LLearn Japanese

Looking for very specific advice from advanced/high level learners

Hey all! I’ve studied listening/speaking to the point that I’m comfortably fluent (I’d say my vocabulary is like 5,000-6,000 words, have no trouble keeping up with most conversations/videos, etc), however my reading is still pretty bad (hard to give an estimate, but I often cannot read tweets, youtube titles etc because they contain lots of kanji past the most basic 500 or so). As someone who already knows a lot of Japanese words, what do you believe would be the fastest method to learning to read well? I feel like with an established vocabulary knowledge base, studying each kanji individually one by one feels like maybe not the best route.

3 comments

  1. Read more, but if you’re stuck in kanji, study kanji.

    This can be one by one or as a word.

  2. I feel like with an established vocabulary knowledge base, studying each kanji individually one by one feels like maybe not the best route.

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    Unfortunately, this is the exact method that all Japanese use to study kanji at school as well as all Chinese. One by one supplemented with reading material and input from teachers. I’m sure there are ways around it, but I have never met a good reader who hasn’t specifically focused on kanji. I myself did the kanji kentei up to level 2.

  3. When I got to a conversational level, I confidently knew about 400 kanji and going through the elementary school kanji greatly boosted my reading ability in about three months. The kanji I knew beforehand were not necessarily organized, and were just the ones that I noticed kept popping up so often that ignoring them was more effort than picking them up from context even without studying. I went through the elementary curriculum using both known and unknown vocab to fill in the gaps.

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