Vocab vs grammar for reading comprehension and speed

That sounds… very complicated to set up.

What book? And how was it?

I probably can’t be persuaded. I’m okay with the extra time it takes to look things up if it lets me use a physical book. I’m all for reading in the bath, so now I just need to get good enough to read without looking anything up. :upside_down_face:

I hate spending money on “unknowns”. If I could use a kindle paperwhite and try reading a book or two on it for free I would. But I’m not inclined to spend $150 on something that might be good.

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I agree, interest really makes a huge difference! I had a hard time with content geared for kids and found that e-books have made it really easy to book-hop and read whatever feels engaging in the moment, and having much broader exposure makes me feel like I’m progressing so much more quickly.

Now that you’ve finished your first regular novel I think you’ll find that the next one is easier! Getting through the first regular novel was really the hardest for me (in my case it was a well-done translation of Agatha Christie’s “The Moving Finger” since I didn’t want to deal with figuring out Japanese names at that point ha)

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I’ve had some extreme dizziness by staying in the bath too long in Japan several times, sort of freaked me out when I would stand up. Must have been a hotter bath than I was used to or warmed me faster. I would never drink before either but I found ~5-10 min was my limit. So if you if are in the middle of good read and forget (or a lightweight like me), 気をつけて

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That’s totally fair, it’s good to work within your means! If you did want to give it a shot for cheap, it’s probably not hard to find a really cheap second-hand Kindle (if you’re ok with second-hand) and there are frequent 0¥ book specials on Amazon.co.jp (you can find them by filtering for lowest price in the kindle store) so you can get full-length novels for free to try. :blush:

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So, I’m going to echo the others and say that vocabulary has been key in my experience. My grammar knowledge is full of holes (for someone at the N1 level), but it doesn’t really stop me.
On the other hand, adding ~3k words on Floflo (over something like a 6 months period) has dramatically improved my reading comfort. It also really helped to be words I learned in context.

From what you said, it sounds like you are mostly looking vocab rather than grammar. So that should apply to you too.

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@Ncastaneda @Merriad Can you explain exactly what device(s) you use and how you have it set up? What dictionaries, apps, etc. to make it super convenient to read Japanese books?

I guess if you’re not doing it already, writing down words you have to look up or making flashcards to study them is usually a pretty good idea. To mirror what pretty much everyone else is saying, learning vocab might be better for you (and should be bolstered by whatever your level of kanji mastery is at this point).

Aside from that, you also shouldn’t hesitate to go back to the baseline if you need to. If you feel you’re extremely comfortable breezing through children’s books, go for books aimed at pre-teens, then teens, and then transition into adult-level books. The furigana on lower level books should ease some of the time spent looking up words, especially if you’re attached to reading physical books.

I know literally everyone has already said this to you already, and I’m a much worse reader than you, but I also think vocab is more important for reading speed and comprehension once you get to that level.

Grammar is much easier to intuit, I think, once you have a foundation level. I also hate passing over sentences where I don’t actually understand the words, but I will much more happily continue reading even when I only vaguely know the grammar. I think the important thing is to return to fix the holes in your grammar once you’re more comfortable with vocabulary, as it’s easy to pretend the holes don’t exist.

You mentioned wondering about a system for adding words to an SRS… I essentially go on gut feeling, but I’m basically looking at a combination of factors:

  • how many words I want to learn per day
  • how frequently that word is gonna pop up in the book
  • whether that word is going to pop up in future books I plan to read
  • whether I already know the kanji*
  • whether it will help to reinforce a kanji I’m a bit iffy on
  • whether I hate it*

*I find hiragana-only words and words which use new kanji harder to remember. My priority, to a certain extent, is to avoid burning myself out or ending up with loads of leeches. So I try to avoid going too heavy on the difficult-to-remember words.

If the word uses a new kanji or a new reading for a kanji I know, I will actually also go and find another word or two to add for reinforcement (and I’ll spread those words over a couple of days of lessons).


My experience with Kitty Detectives and Zenitendou has made me consider that it might actually be best to focus on consuming quite a lot of younger childrens’ books which I can manage relatively well, rather than slowly battling my way through books aimed at teenagers / adults. Not sure you’d be interested in that, but thought I’d mention it.

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grammar is finite, there’s only so much to learn, so you could just sit down and go through it until you’re sure you at least passively got it. no need to be able to use obscure points that only exist in written form.

vocab studies on the other hand never end.

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This is probably what I’ll do with grammar in the background if I focus on vocab. I’ll at least read some cursory explanations in grammar books even if I don’t study them in depth. That wouldn’t help much for sentence production, but that’s not even on my radar right now.

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Somehow theater/play scenarios keep showing up in manga I’m reading. I’ll be an expert in those words before I know it. :joy:

I kinda just wanna read what I wanna read. 霧の向こうの不思議な町 is a children’s book but seemed interesting to read. But I also want to read more advanced books as well like 獣の奏者. I’ll just have to find a balance.

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Yeah, this wouldn’t work if I hadn’t enjoyed both those books. Zenitendou especially was at that perfect sweet spot for me where it was genuinely entertaining story-wise while still being easy enough that it wasn’t hard work to read, most of the time.

But I also feel your pain in terms of there being specific things I want to read, which will be pushed back if I take this approach :sweat_smile:

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The Kindle Paperwhite has a 60 minutes underwater certification… so, that’s how long my baths can take :smile: … I just pour some cold water if I feel too relaxed.

I have the last Paperwhite version. There I have 4 dictionaries. Daijirin, Daijisen, Kenkyusha and the one that comes with the Kindle. So 2 are J-J and the other 2 are J-E dictionaries.

There is a video in MattvsJapan channel where he commented on how they managed to convert some EPWING files into the mobi format for Kindle, there was the link for the mobi files too. Thanks to that I got Daijirin and Kenkyusha available. The others are available for you to download in the Kindle store by default.

Some people commented on the J-E dictionary on the Kindle having trouble to pick up some words (conjugations and contracted forms), Kenkyusha is way better in this regard, and is now my default option. It’s nice to have the others for when Kenkyusha won’t have the word or basically when it fall short (Daijirin usually has a much bigger explanation). As for abbreviations 大辞泉 usually catches most of the ones the others won’t.


For now that’s all I’m doing, reading and looking on the spot. Indeed words come up often and I feel it’s very similar to an SRS in a fashion.

I felt this way コンビニ人間 (the book I mentioned) was a totally different experience compared to my previous attempt (ペンギン・ハイウェイ), though it is half as long, so actually I read into ペンギン・ハイウェイ about as much before putting it down. :sweat_smile: … 150-200 pages seems where my comfort zone is apparently :man_shrugging: .

About picking words for reviewing while reading. I did use it with Anki until some months ago. I was using Kindlemate, which basically picks up the vocab saved in my vocab builder (where all your look ups are saved in the device) and lets you choose which ones to export into a CSV file (the word and the sentence where it was). You can export that to many SRS apps, I used Anki, but I’m aware it’s a common format to import vocab in others.


I also read physical books, not many Shodo books are available in e-book… actually I don’t think I have found any :disappointed:. The ones that are in the Kindle store are scanned versions, so it’s pointless. It feels now like such a drag compared to the other routine. I use the Yomiwa app in my phone and the OCR function with it, it’s helpful though… :man_shrugging:

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Sure! I apologize in advance for the length of this post.

Devices:

  • My spouse very kindly gifted me a Kindle Oasis, 32G with “special offers”, I think it is the second generation model. I think any model so long as it has a touch screen will work just as well for Japanese. Without a touch screen I don’t know how one would easily look up words.
    – Btw, the whole special offers thing makes a device $20 less to buy and you can remove at any time by paying. I haven’t found it to be a big deal, especially since Amazon Japan doesn’t seem to make much use of it. My Kindle is usually in airplane mode for battery reasons so I don’t even get them anymore and have ended up with the regular wallpaper.
  • One also don’t have to go with Amazon, there are other good (and budget friendly) e-ink devices with sizable libraries - Kobo by Rakuten comes to mind.
  • I have a macbook and use Calibre on my desktop to manage the collection of e-books and dictionaries (it’s a free program, well maintained by the developer).
    – Having something like Calibre is optional, you can transfer everything from Amazon to Kindle directly via wifi. The plus to having Calibre is it makes it easy to transfer dictionaries as well as free Aozora Bunko public domain content (Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Books, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine). It will also convert ebooks in other file formats into the right ones for Kindle, and has a function where it can grab news from certain websites and automatically format it for Kindle.

Set Up:

  • Amazon.co.jp: I believe it is better explained in other threads (this one by sirvorn comes to mind) but I made an Amazon.co.jp account with a different email than my other account, and put in a Japanese address (I put my friend in Japan’s place but it doesn’t matter where).
    – You can also set the Amazon.co.jp website to English to help you navigate.
  • Kindle: Setting up the Kindle itself for the first time was simple, I connected to wifi and logged in with the Amazon.jp account. From there you can browse the Kindle store, download samples, etc.
    – As I noted above I use my mac for looking for books on Amazon, then for delivery I use the “Transfer via PC” option (should be something like that in English) rather than directly sending to Kindle so I get a .azw file downloaded directly onto my PC and drop into Calibre to then transfer via USB to the Kindle.
  • Dictionaries:
    – The Kindle comes with 大辞泉, which is a solid J-J dictionary. I believe had to select from a list to download this dictionary from within the Kindle setting menu.
    – I also have this free J-E kindle dictionary called JMDict that I transferred using Calibre
    – Another free J-E dictionary is Edict2, also transferred using Calibre
    – and bought this Japanese Names Dictionary for $3 since I suck at reading names and again, Calibre.

Buying Books via Amazon JP:

  • I’ve found this to be slightly tricky sometimes since sometimes the site doesn’t seem to like selling to people with foreign IP addresses. A way to circumvent this is to use a VPN, and then you should be able to use whatever credit card even if the billing address is not in Japan.
  • OR, if you’d rather not and you are in Japan or have a friend in Japan, what I’ve found to be the most sure-fire route is to buy an Amazon JP gift card. Unfortunately, there are new rules in place so that you can’t do this through a proxy service anymore (like through White Rabbit), I believe to prevent money laundering.

This might all sound like a lot but it didn’t feel like much at the time. Once you’ve got the dictionaries and some books, it’s a breeze! You just open up and long-press any words that you don’t understand, and it’ll open up the entry in whatever dictionary you last had open, and you can look up the same text in another dictionary from the same pop-up. Sometimes the dictionaries fail to get a good entry because of some obscure word or my fat finger mis-selected something, but it’s pretty rare.

I’ve probably missed some points but please feel free to ask any follow up question or anything I’ve left out! Hope this helps.

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Thanks for all the information!

I use Calibre a bit and it’s nice enough. Are these dictionaries legally available? Also, how do I know which dictionaries would support conjugated words correctly? That’s a big thing for me, since without it much of the lookup process would be manual anyway.

What is the benefit of doing it this way? I usually just download stuff from Amazon over wifi after purchasing it on my Amazon Japan account.

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Glad it was helpful!

Yes! Edict and JMDict are under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. You can view it here: ELECTRONIC DICTIONARY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT GROUP.

By supporting conjugated words correctly do you mean when looking up a word like「食べさせられた」it will tell you that it is the past causative conjugation of “to eat”? If so, I don’t think the Kindle dictionaries I listed do that, they just recognize the word and list it in its basic form with info like meaning, reading, part of speech, usage, example sentences. The only dictionary I’ve used that comes close to that is Midori.

Oh I’m just a library nerd and like seeing/organizing/tagging in Calibre, especially since I have books from outside the Amazon ecosystem, have made some of my own Kindle files, and Calibre tells me what I have on my Kindle vs not. :sweat_smile:

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I used a VPN for signing up the first time if I remember correctly with my computer. After that and with the device linked to the Amazon Japan account I’ve been buying books from the device with no VPN whatsoever.

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I meant the J → J ones though. Usually you have to purchase those.

Nah, I don’t need it to tell be what the conjugation is. What I mean is, if I highlight 食べさせられた, will it show me the dictionary entry for 食べる? Or would it just get confused?


I had to use a VPN for a couple purchases to “trick” Amazon into letting me buy stuff, but now it doesn’t care anymore.

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My hiccup at first was that they were rejecting my foreign credit card, but after getting a gift card Amazon was happy :man_shrugging:

It seems like results with Amazon JP vary quite a bit, so you might not want to rely on using a gift card even if it worked for someone else!

Ah, sorry I misunderstood. 大辞泉 came with the Kindle for free for me (I downloaded it from the cloud right to the device, may have had to set something to Japan first, I don’t remember) and is quite good. I just googled, and a Japanese blogger said they got デジタル大辞林(国語辞典)as their free dictionary. Either way, there’s a way to get a J-J dictionary with the Kindle. The J-J dictionaries Ncastaneda mentioned that MattvsJapan has a video on I suspect may not be the most legal option.

It gets it right 95% of the time for me. It seems comparable to Rikaichamp; the software seems to be able to intuit the bounds a word correctly if I just press the main part of it, and will also recognize various collocations. Glancing over the words I looked up in the book I just finished, it looks like the author loved using 和 words and the dictionary recognized the differences between 「和む」「和み」「和らげた」and「和やか」and gave the appropriate entries for each (it also correctly recognized that the reading for the last one was the にこやか one, not なごやか, based on context). If you drag and select more than a single word/phrase, the Kindle will think you’re trying to highlight and do that instead.

Hope that helps!

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