How do you to get FAST at reading?

16 comments

1. Native speakers are **insanely fast** at reading. I don’t know if it’s possible to get to that level of speed (I’ve seen some real crazy shit), however one thing I am 100% sure about is that if you read more you’ll naturally get faster at reading.

   Also some people just read… slower than others. Some people have an internal voice/subvocalize everything they read, some other people don’t (I’m in the former group). Even in my native language I used to “co-op” read books with friends sometimes and I was always the slowest. By the time I was at 10-20% into a page, two of my friends were already done reading it and kept asking to move on to the next page. And I read **a lot**, ever since I was a kid.

   Just keep reading and you’ll get better.

   > I constantly run into unknowns when I’m reading, even with a vocabulary of 14,000 and it’s slowing my reading down a lot.

   This also gets fixed by reading more.

   > Making these Anki cards for every unknown takes A LOT of time :/

   You don’t really have to make anki cards for every single unknown. I usually like to wait to see the same word 4-5 times and being forced to look it up every time before I realize that “maybe I should put this into anki”. A lot of words I read once and then a few more times and I remember them as is, and a lot of other words only appear like once and never again so it’s pointless for me at the time to put it into anki. Just read more and apply some moderation so you don’t burn out.

2. I’m also a slow reader and it’s my goal to improve that this year. I have ~2,700 kanji on record according to Anki and I would estimate my vocab to be at 6-8k.

   One of the things that I’ve been doing is relying on my understanding of kanji through vocabulary and applying it to new vocabulary in an attempt to fill in gaps in my understanding before I go ahead and interrupt my reading to actually look things up. That shaves some time off. I got through コンビニ人間 in six days after getting used to reading this way whereas it took me a month to read 君の名は a year or two prior to that.

   Maybe I won’t even do that many lookups at all eventually unless my guesses end up being obviously misaligned with everything else I actually understood.

   There are resources out there for learning to speedread in Japanese if you want to look into how natives increase their speed.

   And if you’re into visual novels, I noticed that some VNs have an auto read function that can be set precisely by characters per minute. Apparently, the average speed for middle schoolers is 500-700 characters per minute, so you could try challenging that and just go back over what you missed in the logs.

3. What kinda of level of content are you reading?

   I’ve been reading Easy News on the subreddit and with the app (Todai easy news), and while I have to look up a lot of words (I’m at N4), it’s a pretty quick and streamlined experience. However, I’m not looking to understand _every single word_ but get the idea of what I’m reading and then go back and look at the words I either didn’t know or understand.

4. Practice reading quickly. Instead of stopping every time you see something you don’t know, just breeze through it and only stop if you don’t know what’s going on contextually. If you’ve been reading a lot and studying for five years, you should have a decent grasp at guessing words based on the kanji. Practice just reading something quickly. This helps your eyes move ahead and your brain work a little quicker.

   But still do your regular reading study where you look stuff up you don’t know.

5. One thing to keep in mind too is that native speakers don’t anki, as we all know.

   They’re immersed 24/7, so our cases aren’t the same, but you can take me or any person that learns English as their second language as an example. I don’t immerse as much as a native speaker might, but I do immerse quite a bit in English, and that helps me retain a reasonable amount of vocab. I don’t have to anki English vocab, just like a native speaker doesn’t have to. Eventually you just immerse/naturally engage with the language enough and at some point that alone helps you acquire and retain the vocab you need.

   Not saying this necessarily applies to your case at all, just mentioning it here cuz it is indeed a fact that natives don’t anki, and that does have some implications for us learners.

6. What do you do an unknown word? Do you stop and look it up or continue on with your life? Learning to read around unknown words can massively improve your reading speeds. I still come across words I don’t know in my native language but I never stop to look them out because I can get the overall vibe and I’m like “eh, good enough.”

   Something else to keep in mind is that it really is a volume thing. Generally speaking, 10 year olds read faster than 8 year olds, right? That’s because in that two year age gap, kids do *a lot* of reading. I don’t just mean reading for pleasure either. Think about it. They read their math textbook, the menu at a restaurant, their science homework, text in commercials. They’re reading even when they don’t realize their reading. They’re constantly bombarded with a huge volume of text. If you want to read at native speeds, you not only have to have read the same number of books as a native, but more to make up for not constantly being bombarded by words

   Also keep in mind that there is no “native reading speed.” Native speakers read at a wide variety of speeds depending on the person. Personally, I read rather slowly in my native language. Doesn’t make me a “worse” reader

7. I think it’s really helpful to watch a lot of Japanese that has accurate subtitles so you get used to reading at the same pace as native speech, it will feel overwhelming at first but with perseverance your brain will figure out how to keep up better.

   Edit: word

8. >**I mainly only read manga** and sometimes the news, but I’m super slow. Running into so many unknowns a page **when I try to read a novel** is absolutely destroying my confidence.

   IMO this is your problem—it probably has more to do with your expectations than the reality of the situation. The way that language is used differs from medium to medium; your manga reading skills won’t perfectly translate.

   * Manga has pictures, so it’s not necessary to include text describing the world like it is in a novel
   * Manga has speech bubbles, so you don’t get dialogue/action tags
   * A big part of novels is seeing into the inner workings of a character’s mind; a manga is more focused on the plot / what the character is doing
   * Manga is mostly dialogue, and the vocabulary/grammar we use in speech is more limited than the range of language we use in writing

   So… yeah! You’re going to encounter growing pains. You’re super confident reading manga, and suddenly when you pick up a book reading is no longer such a smooth experience. That doesn’t mean that something is wrong with you, just that your mind is grappling with a new sort of task.

   Your first few books will especially suck, as that’s when you’re figuring out how to straddle the difference between manga language and book language, but progress comes relatively quickly. Just earlier today there was a post from a person showing that [their VN reading speed more than doubled in 500 hours of reading](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/112o39v/how_much_my_reading_speed_increased_over_my_first/).

   Just know that it will get smoother as you go

9. Read novels (preferably vns, but anything that sparks your interest is fine) and mine only hard words. Also, it appears you don’t know how to link Yomichan and Anki with Ankiconnect, making cards should only take one click.

10. Read more
    Increase vocab knowledge
    Increase grammar knowledge

    If you’re looking for some hack or shortcut, there’s none, sorry. It’s nothing but hard work.

11. > even with a vocabulary of 14,000

    An average adult is said to have a vocabulary of 50,000. It’s natural you cannot read fast at where you are right now.

    > (I’m shit at this skill in English too)

    How many hours do you generally read per day? You can’t get any faster than you can in English.

12. It’s really just reading more and deliberately reading faster. It took me over 100 books to reach average native reading speed (500文字/分). It won’t take five years, but if you start reading novels now it might just take a year to get into the average native speed range of 24000-36000 characters per hour

13. N1 is not made out to be making you reading fast, or conversation ready…

    It all depends on how you study, and what for…

14. How do you get an Anki deck with 14,000 sentences?!?!?

    Just to let you know, speed readers in English cheat. They can read fast because they turn off the speaking voice in their head and focus in trying to comprehend what they read instead of actually taking their time to enjoy the poetic nature of the writer. That’s why they can get up to 60-80% reading comprehension and be able to say that they read it.

15. I studied the Japanese curriculum by correspondence and the speed of reading on the CDs for my 国語 lessons shot up between year 4 and year 5 very dramatically.

    I was forced to also read at that speed to follow the audio so it just became a habit by high school when they stopped sending CDs 😅

16. From a person who got 200 words/minute at around N3-N2 level, I would say that it significantly depends on 2 things. How familiar something is, mostly how much vocabulary you cover, and how fast you can translate unknown words. In my case translation was instant, I prefer to use such programs that hovering above a word instantly pop ups it’s meanings, and I got a habit to trace where I read, kinda similar to how some kids trace with a finger. In such setup of reading books in a similar genre my reading speed skyrocket very fast. Initially I had around 500-600 learning hours, mostly aimed at grammar, and when I started to use content, my reading speed was around 50 words/minute. After ~100 hours of reading it doubled to 100 words and after another 300-400 hours it was already around 200. But significantly lower if I was reading unfamiliar genres. I guess there is no any other solution here outside of learning at least 10-15k words and having practice with it. Knowing some word isn’t only about word-meaning pair, it’s also about how fast we can recognize it visually, that also takes time to learn. Thus such 400-500 hours reading time, it’s only a part of overall learning, because I was mostly reading similar settings.

    If you want to be able to read without any translation tools, then I would say that you need ~15k vocabulary to have 98% coverage (it’s a solid number to understand the meaning of unknown words via context alone), and then you need to practice in such way that you sweep through anything unfamiliar. Grammar helps here a lot, because grammar teaches the flow, if you understand the flow, you don’t need so much individual words. And similarly adverbs, it’s such bits like “although”. Look at something like “Although you don’t know all words in a text…”. We can omit whole phrase following it and it’s still understandable. In Japanese there are hundreds of such elements that help to understand the flow. I’m not sure if it’s a part of grammar, but a lot of grammar books like DoJG cover it.