Read easy material at or right above your level.
(this is a copy paste of a comment I wrote not long ago in an other thread)
Here is my most extensive list of graded readers :
- Japanese books for beginners : LearnJapanese : I shared these a while ago and it turned out to be my biggest contribution to the Japanese learning community ever since someone later stitched them into a big PDF which is shared on a regular basis (here 2021 updated Free Tadoku graded reader PDFs 1,796 total pages for reading : LearnJapanese ). The funny thing is that they were almost the top 3 Google result but it seems that people are too lazy too search for answers these days…
- https://jgrpg-sakura.com/ there are some Graded readers there as well but under a more restrictive license and you have to sign up. This is the only place that has Graded readers for advanced learner though.
- Found new graded readers + easy mangas : LearnJapanese I also shared other Graded readers I found there. Not as many and mostly for beginners.
- japanese, learn, manga / Crystal Hunters (自然な日本語版) - pixiv Crystal Hunters : a manga in very easy Japanese
I am personally working on a project that aims to provide content to read to absolute beginners. It is here : https://drdru.github.io/stories/intro.html
There are about 60 stories but only the first 27 have been proofread by a native speaker. As written somewhere else on this forum, throughout the stories :
Words are introduced using Emojis and others are derived from the context by the reader. They are then repeated as often as possible to act like a natural SRS. The idea is that if you keep reading, you assimilate easy words and learn new ones on the way without having to stop to check the meaning of a word in a dictionary.