were in the book a lot. So reading the book got gradually easier over time.
Don’t be afraid to re-read things if you need to. But also try not to get stuck on one sentence forever. At some point you may need to understand that you just don’t get it and move on. Sometimes, something later in the book will make you able to understand a previous sentence, or realize you did in-fact understand something wrong. Like thinking a character said no to something they actually said yes to.
So I don’t know if this is advice, but these are my main suggestions. I realized I wrote mostly about fiction here, but I think much of the same is true for non-fiction. Also, one personal suggestion is to read a variety of topics and types of books. That will give you the most bang for your buck. I think if you approach it from a “reading books” perspective and not a “learn Japanese” perspective, it will also be better.
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That’s incredible Ditto san 
This is my feeling right now 
If you don’t mind me asking, approximately when did you start reading books in Japanese? (12 months ago, 18 months ago etc.)
Approximately, how long did it take to complete a manga chapter at the beginning and in present?(Ex: 30 mins per chapter back then, 10 mins per chapter now etc.)
Also What is the drop in frequency of looking up kanji/words? (Ex: Used to look up 20 times a chapter at the start, now 3 or 4 times etc.)
I know how much my head ached when I read 5 manga chapters for 1.5 hours. Trust me, I am beyond impressed with your dedication and progress 
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Manga would be… around the end of 2017? (I was just under halfway through my first year of university and I’m just over halfway through my fourth now). The first actual book(a children’s book though) I read was at the end of 2018. I should probably also add that the first thing I read in general was a random very easy visual novel during the middle of 2017, though I had to look up literally every other word 
The first manga I completed was Aria volume 1 with the bookclub and the first chapter probably took quite a few hours because I looked up all the words I didn’t know, which was a lot of them, and also srsed a few dozen, and then I also had to think a bit about the grammar sometimes. The time per chapter pretty quickly went down to 2-3 hours for the following chapters though and was more like 1 hour by the end of the volume.
As for my current reading speed per chapter… it obviously depends on how long the chapter is, so instead I’ll say that the time it takes to read a manga volume ranges from 40 minutes (for something like a slice of life without tons of text) to something like 60-90 minutes (for something that has a lot more text) to a few hours (for something like a 4koma with a less realistic setting, some more obscure vocab, and a high density of text).
As I already mentioned I looked up every other word at the start which could be as much several dozens at first, now I mostly just don’t bother with looking stuff up unless there’s something I’m extra curious about since context usually is enough to figure out approximately what stuff I don’t know might mean in most stuff I’m interested in (unless I’m reading an ebook where I still do it every now and then just because it’s pretty fast anyway and being able to understand what’s happening from context doesn’t mean I actually know 100% of the words all the time)
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Thanks for sharing Ditto san
It is quite helpful and a level I aspire to reach in the next 2 years.
You are a Bakemono Ditto san
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I think this is the reason I am not able to read books… the moment I feel I am not able to understand something I move on to another book because it kinda irritates me. But next time, the sentence is going to be skipped.
Thanks a lot for your suggestions 
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