How do you read Japanese?

17 comments

1. My 2 cents. My reading level isn’t that high but I did read around 15 books so far. I have around 11k anki cards and I can probably recognize around 1k kanji and maybe 7-8k vocab.

   * Thinking in English is something you might have to fallback to, but you want to avoid if you can. It starts with small/simple sentences just being read “in Japanese” and longer/more complicated are a goal to work to. I find this whole “reading in Japanese” process to be really interesting. It’s like there is a point where your brain is just too lazy to go back into English and that’s the point you want to get to.

   * If you are gonna use google translate, also consider [deepl](https://www.deepl.com) since it’s basically better. But also consider using these as a last resort and don’t make them a habit.

   * Don’t forget to write down vocab you want to learn! You have to keep increasing your vocab. I keep a giant file of words I want to learn and add some of them to anki every day.

2. Don’t translate except as a last resort, and then if you do, make sure to go back to try to reinterpret it directly. Definitely do not teach yourself to translate as a step in understanding. Also Google translate and it’s ilk can be very confusing or wrong, use extremely sparingly.

   Take your time. If some sentences are too hard, move on and come back. And if a particular book or media is forcing you to look up every word, then pick something else; incomprehensible immersion is frustrating and useless.

   As to look up as you go or look up at the end and reread, both are valid. Cycle thru both, they train slightly different skills.

3. I read to understand the story, not the individual sentences. If you don’t understand a word, skip it. If you don’t quite get the grammar, skip it. If the sentence has you completely baffled, move on. Sometimes the word or grammar or sentence will become clearer to you in context. You can make better guesses and connections by looking at the whole.

   If a kanji keeps showing up and it seems important. Like you don’t know if it’s talking about a bear or a dog. Then take a sec to look it up.

4. You need to learn more grammar and solidify your understanding of grammar you’ve already learned. For example, from your translation of “どこかで地図を見たいなと思ったら、ギルド内のテーブルを使って良いと言って貰えたので” it’s clear you struggle when multiple grammar points are stacked on top of each other simultaneously in the same sentence, as your translation is oversimplistic and does not properly account for various grammatical nuances this sentence (e.g. と思ったら, と言ってもらえた although the unusual use of 貰 doesn’t help matters).

   You would also benefit from knowing significantly more vocab. For example, the mistranslation of your first sentence stems from not knowing that the word 両方 means “both” rather than referring to literal directions and the fact that 手に入れる is idiomatic for “to obtain”.

   I would also caution you from relying on Google Translate too heavily, and if you do use it, be aware of its weaknesses. Fortunately, in this case, Google Translate was more or less accurate.

5. I don’t think there’s necessarily a wrong way to do it. I actually took the same approach as you, just trial by fire. Slowly, but surely. It was a frustrating experience at first, and unlike using online material mine was print media and image based (meaning no copy and paste). So I had to really learn how to look up kanji through radical look ups–and I got very fast at that. If I wanted to run it through translation service, I had to rewrite it into digital text (which I did often enough).

   You have to start somewhere, and I think while recommendations to stick to easier media are good. Breaking down understanding something you actually are genuinely interested in will serve as strong motivator to stick to it. I spent a well over a year working through half way a book and over time it got easier and easier. It was well out of my range, but I was just absorbed and while frustrating to get over that initial wall, gratifying over time.

   I’ll be a bit of contrarian and say that unlike most people, I think using translation is completely fine. There’s just one thing you need to keep in mind when using it, just use it to give you contextual clues and that’s it. If you have experience with programming languages, then it might actually end up being easier. For me Japanese didn’t feel like English does but more disparate ideas and concepts strung together and you logically piece them together and see how they interact with each other.

   Example: Table, map, guild, hands. Even if it’s ambiguous just attempt to string these concepts together to visualize what the character is doing and what the author might be thinking and just go from there. You don’t need to think about it in English but perhaps writing your own version of the events in English could help.

6. Anki.

7. My general process for something I don’t understand is:

   1. Yomichan to look up a word if it’s just a vocabulary gap, then make a vocab card for it (or if you’re using Renshuu, go add it to one of your schedules)
   2. If it’s a grammar gap, take a quick look on Bunpro to see if I can find it and make sense of it
   3. If I can’t figure it out after that… I just skip it and move on with my general understanding.

   Maybe it’s the wrong thing to do, but if I can’t figure it out after vocab and grammar lookup, it means it’s probably more advanced and I’ll get to it later as I work through Genki and later texts. I’d rather read more sentences with the time it would have taken me to struggle over finding a precise meaning, especially if that precise meaning doesn’t affect my ability to understand the rest of the story.

   I’m also doing most of my reading on things targeted to my level, which is Tadoku graded readers, and some of the easier Satori reader stuff. I’m not going into Manga or LN because I know I’m not ready for those, and it would just be frustrating.

   tl;dr I don’t treat reading as the right time to learn things. Find material approximately at my level, and read for quantity to reinforce things I do understand rather than dissecting everything.

8. My method is probably not the best or most efficient, but here goes.

   I usually read manga, and use yomichan and [manga_ocr](https://github.com/kha-white/manga-ocr). Initially I’ll try to read the sentence by itself to see if I understand it. If I don’t, I’ll take a screenshot of the sentence so manga_ocr parses the text, and then I’ll paste it somewhere in my browser and use yomichan to check unknown vocabulary. I’ve already done Genki I and II so I almost never have to look up grammar. When I do find grammar I don’t understand, a quick Google search, or just referring back to Tae Kim or Genki, will do. I never translate the full sentence, I just check the meaning of unknown words and try to understand the sentence in Japanese.

   If I was doing Anki, I’d add the unknown vocab I check with yomichan to an Anki deck for review. However (and I say this after trying several times), I hate doing SRS. I’m just hoping to acquire words naturally by encountering them multiple times. Like I said, probably not the most efficient, but it’s the way I personally think is most enjoyable.

9. Skim it, and if there’s too many kanji I’ll have to look up, I just pass, lol.

   I already barely have the patience to read a text in my first or second language.

10. I find ichi.moe really helpful for parsing sentences and finding definitions for set phrases I wouldn’t have known to group together if I’d looked it up on my own.

    Mostly I just stick to stuff that I can *mostly* understand and look up the things I don’t. If a sentence has too many unknown words, I’ll probably just skip it.

11. Currently I read a manga that utilizes furigana. I also have an English copy, but don’t read any of the story in English until I have read and done my best to read the Japanese parts first.

12. At around N3 level, I’ll grab a simple manga and read stuff, and can usually infer the meaning of kanji I don’t know by context. That said, fiction works still like to throw weird shit at you sometimes. Any fiction work where there’s a chuuni character is a big no-no for me, they say the weirdest shit.

    Keep in mind that even when furigana is present in a book/light novel, it’s common that it’s only put over the kanji the first time it appears, meaning you need to keep a glossary going as you read along because the next time you see a character you don’t get the cheater text.

13. I try to read as much as I can. Sometimes I don’t really understand the verb ending or particle use. There’s usually at least some kanji I don’t understand. I can kinda guess around the first one, and for the kanji, well, it’s possible sometimes to guess from individual kanji or radicals. Finally, there’s just context clues. My accuracy is so-so.

14. If anyone here knew the answer, we’d be having this conversation in Japanese. Like I’m five years in, I can draw 1000 kanjis, no problem. Reading is just slow and miserable and not fun. My recommendation is audiobooks.

15. Def add yomichan to your browser it’s WAY faster and efficient than just jisho, also I find using music and repeating it a lot while actually watching the lyrics is helpful

16. I engage in intensive and extensive reading, which is described in more detail here: https://www.fluentu.com/blog/intensive-and-extensive-reading/

    For example, I do intensive reading on the computer where I have easy and convenient access to yomichan, anki, the wider internet for searching, etc. whereas my extensive reading is mainly through videogames and I just use my phone with my capacitive pen to quickly look up unknown words 🙂

17. My reading skill got much better when I discovered LingQ (Satori Reader would be a Japanese only alternative). It makes the first weeks much less painful. It‘s quite expensive (around $100 per year) but for me it was a game changer for my reading skills. The free version is a good demo to check it out but completely useless to really use it.

    Two tipps for your approach:

    Google Translate is terrible for Japanese. DeepL is much better, but the by far best machine translator for Japanese is currently ChatGPT after my experience. Just write “translate this:” and copy the Japanese text in. It gets much more context related stuff than DeepL. And you can even ask it about stuff you don’t understand and it explains it to you. It doesn’t always make sense, but sometimes it helps.

    Instead of jisho.org I would have a look at jpdb.io. It has some advantages but jisho.org is still fine.