Now you know what the rest of the page is and what those words might be.
チワワ should be fairly obvious.
Second picture has the first sentence「花すけの友だち」and by now you know that 花すけ is a word by itself, it’s followed by の友だち, but kanji are often the start of a word so you look up の and then 友だち. (I use the EN/JP dictionary Takoboto on android, and just putting のともだち in to that broke it down for me correctly).
There you go now you can read the first sentence.
The next picture has おねえさん next to it (from level 6), and another sentence that is similar to the first, just slightly harder to work out because of the ご.
Admittedly that was harder than learning a few words via SRS, but it was much more useful.
I would suggest here that names are hard – they may use the same kanji sometimes but they’re often oddball pronunciations or combinations of familiar and unfamiliar kanji. And unlike words, they don’t come in a context that might prime you to remember the word or the meaning.
(PS: 花すけ is also a name, so it doesn’t have a meaning as such.)
@Simian60 Sooo… ‘cheating’ but only a bit. Guess that makes sense
@pm215 Arrgh! Names names names… silly me I didn’t realize they were providing names, thought it might be some fancy word further describing the チワワ (at least that one word was easy! - they don’t come much easier than that I suppose)
@Dunlewy Yes, yes, that’s what I meant by ‘our pal Bezos’
This isn’t just a vocab problem though. Japanese grammar works so different from unrelated languages. There are some exceptions where people learn Japanese without formal grammar study but if you lurk a long time most people used and highly recommend using some kind of grammar guide. Things you think of as words in English like “but” and “and” require grammar glossing (multiple! ).
I did this too. Sure, I didn’t understand everything, but I understood enough and context helped me pick up the rest. I started reading them around the same level you did, actually!
Okay, I’ve read the full thread now and I’ll throw in my two cents specifically re graded readers.
Language learning advice will always be a mixed bag. Tadoku advises not to look anything up, a lot of people here will tell you to throw that advice right in the trash.
But try both methods and see what suits you.
What Tadoku readers aim for is to help you turn off that “oh no! A word I don’t know!” Panic where you scramble with a dictionary and lose your flow. Sure, you could look up the word and figure out that it’s a cast of characters and that 花すけ must then be a name.
But you could also turn the page, and keep reading, and learn from context that 花すけ is a name because that’s what おねえさん calls him on the following pages. That skill is what Tadoku intends to teach you with their graded readers: take a deep breath, keep going, and see if the answer you need is one line or paragraph or page later.
A lot of people here have stories of a “duh” moment where they scrambled to find a definition of something only to realize later that it was a made up word or the character mispronounced something and it was clarified in the very next line.
I also wanna throw in my two cents that graded readers arent necessary supposed to be “interesting”, the same way math drills aren’t supposed to be fun. They’re intended to teach you specific words and concepts and are repetitive by necessity. Don’t worry, you won’t be stuck reading them for very long. I went from reading level 0 graded readers to manga in less than 3 months (but I did have some previous background knowledge in Japanese grammar).
But here’s a question, then: With unintersting content meant just for drills, what’s the difference between these (low level) graded readers and reading the dialogue and additional sentence exercises in the textbook or JP101, or the sample sentences here on WK and/or BP?
I mean that in the sense of "do you gain more out of graded readers vs these other sources of “drill materials”?
Genuinely curious, as there may very well be something I’m missing.
In other news:
Genki went to the park yesterday
Read through the first two lessons and listened to the dialogue on the way to/from. It all went pretty well and quite fast because aside from the grammar point on “ じゃないです” there wasn’t anything else I didn’t already know from my earlier dabbling with JP101. Well… new vocab, but otherwise smooth sailing.
From a brief glance at lesson 3 topics, that’s where I’ll be diving into proper new territory, shall see how that goes…
A few musings:
The park thing shows me the advantage of a textbook - I wouldn’t be sitting on a bench listening to TokiniAndy or JP101 lessons, just feels weird. Reading through the book and taking notes is more ‘natural’ to me (and of course more enjoyable than doing it at home). Just remains to be seen how often I can get away from work and go out during weekdays…
The use of romaji in the first two lessons was annoying, as I would automatically drift to that. Good thing they’re eliminating it from now on.
Writing kana is effin’ hard when you’ve zero practice at that. Doh!
Not sure I care about Mary (btw, メアーリsounds reeeaaally weird) and her little lambs (the other characters) but then I knew what I was getting into. I debated a while between Genki and みんなの日本語 but eventually the convenience of a single book and TokiniAndy doing the lessons won out
Not all graded readers are boring, but to answer your question - grammar books and graded readers don’t serve the same purpose. With grammar book you learn grammar, with graded readers you practice reading which is a doing not a learning, and it’s best starting them with some basic grammar knowledge, mainly ます form grammar.
The idea behind not using a dictionary while reading is to gain understanding from context and to improve your reading ability with material that is tailored to your level. There are graded readers that are solely Japanese but there are also ones that are parallel ones, with either the translation is on the parallel page or after the end of the story there’s a vocabulary list and the translated version of the story.
Reading graded reader is not drilling, it’s just reading, and you simply go from story to story, book to book and the material becomes more and more complex which ease you in into reading “real” books.
It gives you exposure and immersion, and I personally find graded reader story fun and text books boring.
(You might find irodori less boring since it’s aimed for working adults not students, and might feel more relevant to you. It a free resource, btw.)
Thanks!
Iridori I had heard of yes… what put me off was the lack of a printed textbook. I suppose I could print my own copies, and maybe that’ll be the last resort option if Genki really gets on my nerves (which I don’t think it will).
Re. graded readers: I’m not saying a definitive “no” to them, just… not attracted to the idea of reading (struggling to read, to be precise) something that presents no interest at all. At least three I looked at on Tadoku were like that. Maybe I just have to check out more of them…
I do think I should try and acquire just a little more vocab first, though.
I signed up for BP a little earlier. First impressions are overall very good: very flexible in terms of what is displayed during lessons and reviews, a lot of voiced content, sample sentences organized by JLPT level - the N3-N2 ones seem impossible to grasp
I lost over an hour there with a few vocab lessons because I was spending much more time with an item than I do on WK - trying to decipher the rest of each sentence on my own instead of reading translations, then piecing everything together.
Doesnt’ seem to do exactly what I want it to when it comes to the Genki path (couldn’t find a custom lesson picker here on WK), but maybe I wasn’t looking in the right place. Gotta spend a little more time with it and figure out a “solution” on how to progress along with the textbook.
One (not so) funny thing:
Right after BP I came back to WK to do some reviews, all in all this took about two hours of “studying” Japanese one way or another. Then I opened my feed reader on the phone (a mix of English and Romanian news sources) and… it seems my brain had already turned to mush. I could read the words/sentences but the meaning of the content went right past me.
Odd to say the least…
Yup, I have started the Genki path, both vocab and grammar. Took me a few tries to get it to not force the Bunpro N5 grammar path on me (nothing against it, just that I don’t want it to be confusing when mixed with the textbook order)
It’s just that I need to find a way to pick what exactly I want to study next. Ideally, it would be something like this:
My next lesson in Genki will be no. 3.
BP, please put in my queue the vocab of Genki lesson 3 to study
Spend two days in BP on the vocab SRS
Study lesson 3 in Genki
BP, please put in my queue the grammar points from Genki lesson 3
Repeat the same steps for Genki lessons 4, 5, etc…
It’s quite possible this is how they order everything already, I just didn’t get to that point - had vocab to study from the intro chapters of Genki and I reached vocab from lesson 1, no grammar offerred yet.
But I couldn’t find a custom lesson picker, which would come in handy if it would show the study items under sections organized by the corresponding Genki lessons/chapters: kinda like “here is everything we have from Genki lesson 3, take your pick what you want to study today”
Oh and yes, I do realize BP functionality should be discussed in the BP forums but I am wary of joining one more community right now.
I’m already spending far too much time following threads here (and also stumbling onto long-closed yet useful threads) but I can’t help it, they’re all interesting
AFAIK there is nothing like a lesson picker as WaniKani has it. However, you can manually add single grammar points to your review queue, which is what I’m currently doing with N2 and N1
I relate lol If you decide to join the BP forums, though, you can find me there as well, with the same username.
Mmm, but generally textbook chapters do include more than pure grammar notes, and the dialogues and reading sections in them are intended to give students “doing” practice in small chunks. I’d say a textbook is trying to provide a little bit of everything in a way that hopefully makes all the pieces reinforce each other, whereas a graded reader will be more focused on just the “doing” reading part, and provides more reading practice than the textbook can.
Nothing is interesting when it’s taking you 5 mins to decipher a sentence.
However.
When teaching children to read English, nobody really cares what the cat sat on or what spot did with the ball, the joy comes from being able to read something that before you could not. At the start it’s a page full of squiggles, and then it has meaning. A lot of children go through a phase of reading every word they see - road signs, labels, packaging - they have a new superpower and they want to use it.
Maybe the joy is more subdued as an adult, but recognising a word, a sentence structure, and then after all the effort you put in, just reading an entire sentence and understanding it, feels pretty good.
This is just a sign that it’s time to watch some anime.
When you first start, like, the very first attempt at reading something that is not part of a grammar example sentence, this is extremely hard and can be pretty offputting. Without some way of grounding your learning (like some previous knowledge) it can be overwhelming and might as well be in a different language 마치 책이 갑자기 일본어에서 한국어로 바뀐 것 같은 느낌입니다.
Eventually I think you have to do both anyway, sometimes carrying on just getting the gist, sometime really understanding everything.
Unfortunately, I can’t give a very specific answer to your question, since I don’t use Genki or Bunpro
I do like the structure of textbooks, but I used NEJ and am currently working my way through みんなの日本語. So my experience with the reading sections in those textbooks may be completely different from yours, since I don’t know how Genki is structured.
However, I don’t think it’s necessarily a matter of gaining “more” from them as it is to gain a “different” benefit. In the textbooks I used, the reading sections are to reinforce the grammar point and vocabulary you just learned, and so are structured in a way that repeats that grammar point in various ways to reinforce your learning. This mostly applies to NEJ, since the みんなの日本語 text I’m using doesn’t give little stories, mostly dialogue exchanges to read over. And I’d say one of NEJ’s key flaws for me is that it’s geared towards university students, so the reading sections are catered to that, whereas I don’t get much value out of talking about different departments and dorms and classmates and studying abroad, etc. because it doesn’t apply to my life stage. But they did their job of reinforcing the grammar points.
However, graded readers are books. Very simple picture books that are intended to tell a story in the most accessible way possible to someone who may have only just learned hiragana. This is, unfortunately, what makes them “boring”. In order to be interesting reading material, they would have to flood the reader with too many new words and new grammar forms, which would render them inaccessible. It’s different from reading example sentences, because you’re actually reading a cohesive story, just simplified, rather than a standalone sentence.
They are short though. Most are less than 10 pages. So they’re not a huge committment if you do try one out.
You don’t have to read them at all if you don’t want to. I found them to be a convenient, free stepping stone to stuff I actually wanted to read.
When I was just easing into reading, my preferred method was to read a graded reader on Tadoku and an NHK News Easy article. The graded readers I used for more passive learning, to train my mind to recognize the cadence of Japanese sentences and how they’re structured, note the usage of particles in the pared down, simple sentences, etc. The NHK News Articles I analyzed, trying to figure out the meaning by picking out what few words and kanji I knew before I looked anything up. Predictably, I understood practically nothing. (Link to me and Pandoravakarian debating whether the article was about bear populations or bear attacks).
I like to read a lot of things from various sources for different purposes.
But that’s just my method. Yours may differ!
Another source of easy (free!) material to supplement your reading is Watanoc, which you may or may not find more interesting. It doesn’t look like it’s still updated, but they have a backlog of news-style articles about food and cultural events that you can sort by level (N5, N4, etc.)
Well, I mean, it is in a different language that we don’t know very well yet when we’re starting with graded readers. And yeah, I was absolutely intimidated and frustrated when I read the first few level 0 graded readers and understood maybe half of it, if we’re being generous.
And yeah, you definitely have to look up stuff when you’re first learning to read. A lot of stuff! All the time! Which is time consuming, frustrating, and takes a lot of the enjoyment out of it. It’s a necessary evil.
But my point for the Tadoku graded readers in particular is that they recommend for you not to look stuff up while reading because they’re designed so that you don’t necessarily have to, since they (generally) aim to get you to understand the unknown words through repetition and context. And their explicit purpose is to get you to read as much as possible in as short a time as possible, because the more you read, the more you absorb, even if you don’t fully understand it. And if there’s still stuff you don’t understand by the end, you can always go back and look it up, or write down your unknown words as you go and look up any you still don’t know by the end, or any method you please. Whatever you have to do to keep going and not get discouraged and stop.
For me, I like to read, so stopping all the time to look stuff up is a huge motivation killer. But at the same time, it is necessary. So I compromise where I usually have one really easy thing to read where I’m okay with just getting the gist, and usually 2 things (usually book club reads) where I have to actively look up vocabulary and grammar forms in order to have the slightest idea what’s going on.
(I wish I were as motivated for listening, but alas, I enjoy books and comics and hate podcasts )
Again, thank you everyone for all the input! Such a great community here
Genki does have a bit more than just grammar, yes. Not much, though.
But… funny story. Maaaybe
I started learning French in school in second grade. The next year, I started doing additional study at home with a tutor using different textbooks than the ‘state-provided ones’ (back then we were given all school manuals by the school, we wouldn’t buy them as they do now). Now that set of textbooks - called “Bienvenue en France” - was sooo much more enjoyable. I used to read chapters (or at least try to) ahead of the next meeting with the tutor because I wanted to know what would happen next to the characters in the story, and the pretty drawings were awesome. I don’t know how I’d find the materials now, but still… I can still remember the title of those books some 30 years later, whilst I have no recollection of anything else I was studying from in school back then.
So yeah… some textbooks can be more engaging than others.
And that is why I try NHK Easy every few days and I give up after a couple of sentences
I am there right now when watching Japanese films, I pause 'em whenever I see writing and try to read whatever I can, then I resume
Oh soon enough I’ll start a thread asking for some recommendations. Naturally, I have peculiar tastes with anime too
Yes, well… that’s how I feel every time I go there. Funny coincidence though: couple of days ago, they had an article about bears waking up from hibernation earlier than usual in the Fukushima Prefecture… I think?!?
Did not know about Watanoc, I’ll check it out. Thanks!
Anyways.
I think I got the gist of Bunpro with the Genki path. Indeed they push the vocab of each lesson before the grammar points, so it’s quite as I wanted it, and ultimately the lack of a ‘lesson picker’ doesn’t matter much.
From what I can see, each textbook lesson has between 45 and 65 vocab items. Some of those will be ignored due to the integration with WK, but as I’m low level here that number is low, I’m still looking at 40 to 60 /lesson, maybe a little less.
So with batches of 20 daily (manageable with 10 in WK and without KameSame) my interval between Genki lessons will be 2-3 days - a bit slower than I intended, but thinking about it maybe it’s not such a bad thing. I am getting useful vocab in return, which at a faster pace with the books likely wouldn’t stick.
I did my first batch of reviews in BP before coming here, and I really like it. For vocab they provide full sentences with blanks. You can choose at any time the amount of hints you get (from nothing at all to the full translation of the sentence in English and a ‘nuance’ phrase to explain what is expected). I’m not at a point where I can answer without the English expected word or the full sentence in English, but I try without hints first which forces me to try and decipher the full sentence in Japanese. Surely it can’t be bad in the long term
On WK I often skip reading the example sentences because (right now) I know I won’t understand the rest of the words anyway and I hurry through
It does mean that the review sessions take longer, but I can adjust the hints shown during each session depending on the time I have then.
(No idea how they handle grammar points, probably in a similar fashion.)
Yes, I read it too Do you have Yomitan installed btw? It will make reading NHK Easy way easier! (Sorry if I already recommended it earlier, I can’t remember )
Exactly the same as vocab Though there is also an option to do reviews by reading. However, I’m not sure how it works, as I haven’t tried it myself yet.
If you decide to join the BP forums, though, you can find me there as well, with the same username.
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