I keep hearing/seeing that i should practice reading kanji, such as in simpler manga and even news articles. my question is: if i don’t know vocab or meanings of any kanji yet, how do i read stuff? do i learn vocab and kanji in the background while i read mangas? do i need to know a substantial amount of vocab and kanji already?
tl:dr- i’m wondering where i should start with learning kanji and vocab before i read mangas or children’s books.
5 comments
you cannot read without grammar and vocab and knowing the kana
kanji knowledge is necessary to different degrees depending on the material you’re reading, including if it has a furigana pronunciation guide above the kanji words
note: you can’t “read kanji”. you read words. kanji are just letters, you will only know what the word means or how it’s pronounced by learning the word
Children’s books and manga usually have furigana, so you can look up unknown words by their pronunciation in (online) dictionaries.
Here is what I did.
1. Learned Kana: Hiragana + Katakana
2. Learned Kanji Radicals
3. Went to Kanshudo.com to learn all 2136 daily use (jouyou) Kanji 100 at a time. From the most commonly used to the least commonly used.
4. At the same time, I was studying vocabulary and grammar on Duolingo, Drops, Human Japanese, and the Genki textbooks.
5. Within a year, I was able to read Manga with some ease, and for the Kanji, I couldn’t read, I could easily check them on Google Translate since I knew the English meanings of the Kanji.
Good luck, and I hope this helps!
you look stuff up in the dictionary, thousands and thousands of times …. and add to SRS like anki, and hope after so much effort your vocab grows …
if you pick something with furigana, looking up the word is a snap
if it doesn’t have it, you have to pick off the radicals menu in jisho or (harder) write it into an OCR program
The skill that forms the framework for reading is using clues to guess the meaning, relating that guess to the symbols you see, then using your understanding of the symbols and understanding of the story to correct each other.
When you study vocab, you don’t practice this reading-framework skill. When you finally start to read, you’ll find yourself having to catch up: you might recognize a lot of words and grammar patterns, but it’ll be slow and awkward and it’s hard to tell what things actually mean.
In this state, it’s much harder to learn vocabulary.
Conversely, when your vocabulary is lagging behind your ability to intuit gist, you’ll be able to make really good guesses, but you’ll miss some details. If you try to brag about your understanding, textbook-first learners will bully you. So definitely don’t brag.
To get good at reading, it’s best to do both at the same time. Look at manga, try to guess the story, be completely non-judgemental towards yourself. In a word: cheat! But also spend some time on a vocabulary deck like Core 2.3k. Over the course of a few months the two skills start to come together and holy shit you’re reading. You still suck but you’re reading.