I apologize if this is a repeat post, I quickly searched through the posts/beginner thread/faq and didn’t see a similar post. I’m a lifelong reader and bookworm and over the past few years have fell in love with manga and light novels. But of course, the manga and light novels available to me are extremely limited by what gets lucky enough to be translated, and even then they take time to be translated.
I’ve tried on and off through the past 2 years to learn Japanese through various methods- all the free trials of the major learning apps, routes that specifically focus on kana, routes that specifically focus on vocabulary and grammar- but none of it sticks for me because I can’t read real Japanese any better after a few months of progress. And it seems like the vast majority of people who learn the language want the speaking/listening part specifically and just treat literacy as a supplement or mandatory extra so I’ve been unable to find any advice on paths to take either.
Im not looking for a magic “Learn to fluently read Japanese in 2 weeks” method, I understand that even in our native languages we usually spend 3-5 years learning to speak and listen before we learn to read. I’m just wondering if anyone has advice on specifically learning to read, possibly some resources for extremely basic reading practice, and to know what the prerequisites I absolutely have to struggle through are before I can progress in that direction so I can set realistic expectations. I appreciate any and all advice you can give, thanks!
TL;DR: I can’t bring myself to practice because I’m not getting closer to my goal reading well, advice?
5 comments
I also mostly enjoy reading and I pretty much followed this guide
learnjapanese.moe/
Basically took a few months to learn the basics and then started reading *EXTREMELY* slowly with a dictionary and looking up grammar.
I like visual novels the most because manga is hard to look stuff up since you need to use OCR or do radical search and visual novels are easy to text hook and they give you a little more context than full books, and I like how you get listening practice with voiced lines.
jpdb.io is very worthy checking out. It basically has vocabulary frequency lists for thousands of light novels, visual novels, and anime which you can learn through using SRS. For getting started, check out the websites FAQ and I’d recommend checking out the beginners guide that can be found through the jpdb Discord server.
When it comes to grammar, I personally like using bunpro.jp since its very easy to use. That said, last I checked it was 81 AUD per year, so if that’s an issue then you won’t get a huge amount out of it. Another popular option is going through the Dictionary of Basic Japanese grammar, taking some example sentences from a grammar point, and the putting these sentences into Anki. You can then grade your Anki card based on if you can correctly guess the function that the grammar point serves in that sentence.
Honestly, if you want to read books, just do it. I’m serious. Use a basic beginner guide to work through some introductory grammar and learn hiragana and some kanji.
There’s plenty of guides online that have level appropriate texts. Pick something and just go go go.
I really do feel like I’ve learned more just by reading manga and googling grammar I don’t understand than I did trying to slog through textbooks. Maybe the learning isn’t as structured, I’m sure there’s so high level stuff I’m “not supposed” to know yet and some lower level stuff I don’t know, but I feel like I’m getting better all the time.
It’s in a natural context in manga and books, as in how people would communicate so it’s both harder and easier at the same time. The biggest complaint with any language learning text is “it’s just not natural”.
Just give it a go. If you struggle, do more foundation stuff and try again in a month. Maybe it’ll work for you, maybe it won’t but at least you’ll have tried. 🙂
Please correct me if I’m interpreting your post wrong, but it seems like you’re not sticking with a single track for learning Japanese. Even though you’ve been learning for two years, I think every time you change tracks you’re more or less starting from scratch, so you don’t have two years’ progression, you have a few months’ worth.
You’re going to be very bad at reading for years. So don’t get too discouraged about not making huge progress in a few months. A few months is nothing. This takes YEARS. Just keep your head down and continue slowly soldiering on.
As others have said, the best way to learn to read is to do it. Buy some simple graded readers. Look up words you don’t know. Add them to your flash card stack. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I read a few simple books after Genki and you can learn to do this too.
Genki I and Genki II took me like 7 months. So you think about that. In 7 months from now you could be able to read simple books or you could be right where you are now.
Reading is super fun but you gotta hit those books. Get the basics down and buy some simple book from KADOKAWA or something.