I read and write casual Japanese all day every day, but reading books is still slow and there’s a lot of words I have to look up. I can generally read biographies and non-fiction in Japanese and understand them well, but need to read with a dictionary. Fiction with flowery, creative language is much more difficult for me.
Now I’ve recently bought a kindle and am using the touch pop-up dictionary to move through books faster and also review vocab more. This is definitely the best thing I’ve done for my Japanese in ages.
So what I want to ask is if you can read Japanese at a similar speed and comprehension to your native language, how did you get there? Should I just pound books every moment I can and then review the vocabulary I didn’t know?
How fast were you able to go from my level to to high level?
3 comments
I’m not at that level but I have the answer for you. Lots and lots and lots and loooots of practice reading. There is no shortcut to learning languages.
It’s very easy to start reading, 300-500 hours of learning is usually enough to make it comfortable with convenient way to translate unknown words. But if you want to be able to read without a dictionary, you already need 15k vocabulary (usually 3-4k hours) and if you want to read without unknown words, we usually talk about 10+ years of everyday usage of Japanese. Actually we deal a lot with unknown words even in native language, the difference is that we don’t notice that. Memes, slang, terms or simply something rare. Because we try to understand that from context instead of a dictionary, we don’t even think it’s so much unknown to begin with. But in fact natives learn around 300-500 new words every year.
If you want to get better at reading, you have to read; there’s no secret trick, it just takes time.
When you and I were first learning to read, we spent countless hours trying to remember letters, words, meanings, etc. It took a long time and years of looking up basic words, gradually upping the difficulty of the books we read.
That was over 2 decades ago for me, and I don’t remember much about the learning process then, but I imagine it was frustrating at times. It *definitely* was frustrating learning Japanese reading. But that was more recent so I remember it more clearly, and it fades each day I continually read. What you’re already doing sounds like what you’ve been taught to do your whole life in your native language.
As to your last question, it took me about a year of reading before Japanese people commented on how well I read, but I lived in Japan for all but 2 months of that year, so I was constantly reading every sign, every billboard, and every announcement as I traveled around, and spent time reading with native speakers at least once a week, all on top of spending at least an hour of each day studying the language. Your mileage may vary.
I’ll reiterate: it takes time. Keep on keeping on, and we’re all rooting for you!