So my issue is that I am struggling with learning to read kana. I can recognize most characters but when I see words, I more or less go character by character very slowly and this does not seem to be improving. Most apps like duolingo and anki either keep testing you character by character or using limited vocabulary. I feel like when app shows small set of vocabulary, I am more learning how to recognize the word instead of how to read the characters.
I have been trying to find an app that would have a large vocabulary of kana words but they seem to jump to kanji very fast. I know my reading will improve while learning anyway but this seems like something that would be easy to practice separately
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There are a lot of YouTube videos about reading Hiragana/Katakana. But honestly, it’s just a matter of practicing again and again. The more you read, the easier it will become. Don’t get stuck on it for too long, it will improve over time.
Going character-by-character is what happens when you only know the characters, and not the words themselves.
The way we read words is by recognising the shape of the entire word, more or less. But this means that you need to have seen the word a lot of times.
As such, the best tip for getting better and faster at reading is to read a lot, and then read a lot more. Japanese is written in a mixture of kanji and kana, so that’s how you need to learn to recognise the words. It doesn’t really make sense to practice on kana-only texts because that won’t help you read actual natural Japanese faster.
A new word that you have never seen before will *always* be slower to read than a word you’ve seen many times, but of course even reading new words will become significantly easier with time. But in Japanese, there are relatively few kana-only words and most of those are pretty short, so it won’t be a big problem for very long. Most of the kana-only words are also among the more frequently-used words.
Of course you’ll be using furigana a lot too, depending on what tools you use for learning the language (DuoLingo should *not* be your primary tool, but it can be decent as a supplement). Reading furigana of course also makes faster at reading kana.