Effective strategies on how to learn to read?

27 comments

1. > How do you learn by reading? Is it really as simple as looking up every word you don’t know and trying to remember?

   This is what I’ve been doing. And I genuinely feel like I’m remembering more all the time. I have to look up fewer words and characters than I did 6 or 12 months ago.

   Is it the most time efficient way of learning? Probably not. But it seems to be working for me.

   I sometimes use machine translation for longer sentences if I’m having trouble and/or help me make sure I’m on the right track. There’s also a really great sentence parser that will break down the sentence and show you the meaning of the individual parts at ichi.moe

   And I would recommend typing the text you’re working on into *something* on a web browser (translation tool, Googledocs, social media, whatever) so you can use the Yomi-chan/Rikai-kun/10ten plugins. They often pick up compound verbs or common verb phrases that aren’t always in the dictionary apps, even though they all pull from jisho.org.

2. Yep, you look up words and try to remember – but it can be easier said than done.

   Personally, I found it easier to start with manga because the drawings will give you more hints on what’s going on and I also felt like walls of text were too intimidating still. Furigana is your friend and so are ebooks where you can look up words a lot easier. There’s browser extensions that can help you with unknown words and also add them anki (if you use it).

   Sometimes it’s better to grasp the meaning of a text/sentence instead of knowing every single word in every single sentence. Just try and keep the frustration at check that will arise eventually from constantly looking up words and grammar
   points and forgetting the same kanji again and again until it sticks.

   Over time you will get better and read faster. It depends a lot on the text; some are maybe too high a level and might discourage you, but that’s alright, just put it aside and come back later.

3. Honestly, the only way to learn how to read is to read and *struggle* lots. There is no magic pill that will help you to read better overnight unfortunately.

   > May was sunny.

   No, [五月晴れ](https://jisho.org/word/%E4%BA%94%E6%9C%88%E6%99%B4%E3%82%8C) is a word on its own.

4. Pretty much. Another thing I did was make flashcards out of words I had to look up. If you study the vocabulary while it’s context and how it was used is still fresh in your mind, it’s easier to remember (in my personal experience).

5. I’ve been using Satori Reader and it’s been one of the best things I’ve done.

   It connects with WanKani API as well, so kanji I learned in that app will not have the furigana in Satori Reader. I, personally, feel that these 2 together have been phenomenal for myself. WaniKani helps with kanji and vocabulary, and Satori Reader helps with vocabulary and using what I’ve learned in WaniKani for kanjis in the “real world”.

6. [This article](https://morg.systems/Practical-Tips-to-Facilitate-Early-Reading) might help, although it doesn’t address everything.

7. Here are the most important points about learning how to read in a different language, from my own experience. They work for me maybe they don’t work for you.

   * Pick something that you want to read. Not because you want to improve at Japanese, but because you are interested in the story. This is the most important thing. If you are going to learn by reading, you need to make a habit. You will not come back to it if the story doesn’t interest you.
   * Read using a digital reader such as the Amazon Kindle. It could be your phone. This is about minimising friction as much as possible. In a digital reader, you can simply tap on a word you don’t know to quickly look it up and move on with the reading. Reading on paper at a beginner/lower intermediate stage is painful. You have to either take pictures of the Kanji you don’t know of find a way to look them up otherwise. That takes the joy out of anything, even the most interesting book in the world.
   * As much as possible, try to infer unknown words from context instead of looking them up. If you can sort of guess what the word means, that’s good enough. You learn the words more deeply this way. Only look up words that you need to in order to understand the general message of the story.
   * Don’t worry about remembering the words that you do look up. Most likely they will keep coming up frequently throughout the book. You will find that eventually you don’t need to look that word up anymore. This is more enjoyable and realistic than trying to force yourself to remember a word you just saw for the first time.

   In the end, the most important thing is for you to start reading and finding out what you enjoy and what works for you. Like I said these are the things that work for me and make the process as painless and enjoyable as possible. But there are multiple schools of thoughts on this so maybe for you this doesn’t work. Please feel free to comment below what does work for you.

8. Reading via a kindle or your PC will be much faster for look ups and will make reading seem way less of a chore. Also a good strategy is if you are able, have the audio book version of a book and read along with the recording. These are just my quick tips, but there are long articles on reading methods and language learning.

9. Reading Is Indeed effective. It Is very hard in the beginning because you Will probably look up every Word but if you have a LOT of patience you Will see results.
   If something Is too hard don’t be discouraged to lower the level of difficulty a little, you need to stay out of your “comfort zone” but not too far!
   Try to understand the phrase, try to look out for grammar forms that you have not studied yet and Google It or look up on a textbook.

   Hope It helps, good study!

   Also, May I ask you what are you Reading?

10. https://learnnatively.com/ is a good way to find level-appropriate material that’s all interesting

    As for “is this an easy page” – depends on how much vocab and grammar you know. For me, yes. Ymmv

11. I started reading Manga in Japanese.
    It helps me to have a vague idea of what is being communicated and then build an understanding of how they used the words in written form.

    Slowly switching more and more text heavy games to Japanese as well. I tell you, the characters of games like Zelda- Breath of the Wild feel like completely different entities from time to time.

12. Everyone has already sung the praises of reading, but a reality check I experienced was that being familiar with a workable set of kanji and vocabulary prior to even tackling a novel has a strong tendency of making novels more manageable. It’s definitely a matter of reading something level-appropriate if you want something more effective than “just read even if it’s way the hell above your level.” First graders are fluent for their age, but you don’t usually see *them* casually pulling out a thick book with just words because that’s typically not all that level-appropriate. JPDB and LearnNatively are great resources for checking for an approximate difficulty rating.

13. I prefer to read on my kindle or pc as it’s faster, however it’s not as “fun” as using a physical book for me but the time it saves me looking up words is worth the trade off.

    It is painfully slow at first, especially if you pick something harder than your level like I did lol. The first book I read was a young adult novel and in the very first chapter it had about three pages describing guns in detail… I looked up almost every Kanji in those sentences and it took me an hour to read three pages lol.

    I’ve gotten better now but I’m a lot faster than I was! I would say it’s a good way to improve your reading, but it’s not easy.

14. After my own experience: just keep reading every day. It’s painful, you don’t see much progress for a few weeks, but at some point you begin to improve steadily. And then it accelerates. But the first three months or so are really brutal.

    You can ease the pain with optimized readers like Satori Reader or LingQ. They provide a translation by just touching/clicking the word and they color words by your knowledge. E.g. words you never encountered are colored blue, words you already encountered but you don’t know are yellow and words you marked as known are white. Getting less and less blue words and more and more white words is very motivating and keeps you going in the brutal phase at the beginning. It also helps with the infamous intermediate plateau where you have the impression that you don’t progress anymore while you actually do.

    The best moment is when you start recognizing words by their pattern and not by actually reading single kanji. That’s a huge feeling of achievement. But takes a while, around six months of daily reading for me.

    Horizontal and vertical reading are different skills by the way. I can fluently read Japanese when it is written from left to right and horizontally but I completely suck at reading vertically written text from right to left. My brain recognizes the visual patterns of single words only horizontally.

15. Wait, that is h game isn’t it? Or i mean that is original light novel to the game adaptation.?

16. Reading more is the way.

    I wouldn’t say that this is a particularly challenging text. It provides furigana for the uncommon characters, and the grammar and subject matter seem pretty straightforward. However, it’s still a *book*, so you’re probably going to have trouble with it at first. Your translation is okay but missing nuance. Kitsukibare evokes the clear skies and sun of early summer. “The smell of spring was vanishing from the streets along with (like) the sakura.” There’s also some errors in your furigana; the rightmost line should be “hazushi,” not “soto.”

    Might be too tough. I played quite a bit of Zelda in Japanese before getting into books. Zelda has kanji with furigana, which is easy, and you only have to read in short bursts so you don’t get exhausted as easily. Manga is also a good option in that a lot of the storytelling is in the images so you have plenty of context. Pure text, even easier text, is challenging and Japanese has many better options for starting to get better at reading.

17. 1) Start Reading
    2) Don’t worry about not understanding everything, it will come
    3) Turn off Furigana (if possible), your goal is to learn to read Kanji, you can already read hiragana I assume.
    4) Don’t look things up immediately upon not recognising them, instead look at the Kanji, ask yourself have I seen this before, possibly take a guess if you’ve gotten the context, and then look it up.
    4a) If you have seen it before but can’t remember it, it might be wise to make an Anki card but that’s personal preference.

    If your goal is native-like fluency fast, I think you probably want to spend more time with audio content than written.

    Tldr; Read. 😂

18. You need to start at EASY reading. Just read a lot of things that you can completely understand. And then go up a level. I honestly recommend reading for foreigners, because even children’s book in Japanese have crazy words and grammar and dialects, which may make just make you more confused.

    And you MUST learn kanji seriously.

19. Reading from top to bottom is generally harder, scan the thing, recognize and convert to proper layout.
    Or learn to read the text rotated by 90 degrees, it is kind of useless, but still potentially faster.
    The thing is mostly intended for slow, “classical” reading and is not a good thing for practice.

20. Japanese is a heritage language for me, and I’ve recently picked it up again (about last year, but I’m on and off because of Uni).

    The method I’m currently using to learn how to read is this: I picked up a Japan exclusive game that doesn’t even have an English fan translation, and since the game is for middle-school aged kids, it has *some* kanji, but not too many, and they all have furigana. I record myself playing for a bit, reading all the text out loud, and then I spend the next couple days or so rewatching the recording, re-writing the text, re-writing all the kanji, trying to translate them into English (both mot à mot and a more proper translation) and then using the kanji in a few different made-up sentences so that I remember *how* to use the kanji as well as how to write them. I also occasionally go back in the notebook and re-read everything, including the sentences I came up with for the kanji I learned.

    This is in parallel to reading children’s books and using textbooks to learn more grammar and kanji.

    The good part about doing things this way is that I don’t feel like I’m studying Japanese. I’m just having fun playing a game and trying to figure out how to translate it.

21. Don’t expect to understand at the beginning…if there are words you can’t understand, ignore until you find that in a different context that makes you understand.
    Use a phone(note app) to write stuff instead than a physical notebook. Or you can let memory to do that task without writing anything. Writing just help to check that same word if you forgot, without searching on dictionary again. That doesn’t make you waste time. Phone is faster and easier to use.
    Your mind will memorize stuff by ownself then.

22. read

23. My tips:

    Kanji count: open the book to a random page and look for the first 10 kanji. If you can accurately read all of the kanji, it will be an easy read. If you can read 7-9 of them, it will be easy with a little work; keep a dictionary nearby. 4-6 recognizable kanji and it starts to be a struggle. If you only recognize a handful, the book is too hard. Note: if the book is primarily written in hiragana it might be too easy.

    There are two main reading-as-study methods: intensive and extensive reading.

    Intensive reading focuses on the details – you’re studying the grammar, vocabulary and so on of a text. You’re aiming for 100% understanding.

    Extensive reading is looking for the gist. You can skip words you don’t know. You’re generally focusing on reading a lot of easier texts than spending time on one difficult one.

    Each has its own uses. If you’re at JLPT N2 or above, intentionally picking up harder texts may expose you to more complex kanji, vocab, and grammar – great if you’re out of textbooks.

    If you’re looking to build up your reading speed or looking to bolster/refresh your textbook knowledge, this is what you probably want.

24. “May was sunny. The smell of spring along with the sakura petals vanish from the city, the season of blooming sprouts”

    That’s not quite right

    Fine weather during the rainy season. This is the time of year when the smell of spring along with the sakura petals vanish from the town, and the sprouts blossom from the ground.

25. I’m reading stories from the graded readers from ASK. Level 2
    レベル別日本語多読理ライブラリー 着物 レベル2

    Basically, my strategy is to know within each sentence what is it about (would look at the end for the verb). Then look for any particles like を、と、は、etc.
    So find out what is the sentence about or who is it referring to (subject). The subject though can be a few sentences back though. Then look at the place (in time or space). And my most dreaded is the various endings that signal intent (~たい、〜たいする）、did something(〜ことがある） to express excess (すぎる） and so on. These along with the tenses are challenging still.

    I’m not focusing much on kanji (maybe I would ask myself what is the radical for this kanji or make a note of it). (I recognize a few yes, but I assume, that as I get accustomed to the way in which sentences are structured and translated the more I will be able to re-read the kanji later on as I continue to read other books or manga or stuff on the web)

26. * First and foremost: read a text that you can understand **adequately** without using a dictionary. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use a dictionary. You can use a dictionary if you want to or need to, as long as it doesn’t detract too much from the reading experience, but if you’re floating in a haze of unknown vocabulary, read something easier.
    * There are enough easy reading materials out there – Tadoku books, Satori Reader, NHK News Easy – that I recommend building a fairly strong vocabulary base before you try diving into content for native Japanese speakers. Children’s books can be deceptively hard, and Harry Potter specifically is harder than a lot of contemporary adult fiction. Manga aren’t necessarily easy, but a manga with furigana can be a good choice at the “I can’t quite read a light novel yet” level because if you run into an unknown word, you at least know how it’s pronounced. In the same vein, although children’s books can be deceptively hard, book series for elementary school students usually have furigana.
    * Don’t be married to a specific book. It can be quite hard to find a book that is both interesting and not too hard. (A lot of the Japanese books I find interesting now aren’t books I would have found interesting when I was an intermediate student, because I was reading them slowly. You can read a light novel slowly, but if you read a Kawabata novel slowly, nothing ever happens!) If you buy a book and it doesn’t work for you, don’t force it. Read something else.
    * Looking up every word you don’t know can be a recipe for frustration. As you read, you’ll find that there are words you understand from context and words you kind of vaguely understand from context (If I see that the characters are walking under a row of 楓, and I guess that’s some species of tree from the radical, that doesn’t hurt my overall understanding of the story. I don’t need to look up the exact species.) You need to find the right balance *for yourself* where you have a good enough understanding of what’s going on but you’re still reading the text at a reasonable pace and not just slogging through it.

    (As an aside: tools like Rikaikun are great, but I don’t use them because I generally read ebooks from Bookwalker or Honto and you can’t use popup dictionaries unless you have some way of turning the ebook images into text. For me, it’s simpler to just use a dictionary in a separate tab as I need to – and it makes me more mindful about pausing to consider, “Do I know this word? Can I guess this word from context? Should I look this word up?”)

27. The one thing I’ve tried and seemed to work: write the kanji/word down multiple times, it sort of becomes “your own”. [Calligraphically and with correct stroke order.](https://kakijun.jp/page/1612200.html)