I have been learning to read Japanese for a very long time (I’m too ashamed to be more specific!), and have very little to show for it…
I suspect that I’m going about this in a thoroughly archaic (early 20th-century-ish) way, and that these days there must be techniques that would accelerate my progress significantly.
For example, I thought that a tool like a Kindle may provide enough immediate assistance to allow me to begin to read, say, novels in Japanese at a pace sufficiently fluid to preserve my interest in what I am reading.
Indeed, I found out that the Kindle platform offers something called Word Wise, which provides in-context translations of difficult vocabulary.
So, I went ahead and downloaded the Kindle app on my tablet, only to discover that I could not find a single Kindle book in Japanese that I wanted to read and for which Word Wise was available. In other words, Kindle + Word Wise may be great for learners of, say, Spanish or French, but it is essentially useless towards my goal of reading Japanese fluently.
(To be fair, the problem of providing contextual reading help for Japanese is significantly harder than for other languages, since it really requires not just a translation, but often also a reading.)
Are there some *other* modern tools that would do what I had hoped Kindle + Word Wise would do for reading Japanese content?
EDIT: as a rough measure of my level, I can identify the keyword for pretty much all the 2200 characters in Heisig’s *Reading the Kanji vol. I*. Furthermore, I estimate that, over the years, I have learned the reading of a few hundred words. (E.g. I know that 飲む is read のむ.) But, I have great difficulty understanding Japanese text *even when it is extensively annotated with furigana.* In other words, my deficits are not only in the area of readings, but also in the area of general vocabulary.
6 comments
What do you mean by ‘identify the keyword’? I’m not quite understanding what you mean by you can identify 2200 but know the reading of just a few hundred?
A lot of people use Kiwi Browser on their phone, then install an addon called Yomichan and add a dictionary to it, lastly add a book to ttu-reader ([https://ttu-ebook.web.app](https://ttu-ebook.web.app)). You can also use Yomichan to read other websites too, of course.
Though one thing Yomichan doesn’t do is provide in-context translations. If you need those maybe Satori-Reader might be more your thing. Though you can’t use it for your own books (if I understood correctly how Word Wise works).
I’ll list down some resources that might be helpful and the technique I use to read literature on my own. [Japanese.io](https://Japanese.io) is a great site to read on tablet or smartphone, you’ll have to login to it tho, go over to the books section and browse all books they have (aozora bunko database + some other stuff), select the work you want to read. The site has an in-built pop-up dictionary that shows up whenever you click on a word, has kanji details and all.
Now on to the method, this is what I use, just want to give an general idea. 6 Tabs on chrome in my phone (or laptop), choose your story say Akutagawa’s 羅生門. Search 羅生門 青空文庫 on the 1st Tab, open the story on [Japanese.io](https://Japanese.io) as well on another tab (i don’t like to over rely on this, gotta use my brain to guess kanji as well haha), search for the audiobook for the story on 青空文庫朗読 (try yt if can’t find audiobook there) , play it alongside or when you get stuck or after you finish a paragraph, a Jisho tab as its always good to have a dictionary at hand, Google in another for searching cultural references; I prefer google images. Finally open up an english translation of the text for final reference. Also helps if you search up the author background and themes in the story.
Hope this helps.
>as a rough measure of my level, I can identify the keyword for pretty much all the 2200 characters in Heisig’s Reading the Kanji vol. I. Furthermore, I estimate that, over the years, I have learned the reading of a few hundred words. (E.g. I know that 飲む is read のむ.) But, I have great difficulty understanding Japanese text even when it is extensively annotated with furigana. In other words, my deficits are not only in the area of readings, but also in the area of general vocabulary.
With the ability of reading only a few hundred words, it feels like you are still very beginner. For comparison, that’s maybe one semester of Japanese class (maybe less depending on school). I think you may be trying to read higher than your actual level is. Are you able to read something like Yotsuba yet?
At least at the beginner levels, there’s nothing wrong with ‘archaic’ 20th century ways. Which is basically repetition through paper and pencil handwriting. What are your current methods? That may help the people who will try to give advice here.
Browser extensions like Rikaikun can provide translations of kanji on the web if reading through a browser. But the ‘in-context’ part to get the reading, you kind of need to get the gist of the sentence too sometimes. When I need whole sentence help, I just use Google translate or Deepl. Google translate will give you the reading of it.
I had many aborted attempts to ‘read’ over the years. Most were brute force ‘read and use a dictionary’ type approaches. They never worked. Technology does help but even then selecting and looking up each word is slow. If you are also missing vocab it’s even tougher. Graded Readers are helpful there. My bog standard advice still applies though – learn enough Japanese to be able to speak and listen comfortably then think about kanji. Wanikani worked for me but took 2 years and I’ve continued with Anki ever since (maybe 4 or 5 years now) along with reading anything and everything. I’m in no way perfect but looking up one or two words a page is far easier and manageable. Reading is, for the most part, enjoyable.
You could try Satori Reader:
https://www.satorireader.com/series
You could also try something like “Comprehensible Japanese” with the CC turned on.
https://cijapanese.com/
You could also actually try and study grammer. It seems like you are struggling with grammar and maybe also vocabulary even though you are able to recognize and distinguish kanji. This is the problem with RTK, all it teaches you is to recognize the symbols; it imparts almost no ability to understand the language. Despite having a good ability to recognize kanji shapes, in other regards you still may be near the beginner level and best served by beginner-level materials (but recognizing the kanji shapes should help you learn some vocab, so it’s not like you got nothing at all out of RTK)