I have been studying this language over 5 years now, and reading has been my main goal from the beginning; although I speak and text with the language a lot too now that I live in Japan. I spent much of my 5 years of study slowly reading and looking things up and SRSing some of the new words I saw in my reading.
Fast forward to now. I still really enjoy reading Japanese novels and manga. Sometimes I skip reading for a few days because I’m busy with other things, but as soon as I pick up another book, it amazes me how much I can understand without even straining, completely relaxed. I’ll see a text bubble, or the first sentences of a paragraph, and the faint voice in my head just… reads it. The meaning just comes. Just like in my native language.
Of course in the beginning it was nothing like this. I had to carefully and slowly sound out each word and kanji before. But now (excluding the few unknown words I still come across every chapter or so) it’s become a regular occurrence.
It shows me that the hundreds of hours of reading I accumulated over these 5 years have really made much of this language automatic for my brain. I guess more exposure means more effortlessness. It feels great to know that’s possible.
18 comments
Reading Japanese novels is my main motivation so, at three months in and just starting to pick up some native content, this was great to read.
Good job 👍
Is it okay if I understand what I’m reading but I don’t translate it to English in my head to make sure I understand (if that makes sense?) I’m still relatively a beginner so I’m thinking that translating everything to English in the beginning is good to make sure that I understood it.
it’s so fun when you can see progress because it’s such a marathon that it doesn’t feel like you’re moving anywhere day to day.
This is good motivation for me. It’s so hard to get over the hump where nothing makes sense, or I have to look up every other word.
Got tips on speeding up reading other than reading more?
Thanks for this, one of my main goals is to read my favorite books in Japanese.
Great stuff!
This is exciting to hear! I’ve been reading 小学中級 novels since last year and I’m really enjoying it. I took a break to read some simple manga but I was itching to read a novel again. I read the first story in one day, which is way faster than I’d done before!
I had to send out an email in Japanese and it was pretty cool to be able to read the reply back. It was simple compared to a novel but it was still cool to realize I could read!
I frequently hear reading accelerates comprehension, which hasn’t happened for me, but I’m somewhat glad to find out that it’s actually 5 years of slow reading
Hopefully I can do this one day. Nice job, lad Japanese is hard
Thank you for giving me hope haha. I didn’t really have this trouble learning english but somehow trying to read Japanese as a beginner makes my brain run at 9000 horsepower.
May I know at what point in your 5 years journey do you start noticing a drastic improvement?
こんにちは！
I’m a fellow Japanese learner who is more than a newbie and currently struggling reading when coming across kanji I don’t know, so I’d really appreciate some tips!
Speaking of which, do you all have a correct translation mobile app for translating Japanese?
the epitome of my goal is being able to read the novel version of 新世界より but reading books and admittedly yes manga has been a goal of mine for over twenty years now. I’ve never had anyone to talk with and I have very little access to much of anything to read, so for huge swathes of time I just sort of stagnated in my learning. But on this push, I really feel like I can get there. I’m only up to like a fourth or fifth grade reading level, but you gotta start somewhere right?
Congrats, it’s so exciting to see other people getting to the point I’m aiming for (in the future).
I have been studying Japanese really slowly for several years now, and this year I finally started to read some manga and recently I began using SRS as well.
Thank you for your post, it really motivates me to keep on going!
I was just thinking that earlier today!
I’ve been studying for some years now, and while reading a story I got so into it that I didn’t even realise I was reading a lot of it without having to stop and look something up
Things like this make it so worth it