To preface, by beginner/intermediate level, I have a working knowledge of the grammar listed in Tae Kim’s guide, and I completed the 2k core anki vocab list (though I haven’t kept up on it so I have let some slip, my vocab is probably closer to 1k).
I’m attempting to read some child material right now (Kirby to be specific) and I was wondering how much I should agonize over deciphering 100% of every sentence. Is it good enough to understand what the sentence is trying to convey? Or do I need to understand exactly what every part means?
5 comments
I was in a class that focused on learning Japanese through reading children’s materials, and the general rule of thumb is that you stop reading a book if you don’t understand at least 75% of the material. I’d say in my experience getting the idea of a sentence is perfectly fine.
Have you tried Satori reader? I’m kinda in the same boat as you, and being a bit OCD I tend to agonize over every bit of a sentence. Satori Reader let’s you do that, it breaks up the sentence into components and explains grammar points. You can do a 1month free trial or even just try out the free articles.
It’s good to try to get the gist of things, and then you can reread multiple times to catch more details.
IMO, read for volume. Quantity of words going through your mind is more important than understanding every little thing – you won’t remember 95% of stuff you look up anyway. You need a fairly decent foundation to do this though – 2k is probably about half of what you need.
Get back on Anki – that’s where you should understand everything, because you’ll actually remember it. Start Anki-ing things that are closer to what you’re reading – e.g. put sentences from your books into it, or subs2srs anime that are similar. Anki is the quality study, reading is for quantity of exposure to Japanese. If you keep going through Core, you’re less likely to be studying the words you’re going to need for Kirby or whatever.
Here’s my biggest tip. Read, but let it go if you can’t understand it. My usual reading process for Visual novels is to use a dictionary and grammar reference to decipher every unknown word or grammar structure that I come across in any new sentence. Once I read that sentence and form an understanding of the sentence in my head using the dictionary look-ups, I move onto the next sentence, but here’s the important part. If I don’t understand it, I take a minute to think about it. If I still don’t understand it, even after a minute, I move on. Simple as that. Keep doing that with material that you like and you’ll improve over time.