How much my reading speed increased over my first 500 hours of reading visual novels and light novels

[Progress graph](https://i.imgur.com/2p1kmjI.png)

I started at a reading speed of about 4000 characters per hour to now over 10000 characters per hour, on VN’s of similar difficulty. I still have a long way to go, but it has been very interesting for me to track my reading speed, since I can still remember how slow it was to read anything when I first started. Seeing such linear progress has been really motivating for me, so I wanted to share this.

Background:

I started reading visual novels about 7 months ago in June. Since then, I have been reading about 3 hours per day, +1-2 hours of anki. The first VN I started reading was Summer Pockets. I didn’t complete the entire VN, but spent about 80 hours on it in total.

At the start of this graph, at 0 hours in, I had already spent about 1500 hours in Anki spread over several years, but had done little actual immersion (only \~100 hours of anime total). At this point, I had about 7k cards in my Anki deck (from frequency lists). But my reading was still very slow, because my Anki knowledge was really loose, and it took a long time to recall words.

At around the 350-450 hour range, I started reading more LN’s instead of VN’s, which is why there is a gap in the recording. Dips in reading speed probably correspond to when I switch to reading a new VN. However, most of the VN’s I read are still pretty easy. I usually stick to VN’s which are rated 4-5 difficulty on jpdb.

If you’re interested in doing something similar, TheMoeWay has a great guide on how to set it up so you can read visual novels with a popup dictionary here: [https://learnjapanese.moe/vn/](https://learnjapanese.moe/vn/).