What books should I get for learning C1/C2-level Japanese?

Note: I do not need to learn Kanji for the most part. My native tongue (aside from English as I have two native tongues) is Chinese (Mandarin). My Japanese grammar is pretty good now at this point. (I can use pretty much all of the basic particles with ease and few mistakes and I don’t struggle with sentence structure either.) But I still want to take my Japanese to the next level. Where I’m lacking the most in is definitely vocabulary. I would say that my vocab level is probably still at B1~B2. (In the level system that I’m using, C2 is the highest possible level of fluency while A1 is the lowest possible level of fluency.)

2 comments
  1. Extensive reading (多読) is the way to go… I’d just say to try to cover a wide range of topics, and materials at different levels. There are free graded readers here https://tadoku.org/japanese/en/free-books-en/

    You can start from the lowest level and use them for speed reading. Usually with Tadoku you read for understanding and don’t break your flow to look up vocab, but you might as well keep a spreadsheet and add any unknown words to that. For example, I think somewhere in Level 0 there are all kinds of cooked-egg vocab words that might surprise you.

    But I’d also challenge yourself with more difficult texts- check out Aozora Bunko for some Japanese literature that’s out of copyright. Check out Tofugu’s recommended resources- there’s at least one group that meets monthly to read and discuss these (it says JET alumni in the title, but anyone can join). See if any of your library e-resources are in Japanese, too, for more contemporary material. And see if you can sign up for the Japan Foundation’s digital library card.

    More lower-level materials (around N4):
    News Web Easy is probably too easy, but you could use it to practice skimming and scanning for unknown vocab and to increase your reading speed, then go on to read the adult-level articles. Satori Reader is another lower-level resource- you could always sign up for a month and read everything that’s on there quickly, then discontinue your membership.

    Other random resources:
    See what you can get out of sites like NHK For School:

    https://www.nhk.or.jp/school/

    Watch Japanese-language TED Talks and read the transcripts

    Search for topics that interest you on YouTube in Japanese and find lectures/documentaries/videos about them.

    Make sure you work on your listening, too, and your production (speaking/writing). YouTuber Kemushichan (Loretta Scott) has some good videos where she explains how daily writing/audio journaling helped her in her learning (and to really master vocabulary). There are some Japanese teachers with podcasts (Teppei, Noriko, etc) who have built communities of learners (Japanese Together) and Noriko does quarterly Challenges you can join too. Or find your own language exchange partner/study buddy 🙂

    Good luck, and let us know what books you end up liking!

Leave a Reply
You May Also Like