So I have 2 goals. My main goal is to understand the anime I watch without English subtitles. The second is to read manga. I decided to learn kanji because I need them to read lots of sources and reading is a good way to get familiar with the language.
After 6 months of learning Japanese I’m just passed n5 level and am now learning at a faster rate. However it seems I’ll only comfortably be able to learn around 1000 kanji and 2500 words in a year. Considering my goals and my expected results how long will it take for me to understand a large amount of what I read or hear without having to look up so many words.
I don’t mind looking up one or two words in a sentence but when I tried Satori reader a few months ago I had to look up nearly everything. It was tedious so I stopped and planned to wait till I know more words and grammar.
I want to know how long it will take me to get to the point where I’ll know that I don’t know something specific, and i’ll know it’s a word or grammar point or something. I want to approximate when i’ll be at a point when I get the gist of the majority of what I read or hear, and just have to look up Japanese to fill in the blanks.
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You should actually speak Japanese, to a human. Because learning kanji is great, but if you aren’t actively using the language… everything you learn will go in one ear.. then out the other over time.
But it’s just what I think.
I just brute forced my way through this stage, personally. As in, I would attack anything in Japanese I could get my hands on and just accept I would have to keep one eye glued to a dictionary. I tried putting every new word I encountered into Anki but I’m sure you can imagine that quickly becomes unreasonable if you’re trying to use a lot of Japanese media, so I was just selective about what I thought was really important to put into Anki, and let the rest go. If I forget, I forget, I’ll see it again.
When I got tired of struggling to understand every sentence, I would take a break from any immersion for a week and go back to exclusive learning from my textbook (Genki) which required much less effort to learn from, even if it wasn’t quite as “real”. Then I’d switch back to using the textbook less and start butting my head up against real Japanese again…
Repeating this process over months and years simply led to me seeing everything I need to get by reading most everyday material so many times it’s trivial at this point. I went back recently and looked at the notebook I kept with pages of words from Pokemon Gold in Japanese. I remember sweating as I carefully wrote all the kanji and definitions, swearing I’d never be able to remember all this in a million years. Except now I look down the list and all the words are easy… even “hard” words like 図鑑 are obvious in both meaning and reading by looking at the kanji. Most of those words I never put in anki, and yet somehow they’re all up in my brain anyway. That’s purely the result of reading and listening to tons of Japanese.
**tl;dr** Keep attacking native material even if it’s hard, and when brute forcing becomes too tiresome take a break and spend more time with learner’s materials that are designed so you can understand everything. This way you’re always making progress. Repeat this for X months and Y years until you speak Japanese 🙂
You need to master the most common 20,000+ words that Japanese people use day to day so you don’t have to look up words in the dictionary frequently. Get a frequency dictionary and mine vocabulary from there. It’ll take you a while to get there so hang in there.
About your side question, you rather need to know grammar well. Reading can be very simple even if you need to check 1-3 words every sentence, when such words are very simple and you barely need to click or hover with cursor above it to get translation. Much harder to translate grammar forms, because these usually have at least several different functions or can’t be explained in several words.
And speaking about how much vocabulary we need to understand everything without a dictionary, then generally it’s 15k words (98% coverage). Can be lower if content we are using is rather narrow and constantly uses the same words.
2500 kanji and 10-20k words, approximately
i’m studying for n1 and i’m about 5 novels into reading (i could have read a lot more by now, i just took a long break) and i still have about 4 unknown words per page on average, and it’s improvement has asymptotically slowed down, so it won’t hit 3 for another couple books, i suspect, and 2 will be many books away. that being said, with a rare exception, i can get by without caring about those 4 words and still understand what’s going on just fine
I’d say knowing the 6000 most common words is a watershed where things become bearable(that’s when I began to read my first long length novel, which took 100 hours total). But the only way to get better at reading is to read. So the earlier you start, the faster you will progress.
I recently reached level you mentioned where I can watch anime with jp subtitle. I am using jpdb as my SRS. It is **around 1500 kanji and 6000 most common words** where I can watch anime comfortably without using dictionary much.
As a side note, since your goal is to watch anime which is similar to my goal, I want to share my study method. I sort anime by difficulty in jpdb, choose easy ones first, watch an episode of it at animelon, then learn that episode deck in jpdb. I do the same process with next episode, harder anime, etc. This kill two birds with one stone, watching anime and learning vocab. There is also added benefit of easier to learn some words since you have context and scene.
Reaching i + 1 at least (where one word per sentence is unknown) is going to take you a number of years if you’re only going at 2500 words per year. 90% knowledge is at 10,000 words iirc.
The N2 is 6000 words, N3 is about 3750 words, N4 is 1500 words, and N5 is 800 words. At this point you can read quite a bit
The N1 throws another 10,000 words at you, quite a jump. If you are reading for business, you need to be at this level.
For recreational reading, you can survive around the N3 mark, depending on the material
Too many. It really depends what you’re watching/reading.
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I have over 13,000 words known in my passive vocabulary. When I read Dragon Ball I find an unknown word every few pages. When I read something hard like AOT/Jujutsu/Jojo I find a word like every page or every other page. If I read the news there can be 5-10+ unknown words an article depending on the theme.
Depends enormously. I’m at 7k words now and easier LNs are trivial but ‘real’ literature is still rough. Also learning words from the thing you’re immersing in will help, because many things (would definitely be true for most manga, especially isekai type stuff) have maybe like 100 words that aren’t so common in everyday usage but used a lot in that thing.
If you continue reading with a pop-up dictionary eventually the words will stick. It’s a much more efficient way of learning than anki so I wouldn’t judge your ability based in the amount of words you learned with flashcards. Just think about how many sentences you are exposed to in an hour of reading compared to how many daily cards you do. If you read a lot in a short time span you can literally feel yourself get better.
probably give it a year. after a year you will probably be able to read stuff with difficulty, but not having to look everything up. i see a lot of people saying you need tons of kanji and tons of words but i read my first book after like a year or so and understood it ok. even now i understand pretty much everything i read/watch and 10000 would probably be a rather generous estimate of my vocabulary
The thing is, it’s really hard to know when that moment will come for you. Some people are amazing at decoding language and can do really well at understanding words from context, others really need to confirm their knowledge in dictionaries and can’t puzzle things out at all. And some people use materials that perfectly build upon each other, others read a wide variety of different things. The former will feel comfortable sooner, but the latter will have the greater skill when they finally get comfortable.
Like, you could know 10,000 words and still be unable to do anything if all of those words are jargon, you know? OTOH, you could know 50 words and read an entire native-level book, if you chose that book well.
I think 95% word coverage is pretty a good mark as far as VN LN go, you can work through 90% too but it can be hard sometime.
I searched through jpdb stats and found that you can hit 95% for pretty much every VN with like 7k words at most other than some VNs like oretsuba, muramasa, romeo tanaka etc.. stuff which you hit 95 % at more like 11-13k.
90 percent for VNs other than the ones that I named is also about 4k-5k so you could try them then too.
LNs are a bit harder than VNs.
I’d like to point out out something overlooked here: There is “knowing a word” and “knowing all the meanings of a word”. I quite frequently find myself looking up words I know because their meaning does not make sense in context to find out they have a slang meaning that word lists and books rarely tell one about.
I have like 7k words. Anki says I have way more…but I know the truth is that there are words I know in anki and don’t recognize in practice. and I can’t take a step without seeming all these new words. BUT, sometimes I can read like half a page without looking something up.
7k is definitely not enough. It seems like I would need twice this amount.
I can do another “color coded” page of what reading looks like for me if anyone is interested.
Estimated I know around 20,000 words, and that’s not even enough to read something of higher difficulty without lookups
If you’ve already built a foundation of about 1500 words, and already know basic grammar, Start sentence mining.
Its basically making anki cards out of i+1 sentences from your immersion material. This is the no.1 way to learn Japanese if your goal is to be able to read manga and watch anime without subs (again, provided you’ve built a foundation already)
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If you haven’t built your foundation yet, finish the Tango N5+N4 decks and you’ll get to around 2000 words in 6 months or less. For grammar, just follow a textbook such as Genki or a grammar guide such as Misa, Cure dolly, or Tae kim.
Check out [https://learnjapanese.moe/](https://learnjapanese.moe/)
I think a few have said this, but you’ll never actually get good at reading unless you read. You have to just plow through the beginning stage, and understand you’ll have to look up a lot of words and grammar points. Then eventually you’ll get through a page and just look up 1 or 2 words, and you’ll feel fantastic, and then you’ll read the next sentence and have no clue what it says. If you stick with it you’ll see glimpses of where you’re trying to get until you’re there
Idk, everyone has incredible suggestions here so I’ll add my experience. I attempted reading pretty early on, maybe too early, but I probably knew a few hundred words and maybe a couple hundred kanji. I think i started with Yotsubato! (Also the first couple chapters are the hardest because it has more adults and uses harder language, once the story opens up to regular shenanigans then its easier just fyi.) It was hard around then, I tried some stuff, and kind of got a setup for it but took a break from studying for a bit. When I came back after reviewing and learning new words I tried again and it was a bit easier but I was still using bilingual manga till it went down. Took another break.
Idk, I’m reading okay, now actual games like persona 4 golden and a vn the nonary series 999 and then re:life manga and want to start rezero web novel but I’ll still wait a tad to finish these things and I’m arguably still not really ready. I know around 800 kanji and probably 2.5-3k words, although not necessarily the most frequent. And am familiar with all N5 and N4 grammar and a bit of N3 grammar and other random grammar points, not necessarily perfect though, just familiar. But trying earlier helped my confidence that even if it’s really hard, I can do it and I can comprehend it at least a little. Now it’s not a matter of whether I can handle it or not, I can handle most things probably, it’s just a question of how long it’ll take and how much I’ll have to lookup, but if I’m doing things I enjoy then that’s really a non-issue anyway.
Also, reading earlier and more helps reading speed, helps cement for me really grammar points and the way words are used and sentences are structured, and although off-putting to some people, I think it’s very highly motivating to read something and extract meaning even if it isn’t perfect. But I also have a super easy and quick setup to make anki cards so as I study the words from content I’m consuming it’s going quicker and I’m learning more. And really, my reading speed is getting noticeably better each week. Kind of like in your native language how you can read words even if the letters are jumbled around since you just scan the shape and some letters like “ntviae elnsigh saekeprs sohlud raed tihs prteclefy fnie”
Well looking into it more I guess there wasn’t any research to spawn that particular early internet meme, and that may not even be readable to people so now I just look stupid, but there is lots of research I took a quick gander at about how we read and process words and learn and what not and my short conclusion is reading is such a complex behavior with so many interworking brain regions that i think it really can’t hurt to get more reading practice in your target language even if just to get used to common conjugations, word order, particle usage, reading the characters, and learning common patterns. Pattern recognition is probably the most complex thing our brain does by which many other complex behaviors emerge. Can’t hurt to train it to recognize patterns you want to eventually recognize.
I think with a decent base, reading can be very beneficial with the right material, or less beneficial with the wrong or super hard material, but you’re going to learn either way and slowly train the brain to do what it does even with just five minutes a day that will really build and strengthen those connections. I think people worry too much about the most effective method or the perfect time to do this or that, but imo as long as you keep at it you’ll make progress and if you consume content you like then you’ll be more interested and consume more of it and improve more quickly anyway.
I’d suggest finding something on the easier side but also interesting to you, and maybe read 5 minutes a day or one page of a manga a day or whatever and compare the change each day. Or read for maybe 30 minutes once a week while studying how you have been in-between and see how much easier it feels each time, and I don’t do this but maybe time yourself or count pages or a word count if possible when you finish and plot it on a graph and after 4 weeks I would guarantee that your ability will already have noticeably improved. Or some mix of these, 5 mins a day and one 30 min or hour session a week would really make for some interesting data.
Anyway, good luck, keep it up, and don’t worry too much about whats most efficient or the perfect time or method or material. Just have fun!
keep trying bro