I’ve been working on kanji for such a long time but for some reason I’ve always had this fear of reading. I just figured I wouldn’t understand anything. There are so many words and kanji I don’t know. I’d touched grammar a couple of times and it never clicked for me. I just didn’t have the motivation to read another Genki chapter, do another worksheet, read another blog. Frankly, I hate grammar study.
But I really really love reading. I’ve read probably close to a thousand books in English, and I’ve always found joy in it. I desperately wanted to be able to read in Japanese.
So I looked at the numbers on wkstats. Theoretically I understood ~70% of kanji. But that number will not increase easily. Another 20 levels and I’d barely see a difference. I have an incredibly weak understanding of japanese grammar, but I’ll probably be dead before I work up the motivation to read another chapter of genki.
So I said screw it and I ordered all of 推しの子、葬送のフリーレン、and ワンパンマン in Japanese. These are some of my favorite anime, and at the rate they produce anime I’ll never know how they finish.
Now, none of them are “easy” or “beginner level” as we’d describe them.
And I want this to be lesson number one: the most important thing about your reading material is that you want to read it. Not the reading level.
And so I started reading. I picked 推しの子 first for 2 reasons:
1.) I really like how the author writes characters and ends stories, and the anime left somewhat on a cliffhanger.
2.) No furigana. I tried reading book 1 of frieren and quickly found that even for kanji I knew extremely well like 日 and 人 my eyes immediately took the path of least resistance. I really wanted to read kanji directly because it gave me a greater sense of accomplishment. I hoped that once I read a manga without the furigana it would be easier to read one with furigana without just looking at all the readings.
So no furigana and I only understand 70% of the kanji. How the heck am I meant to understand passages full of hard kanji? Looking up kanji is really hard.
Tool number 1 I recommend is the yomiwa app. You can draw the kanji and it’s pretty good at finding them. I became extremely good at drawing kanji because I had to draw so many and this made me happy. (Ultimately one of my goals is to be able to write in Japanese). If you want it also has a camera recognition feature that is really good. It also has radical input, but having only learned wanikani’s radicalized radicals, it is next to impossible for me to use. (My biggest gripe with WK is the radicals. I don’t like that they use custom ones. I think it does more harm than good.)
Next problem is grammar. How am I supposed to read with weak grammar? Well, I just read it and if I didnt understand it, oh well. And this is not as bad as you think.
When reading, you essentially have two modes:
Read and look up every single detail
Read and just enjoy the book
And both of these are important.
Looking up every detail will teach you. But it’s actually useless unless you’ve seen the thing you are looking up like 100 times.
Seeing it and not understanding it doesn’t mean you aren’t learning. Your brain is drawing connections, creating links, and tying it to context. Looking it up gives it a label. If you look up tons of details, your reading speed slows so much that it hardly gives your brain a chance to do all the connecting, because it just sees the individual word in isolation. But reading normally lets your brain do all that and now at occurrence number 50, you look it up. Now your brain labels it AND had the connections. But say you look it up immediately. Now your brain has almost nothing to label and it will be quickly forgotten.
So I generally recommend not looking anything up unless:
- It’s clearly important to the plot of the story
- its the only thing in the sentence you don’t understand
- you’ve seen it enough times to think “I keep seeing this and I don’t know what it means”
And if you aren’t enjoying your book, maybe you are learning, but I think you aren’t achieving your goal! The purpose of reading manga especially is enjoyment! Enjoy it!
Now, I’ve seen the anime of 推しの子 several times. Right now, the anime covers the first 8 books. I started on book one, and holy cow, it was really slow to read. I’m incredibly proficient in hiragana, but somehow I found that reading hiragana was so slow! Why? I don’t know! Probably because all my “practice” was typing on my english keyboard while reading kanji. And reading kanji, even simple ones, was so slow.
But bit by bit, little by little, everything became faster. I was surprised as common kanji became just as fast to read as everything else. I was also surprised by the number of new words I was learning. I thought I couldn’t learn a kanji or a word unless it showed up on my lesson pile in wanikani. But really common ones like 現、呼、探、and 描 I quickly picked up. New word compounds involving 演 I also learned fast. And whenever I did new wanikani lessons they felt so much more meaningful because I would quickly encounter the new word in my reading.
And finally, I had to learn katakana. I put it off for so long, but there were so many katakana words and onomatopoeia that it became necessary to learn.
I also learned why we learn so many words in wanikani that don’t immediately sound useful. Japanese express things so differently than we do in English. Words that are rare in English can be super common in Japanese!
I learned what things do and don’t belong behind different particles. I finally understand confusing things like the weird use cases of も and と just because I’ve seen it used thousands of times. Repetition is a great teacher.
I also learned how to read different fonts. It was super hard at first but I dont even think about it.
Another worry I had going in was “When I finish book 8, and move on to book 9, will I still be able to understand what is going on? Will I suddenly understand nothing now that my anime background is gone?”
And the answer is I didn’t notice AT ALL. I thought for sure I’d be hopelessly lost, but my comprehension was good enough at that point that I understood just fine.
A big thing I want to talk about looking up grammar. Looking up words is easy. Looking up grammar is next to impossible. Or at least it was until I found cure dolly on youtube. Please, for the love of all that is holy, watch her videos. Enormous clouds of confusion and doubt were wiped away in an instant. Watch videos on things you think you already understand. Watch videos on what you keep seeing in your reading. She is a genius. You will never be confused again.
Another huge worry I had when starting was “Will I be able to feel the same feelings I get when reading in English? Will I feel the same joy, sadness, and shock at different plot twists and events? Will I understand enough to laugh at jokes?”
And the answer is a wholehearted YES!
It took 5 months for me to finish all 16 books of 推しの子. But in terms of hours spent reading, the first book probably took around 20-30 and the last book took only 6. I lauged, I cried, and I loved the ending. The author knows how to write a good book.
So please, I urge you to stop putting off reading, and just pick a story you love, and enjoy reading it. Your knowledge will reach a level you never thought possible, your self confidence will increase, you will enjoy the story, and YOU CAN DO IT! Learn to love it and you will never stop. Start learning and reading for fun. And watch cure dolly for the grammar, because nobody will ever come close to her beautiful explanations.
Feel free to ask me any questions about my experience or about 推しの子 in particular. I’d love to talk about it.
Happy reading!