Get Takoboto on android and download Japanese keypad and handwriting kanji experience.
I just google
Yes.
Treat ’em like you would when encountering an unfamiliar word in *any* language.
If context isn’t clear, reach for a dictionary/Google. Or ask someone who can read japanese.
<mumble: isn’t this like how most knowledge is gained?>
Piggybacking off this, any beginner recommendations for reading? I’m about halfway through core 2k and done with Genki 1.
Personally, I would probably try to build a vocabulary first before tackling certain books.
The NLPT lists are pretty solid in my opinion. I would say N2 level is not bad if you want to start reading. Otherwise you may find you will be overwhelmed by the number of words you don’t know.
(And beyond the words, kanji! At least the full 2136 Jouyou)
Beyond that, I use the good old: [https://jisho.org/](https://jisho.org/)
At a certain point, you will be able to start using weblio and kotobank if you have a good grasp at reading Japanese definitions.
It will be hard, you probably wont understand everything, but you need to make peace with that, thats your next few years of your life, not reading/immersing until youre “ready” is the biggest waste of time that I did, I recommend you use chatgpt to look up sentences and have it broken down part by part. But dont feel the need to understand everything, you probably wont, but someone who reads every day will learn Japanese faster than someone who just does a textbook for 30 minutes every day.
When you see a word or expression you don’t understand, move your mouse over it and see if something comes up in yomitan. If you still don’t understand, use Google and/or ask around (like in the questions thread in this subreddit or on some discord servers like EJLX, etc) for help.
Still, you’ll struggle a lot early on until you get used to it, and don’t skip on actual vocab and grammar studies too because those are important. Jumping straight into immersion with no foundation is hard and not advisable (in my opinion, speaking as someone who did that and regrets it). But trying to read is very important nonetheless, even early on.
You can start reading very early if you’re willing to translate a lot of unfamiliar words. Googling words or using a regular dictionary is too slow, so I recommend the browser extension yomichan.
To progress quickly at the initial stage, it is better to translate all unfamiliar words. And add words with high frequency to anki.
If you have an ios device I highly recommend the dictionaries app monokakido. They have many excellent dictionaries for Japanese, especially once you are ready to try Japanese to Japanese dictionaries. They recently added some great elementary school 国語 dictionaries which are really good for those beginners who want to try all Japanese dictionaries.
yomichan. takes a little bit of time to set up but it makes reading online significantly less painful.
Just read, don’t think too much. I did this when I just started and oh boy did it help. Just search for the words you don’t know/are not sure what they mean, I suggest Google Lens or any other OCR app.
Remember to choose books with topics you are interested in or the passion could die out quickly. (If you are thinking about what book you should choose too much, just don’t think, forget what I said, grab one randomly, and start reading!)
Don’t read the following if you overthink easily. It’s just me yapping about what I think of the current mainstream language learning methods. >!What I think about learning a language is you learn by using it, not really by memorizing how many thousand vocabularies or by analyzing hundreds of grammar. (If you are not aiming for any proficiency test, that is!) Don’t get me wrong, it is important to memorize the vocabulary and to know what grammar there is, but focusing on only that makes you no more than a bookworm.!<
TL; DR. Do whatever you want! There are no *”wrong”* paths in learning. Sure, there are long ones, slow ones, short ones, fast ones… But as long as you think it’s the fun one, it doesn’t matter! Try it and find out if it’s suitable for you!
It’s a chicken and egg problem. I recommend practicing writing new words, like 20-40 times. Fill notebooks with the stuff. If you outsource the recognition to a computer, you’ll never learn Japanese.
If you have a smartphone, likely you do, you can download the google app and using google images you can take a photo and instantly translate text. Guessing the word likely won’t do much good.
To read monolingual books in Japanese what I did was
1. genki I, genki II
2. buy book, read
3. look up a lot of words, ask any questions online about what I don’t understand to the daily thread
that’s it, like so far I read about 25 books, more than half of those being paperback.
Very, very, very slowly. What you do is, you grab a notebook and a kanji dictionary. You look up every word you don’t know, write it down, write it’s pronunciation in kana or romaji, and write its meaning. Repeat as often as needed. This is the only real way to do it.
Option 2 is buy children’s books and start there. Level up with the source and gradually build your vocabulary.
To be honest, this is the one thing keeping me from actually getting any better at Japanese. I learned English as a native speaker by speaking English at home with my family and reading a shit ton of books. I only wish I could do the same thing in Japanese. I often am able to look at a word an know what it means, but that doesn’t mean I know the word, because I can’t say it. I really hate that about this language.
Well yeah. Use a dictionary. Takoboto is good if you’re looking for something free.
I believe that term has fallen out of fashion
Use easy books and go on from there
Get comfortable with ambiguity and be ready to move on if you don’t know a sentence, but also don’t care to know. You should only be looking up words if your interest is high.
No-one’s mentioned [https://jpdb.io/](https://jpdb.io/), which is curious. They have database of 1k+ novels, 1k+ web novels and many more of other media. Pick one which is has a low difficulty rating, get the vocabulary deck for that novel or web novel and start studying. Oh, and it is free. However if you have one specific book in mind, it may not be in the database, so never mind.
The killer feature of that website is the ability to familiarize yourself with the vocabulary before you start to read your novel. If you have already mined an Anki deck, you can import that too, so that you don’t have to start from zero. Reading is so much easier and doesn’t actively hurt your brain when you don’t have to check every other word from the dictionary, because you already know them!
Basically when I tried jpdb, it opened up a new world for me. When I’m not grinding any vocabulary deck for a novel, I’m going through top used words deck that you can generate yourself from there. E.g. “top 6k words used in novels and web novels”, and it will directly level up your reading skills in general.
jbooks.pro it’s a new site, this is not an ad I discovered it on my own
Where can I find books in japanese?
Maybe not for early on, but recently I found reading on Kindle Paperwhite was the best way to improve the vocabulary.
This model has “vocabulary builder” feature that save all the words that you searched on the dictionary when you are reading a novel in japanese. Then you can check later the words and in what sentence you found them in the novels. You can also do flashcards with this words. I trully recomend it.
I take the Google translate camera, take a photo (or screenshot), copy the words, and paste into the Jsho app because it parses sentences reasonably well. And I just rinse and repeat. Over time you need to do it less but the first while it’s brutal if you’re not already intermediate/are reading higher level materials.
It depends on your level i guess.
If you have memorized a good amount of words like from a core deck , then you can pick up something very easy to read.
You can use Yomichan if you really want to read a book, or if you want to start with something easier like a manga there are OCR tools out there.
If you want to know from my experience of last year where i picked up studying again, I firstly built up some fundamentals by studying on Anki a core deck of 2k words and then picked up some easy media i enjoy, i tried some manga but switched to some simple VN.
Finding books meant to be read by children, mostly in hiragana with simple subject matters, I guess.
Someone posted the updated free tadoku graded reader list here. Please check them out! There are also sets you can buy.
You can then mine the words from those videos to your anki deck or in my case jpdb deck
I’ve been studying Japanese for years and when I encounter a word I don’t know in a book I’ll just look it up on my phone. I use the Renzo Japanese app and it has the option to draw in the characters so even if there’s no furigana I’m good. I’ve gotten pretty adept at doing it with the book in one hand and the phone in the other.
I’m two months in and this is my experience:
-Manga has furigana, so it is possible to sound it out even if you don’t know the meaning. Children’s books too are mostly in hiragana. With hiragana and furigana, you can look up words in any dictionary.
-Midori is an iOS app that let’s you take a picture of text and you can just tap words to look them up. It does not work with vertical text, so not so useful with novels. But This was helpful when I was attempting video games (Pokemon Scarlet, Final Fantasy VII).
-Building your vocabulary is huge, and jpdb.io is what I recommend for doing that, especially if it has a deck for what you want to read. Someone gave me a stack of Japanese kids books mid-December. It was agonizing to get through a page, looking up basically every word. Fast forward to today, where I now have 1000 words on jpdb, and it is much more comfortable. I’m still looking up words, but I’m also able to read or guess the meaning of many more words than before, so that it’s actually pleasant.
I have a couple novels that I eventually want to read, but as they have very little furigana (only on rare words), I know I need to just keep expanding my vocab base in the mean time. Good luck!
How i did it, which could be very tedious, i looked up every word i don’t know. Many different dictionaries and Google. Coming back from the experience, i recommend having at least n3 grammar and vocab before reading anything because it’s torture.
The [WaniKani book clubs](https://community.wanikani.com/t/master-list-of-book-clubs/35283) are my main resource for reading right now. They have solid picks, coupled with their Natively difficulty rating to help you find something level-appropriate. The most helpful part is the vocab lists, making it really easy to look up words as you read, faster than using a dictionary.
32 comments
Get Takoboto on android and download Japanese keypad and handwriting kanji experience.
I just google
Yes.
Treat ’em like you would when encountering an unfamiliar word in *any* language.
If context isn’t clear, reach for a dictionary/Google. Or ask someone who can read japanese.
<mumble: isn’t this like how most knowledge is gained?>
Piggybacking off this, any beginner recommendations for reading? I’m about halfway through core 2k and done with Genki 1.
Personally, I would probably try to build a vocabulary first before tackling certain books.
The NLPT lists are pretty solid in my opinion. I would say N2 level is not bad if you want to start reading. Otherwise you may find you will be overwhelmed by the number of words you don’t know.
(And beyond the words, kanji! At least the full 2136 Jouyou)
Beyond that, I use the good old: [https://jisho.org/](https://jisho.org/)
At a certain point, you will be able to start using weblio and kotobank if you have a good grasp at reading Japanese definitions.
It will be hard, you probably wont understand everything, but you need to make peace with that, thats your next few years of your life, not reading/immersing until youre “ready” is the biggest waste of time that I did, I recommend you use chatgpt to look up sentences and have it broken down part by part. But dont feel the need to understand everything, you probably wont, but someone who reads every day will learn Japanese faster than someone who just does a textbook for 30 minutes every day.
Grab ebooks, open them in https://reader.ttsu.app/, install [yomitan](https://github.com/themoeway/yomitan) as a browser extension (popup dictionary), grab some J-E dictionaries (Jitendex) and grammar dictionaries (see [this page](https://github.com/MarvNC/yomichan-dictionaries)), and start reading.
When you see a word or expression you don’t understand, move your mouse over it and see if something comes up in yomitan. If you still don’t understand, use Google and/or ask around (like in the questions thread in this subreddit or on some discord servers like EJLX, etc) for help.
Still, you’ll struggle a lot early on until you get used to it, and don’t skip on actual vocab and grammar studies too because those are important. Jumping straight into immersion with no foundation is hard and not advisable (in my opinion, speaking as someone who did that and regrets it). But trying to read is very important nonetheless, even early on.
You can start reading very early if you’re willing to translate a lot of unfamiliar words. Googling words or using a regular dictionary is too slow, so I recommend the browser extension yomichan.
To progress quickly at the initial stage, it is better to translate all unfamiliar words. And add words with high frequency to anki.
If you have an ios device I highly recommend the dictionaries app monokakido. They have many excellent dictionaries for Japanese, especially once you are ready to try Japanese to Japanese dictionaries. They recently added some great elementary school 国語 dictionaries which are really good for those beginners who want to try all Japanese dictionaries.
yomichan. takes a little bit of time to set up but it makes reading online significantly less painful.
Just read, don’t think too much. I did this when I just started and oh boy did it help. Just search for the words you don’t know/are not sure what they mean, I suggest Google Lens or any other OCR app.
Remember to choose books with topics you are interested in or the passion could die out quickly. (If you are thinking about what book you should choose too much, just don’t think, forget what I said, grab one randomly, and start reading!)
Don’t read the following if you overthink easily. It’s just me yapping about what I think of the current mainstream language learning methods. >!What I think about learning a language is you learn by using it, not really by memorizing how many thousand vocabularies or by analyzing hundreds of grammar. (If you are not aiming for any proficiency test, that is!) Don’t get me wrong, it is important to memorize the vocabulary and to know what grammar there is, but focusing on only that makes you no more than a bookworm.!<
TL; DR. Do whatever you want! There are no *”wrong”* paths in learning. Sure, there are long ones, slow ones, short ones, fast ones… But as long as you think it’s the fun one, it doesn’t matter! Try it and find out if it’s suitable for you!
It’s a chicken and egg problem. I recommend practicing writing new words, like 20-40 times. Fill notebooks with the stuff. If you outsource the recognition to a computer, you’ll never learn Japanese.
If you have a smartphone, likely you do, you can download the google app and using google images you can take a photo and instantly translate text. Guessing the word likely won’t do much good.
To read monolingual books in Japanese what I did was
1. genki I, genki II
2. buy book, read
3. look up a lot of words, ask any questions online about what I don’t understand to the daily thread
that’s it, like so far I read about 25 books, more than half of those being paperback.
Very, very, very slowly. What you do is, you grab a notebook and a kanji dictionary. You look up every word you don’t know, write it down, write it’s pronunciation in kana or romaji, and write its meaning. Repeat as often as needed. This is the only real way to do it.
Option 2 is buy children’s books and start there. Level up with the source and gradually build your vocabulary.
To be honest, this is the one thing keeping me from actually getting any better at Japanese. I learned English as a native speaker by speaking English at home with my family and reading a shit ton of books. I only wish I could do the same thing in Japanese. I often am able to look at a word an know what it means, but that doesn’t mean I know the word, because I can’t say it. I really hate that about this language.
Well yeah. Use a dictionary. Takoboto is good if you’re looking for something free.
I believe that term has fallen out of fashion
Use easy books and go on from there
Get comfortable with ambiguity and be ready to move on if you don’t know a sentence, but also don’t care to know. You should only be looking up words if your interest is high.
No-one’s mentioned [https://jpdb.io/](https://jpdb.io/), which is curious. They have database of 1k+ novels, 1k+ web novels and many more of other media. Pick one which is has a low difficulty rating, get the vocabulary deck for that novel or web novel and start studying. Oh, and it is free. However if you have one specific book in mind, it may not be in the database, so never mind.
The killer feature of that website is the ability to familiarize yourself with the vocabulary before you start to read your novel. If you have already mined an Anki deck, you can import that too, so that you don’t have to start from zero. Reading is so much easier and doesn’t actively hurt your brain when you don’t have to check every other word from the dictionary, because you already know them!
Basically when I tried jpdb, it opened up a new world for me. When I’m not grinding any vocabulary deck for a novel, I’m going through top used words deck that you can generate yourself from there. E.g. “top 6k words used in novels and web novels”, and it will directly level up your reading skills in general.
jbooks.pro it’s a new site, this is not an ad I discovered it on my own
Where can I find books in japanese?
Maybe not for early on, but recently I found reading on Kindle Paperwhite was the best way to improve the vocabulary.
This model has “vocabulary builder” feature that save all the words that you searched on the dictionary when you are reading a novel in japanese. Then you can check later the words and in what sentence you found them in the novels. You can also do flashcards with this words. I trully recomend it.
I take the Google translate camera, take a photo (or screenshot), copy the words, and paste into the Jsho app because it parses sentences reasonably well. And I just rinse and repeat. Over time you need to do it less but the first while it’s brutal if you’re not already intermediate/are reading higher level materials.
It depends on your level i guess.
If you have memorized a good amount of words like from a core deck , then you can pick up something very easy to read.
You can use Yomichan if you really want to read a book, or if you want to start with something easier like a manga there are OCR tools out there.
If you want to know from my experience of last year where i picked up studying again, I firstly built up some fundamentals by studying on Anki a core deck of 2k words and then picked up some easy media i enjoy, i tried some manga but switched to some simple VN.
Finding books meant to be read by children, mostly in hiragana with simple subject matters, I guess.
Someone posted the updated free tadoku graded reader list here. Please check them out! There are also sets you can buy.
Grab the free Tadoku Graded Readers from here: [https://learnnatively.com/series/c78f246213/](https://learnnatively.com/series/c78f246213/) and read them by itself or along with it spoken aloud: [https://www.youtube.com/@tadokuorg](https://www.youtube.com/@tadokuorg)
You can then mine the words from those videos to your anki deck or in my case jpdb deck
I’ve been studying Japanese for years and when I encounter a word I don’t know in a book I’ll just look it up on my phone. I use the Renzo Japanese app and it has the option to draw in the characters so even if there’s no furigana I’m good. I’ve gotten pretty adept at doing it with the book in one hand and the phone in the other.
I’m two months in and this is my experience:
-Manga has furigana, so it is possible to sound it out even if you don’t know the meaning. Children’s books too are mostly in hiragana. With hiragana and furigana, you can look up words in any dictionary.
-Midori is an iOS app that let’s you take a picture of text and you can just tap words to look them up. It does not work with vertical text, so not so useful with novels. But This was helpful when I was attempting video games (Pokemon Scarlet, Final Fantasy VII).
-Building your vocabulary is huge, and jpdb.io is what I recommend for doing that, especially if it has a deck for what you want to read. Someone gave me a stack of Japanese kids books mid-December. It was agonizing to get through a page, looking up basically every word. Fast forward to today, where I now have 1000 words on jpdb, and it is much more comfortable. I’m still looking up words, but I’m also able to read or guess the meaning of many more words than before, so that it’s actually pleasant.
I have a couple novels that I eventually want to read, but as they have very little furigana (only on rare words), I know I need to just keep expanding my vocab base in the mean time. Good luck!
How i did it, which could be very tedious, i looked up every word i don’t know. Many different dictionaries and Google. Coming back from the experience, i recommend having at least n3 grammar and vocab before reading anything because it’s torture.
The [WaniKani book clubs](https://community.wanikani.com/t/master-list-of-book-clubs/35283) are my main resource for reading right now. They have solid picks, coupled with their Natively difficulty rating to help you find something level-appropriate. The most helpful part is the vocab lists, making it really easy to look up words as you read, faster than using a dictionary.