Reading

A while back someone told me the true path to getting good at Japanese was to read more. So I went to the library, grabbed the first Japanese book I could find, opened it up… and drowned. Every other word was a lookup, and I still had no idea what was happening. Fast forward a few years, and reading is where most of my Japanese time goes. At least three hours a day this year, with a goal of 1,000 hours and 30 books. This chapter is how I got from that library book to here.

Why reading matters so much

When I passed the N2 on my third try, my listening carried me. Reading, vocab and grammar were way behind, because I’d spent a year mostly watching stuff. Reading packs in way more words. An hour of a light novel puts a lot more Japanese in front of you than an hour of anime, and you can slow down for the hard parts. Once I made reading my main thing, my known words shot up. And weirdly, speaking got easier too. More words in your head, more words that come out.

What to read at each level

Beginner

At the start, you’re just building confidence and a habit. Graded readers are books written for learners, sorted by level, and the Tadoku NPO has a bunch of free ones. NHK News Web Easy rewrites real news in simpler Japanese for kids and foreigners, and it’s a great bridge if you’re around N4 to N3 (if you’ve done Genki 1 and 2, you’d probably be fine with it). And manga with furigana, especially Yotsuba&!, which is the classic first manga. LivingJapanese has a free reading pack for the first volume with every word and sentence in an Anki deck, which makes it a lot more manageable.

Intermediate

You’re probably here once NHK Easy articles only have one or two words you don’t know. This is where I started reading about my hobbies, like switching my recipes and workout plans to Japanese. Beyond that: lots of slice-of-life manga, then shōnen (Jujutsu Kaisen and Dandadan are surprisingly approachable), light novels like また、同じ夢を見ていた and 君の膵臓をたべたい by Sumino Yoru or コンビニ人間, and visual novels. Those are reading too, but they feel like a game, so I can go way longer with them than with a plain book.

Advanced

Now it’s about stamina and taste. I moved from NHK Easy to the regular NHK site, and binge-reading one topic works great: I read a whole run of articles about bear attacks in Hokkaido and came out knowing a bunch of nature and ecosystem words. I’m a murder-mystery nerd, so Ayatsuji Yukito’s 館 series and a Japanese translation of Murder on the Orient Express are on my list, and someday the classics like Natsume Sōseki’s 坊っちゃん, which took me thirty minutes on stream to get through half of the first page. Most of my reading this year has been 本好きの下剋上 (Ascendance of a Bookworm). Thirty-plus volumes. A bit slow. So good. Next up is 86, because I’m comfortable with fantasy words now and want a whole new pile of military ones.

◎ Photo neededYour Japanese bookshelf / the stack of Bookworm volumesimages/guide/bookshelf.jpg

Most of my books are EPUBs that I read in the ッツ reader with the audiobook synced up, so the text highlights as it’s read aloud. It keeps me moving and I read faster with it. I still do plenty of raw reading, though, so I don’t lean on it too hard.

Making reading feel doable

You ever ask someone for reading advice and all you get is “just read more”? Wow. Revolutionary. It’s true, but it doesn’t help much when you’re looking up every other word and you’re fried by page two. A few things made it click for me. The first one I got from MoeWay: watch the nouns. In English they jump out at you, but in Japanese they blend into the line. Once I started spotting the people, places and things first, the rest of the sentence fell into place around them. Breaking paragraphs into chunks helps too. Take it one phrase at a time, like a puzzle, instead of staring at the whole wall. Kanji get less scary once you see them as a few familiar parts (next chapter). And furigana is a great crutch at the start. Just wean yourself off it little by little.

Here’s one I don’t see people recommend: read a summary in English first. When you already know the plot and who’s who, you’ve got somewhere to hang all the new words. That’s not cheating. Repetition quietly does a lot of work too. 〜なければならない, 〜なくてはいけない and 〜ないといけない all mean “have to,” and after enough reading your eyes skim right over them, the way you skim “I gotta get outta here” in English. And keep it fun. The moment reading feels like a chore, you’ll stop. Read what you want to read.

My first novel

The first full novel I finished was また、同じ夢を見ていた. I only start a book once I know about 98% of its words on jpdb. There’s no science behind 98. It just sounded cool. At that point, most of my lookups are names and obscure words. For harder books I raise that number first, by watching the anime or movie adaptation and going through the vocab list. While reading, when a line doesn’t click, I close my eyes and picture what the Japanese describes instead of translating it. And when I finished, I found a Japanese reader’s blog post about the ending to see if we read it the same way. We mostly did. I completely missed a joke about one character’s name, though.

精読, 速読, 多読

Scroll r/LearnJapanese long enough and every reading method turns into an argument. I think you just cycle through all three. 精読 (seidoku), intensive reading, is slow and analytical: look up the grammar, pick the sentence apart, mine. It builds accuracy. I used to do it two hours a day, and I could feel it working. I could also feel it burning me out. 速読 (sokudoku), reading at a set pace so you react instead of translate, helped my perfectionism a lot. And 多読 (tadoku), extensive reading with minimal lookups, works like a natural SRS because you keep seeing the same words, as long as you understand most of what you’re reading.

Stopping every line wrecks your flow. Ignoring everything you don’t get means you never grow. My balance: intensive reading on stuff I mostly understand, and fewer lookups on stuff a bit above me. If you get enough of it, you’ll guess most of the words from context anyway.

My manga picks, by level

I only list manga I’ve actually read, so no Death Note or One Piece yet. I’m working on it.

When reading starts to feel easy

This year I’ve had sessions where I read for thirty minutes, sometimes a couple of hours, without thinking in English once. It almost feels like reading in English. It’s a great feeling. It’s also a sign I need harder books, because I don’t want to get comfy. The harder stuff is where the unknown words live, and that’s where I learn the most. But flip it around: if you’re dying to read something, don’t let the difficulty scare you off. Take it bit by bit and close the book when you’re tired. Even native speakers do that. Pick one manga from the tabs above and read the first chapter this week.