When did you start reading?

I started in lv22 or so

  • Started reading Haikyuu at around lvl 35 or so. Was going through Genki 2 at the time.

  • A few months later, I started my first book, Hyouka, which I read along with the book club.

  • Soon after I started SAO 1. At that time I was thinking that if I wanna get gud, I had to read some advanced stuff (I had heard it was around JLPT level N2). Hehe, reading it was a painfully slow process, but worth it. I had tons of fun. By this point I had already reached lvl 60.

All of these I had already watched the anime of, so it was relatively easy for me to follow what was going on, even if there was tons of unknown grammar and stuff. Can recommend reading something you’re already familiar with, even if it might be more advanced than your current level of proficiency. Especially if it is a series. They tend to have much of the same vocab and grammar throughout the series, so what you’ve learned in the first and second book, you’ll have an easier time reading the following books as the number of unknown words starts to decline.

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I read textbooks before Wanikani, NHK Easy at around level 4 or 5, and skipped straight to trying novels (stopping to look up every second word) at around level 7 or 8. Granted, I had taken multiple year-long ā€œbreaksā€ from Wanikani in which I continued studying Japanese grammar by the time I reached level 7 so I think I’m definitely an outlier…

Now I’m reading ć‚³ćƒ³ćƒ“ćƒ‹äŗŗé–“ only looking up every third word. :grin:

I think you can’t solely rely on Wanikani to be able to read. You could be on level <10 and already start reading if you know foundation grammar and basic vocabs. On the other hand, You could be level 30+ but cannot read anything, if you’ve done nothing but memorize kanji and vocabs on Wanikani.

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Started reading at WK level 0 using Tadoku Graded readers..

I started reading when I was around level 5 (and N5), I think? I started with children’s stories. It was really really hard at first jumping straight into native materials and took me forever to read relatively short passages. I just kept doing it though (literally every day) and now feel super comfortable reading. (currently about N2 and making my way through Harry Potter). I think the most important thing is to get comfortable interacting with words you don’t know. You don’t need to look up every single new word. Can you understand rough meaning of the word from context? Can you understand the gist of the passage even if you don’t understand every detail? I think people can sometimes get a little to attached to their dictionaries haha. Most of us learned how to read in our native language in this immersive way, and while adult brains are different from child brains, I think there’s a lot to be gained from this approach.

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I used graded readers around level 5 but soon got tired of ā€œmukashi mukashi aru tokoroni,ā€ so I began reading JLPT materials starting from N5. Now, after learning N3, it’s getting easier to read native content. However, still getting problems with vocab used on native contents, so I kept building vocabulary outside WK. For reading, the most important part is vocabulary and grammar. Kanji? not so much. You can read the furigana if you can’t read the kanji. So if you are focused on learning to read, I suggest building your vocabs and learning grammar.

In my personal opinion, this depends on what you want to read. None of the stuff I’ve read has had furigana, so if I’d slowed down on kanji and only focussed on vocab and grammar, I would have had very few things available that I would be excited to read. The most motivating thing for me was to engage with exactly the kind of games / books / manga that I wanted to read, and building up kanji just as much as everything else was vital for me.

So I think it can be good to think ahead about one’s reading interests and consider if furigana is common. It can be very draining to wrestle with the hurdle of starting to read while also being dispassionate about the subject matter. But if furigana is common, you can potentially balance things differently, and slow down on kanji in order to prioritise being able to enjoy immersion sooner, which is really rewarding. :muscle:

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Yeah, I agree with you. The most native material that somewhat enjoyable and not aiming at learners and kids have a lot of kanji without furigana.

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For news reading, you can turn on furigana on NHK News using Todai app. I just didn’t want to restrict my reading with my kanji progress. I am weak at kanji but can absorb vocabulary much faster, so I’d rather go faster with vocab, my kanji reading will pick up. I’ve been doing this for the past 16 levels. My vocabs are way ahead of my kanji reading and my reading and listening comprehension went up than it used to, so I’ll keep doing this method.

Just see what works for you, learn your weakness and strength, more input from different people might be useful to carve your own journey.

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unrelated but is there a text version of cure dolly’s stuff somewhere? i appreciate the info in the videos but that voice grates on me and is hard for me to listen to much.

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For many novels and manga it’s not possible to just turn on furigana though.

Much of the stuff I read online and buy doesn’t have any furigana aside from the odd name or joke (like the kind where the kanji and furigana say two completely different things).

Not true. I have å›ć®åćÆ novel, and it has a bunch of furigana on every page. Even 私 has furigana. Look harder. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, so pick your own way that works for you.

That’s one novel… Trust me there’s a lot of them out there that don’t have furigana. Novels and manga that target an adult demographic usually don’t have furigana :sweat_smile:

Oh, I in no way was suggesting the method was no good or anything. ^^ I was just saying that, depending on what you enjoy reading, some will be helped by slowing down on kanji, and some might be harmed by it - in the sense that it will take longer before they can use Japanese for stuff they love.

There is no one way of learning, and whatever works for a person is the right way to go!

Yes, and no. ^^ Since she manually uploads subtitles (not auto-generated garbage) you can rip the transcript from youtube.

You can highlight the text and copy it to somewhere else if you want. And if you click on a certain line, it will jump to that time stamp in the video, so if she has visual aides that she’s directly referring to, you can easily see without even having to unpause.

Hit the dots in the row of options below the video to grab the transcript.

Capture

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ah good to know, i didn’t think to check subtitles as they are as you eluded to, usually garbage auto translations lol. thanks

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Trust me.
We have a lot of novels sold here that uses furigana because of high demand. You are limiting your belief that only children uses furigana.

Pffff, I don’t believe that only children use furigana. I live in Japan. In any given bookstore or library I walk into though, the majority of the books aren’t going to have lots of furigana.

One of the first books I bought was the Mushishi manga. It looks like this on the inside.


Very limited furigana. It and restaurant menus are a major part of the reason I signed up for WK. I wanted to be able to read them and to be able to read them without hassle, you need to know kanji.

Almost anything targeted at the seinen and josei demographic (and no, that’s not code for porn) is going to have very limited furigana. Technical and nonfiction books will also depend on the target demographic, but usually the more specialized ones will have less furigana.

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I don’t live in Japan, and I have furigana novels.
I don’t want to live in Japan, and I don’t want to read Japanese restaurant menus. So I have my own reasoning for learning Japanese. I definitely will get there someday when I can read all kanji. For now, this is what works for me.

I think I did my first NHK news article when I was around level 8 or so, but haven’t read much in the meantime. I have a website that recommends HNK Easy texts to me based on the Wanikani learning stats. It works better than I expected. I often don’t know the words from the text, but I can try to guess the reading and meaning from my WK knowledge. Quite fun I have to say. (Means I use NHK Easy with Furigana disabled)

My plan is to write down all vocab from NHK Easy texts into an Anki deck in the future to boost my vocabulary.

Before using Wanikani (and other online courses) I tried to read children books, but that didn’t go so well. I think I’ll stick to NHK Easy for now. Understanding something there (not all sentences, but the general meaning of the text) gives me some feeling of success.