Is reading in Japanese for first time always like this?

40 comments

1. Yotsuba is fairly slangy, and also the main character makes a lot of cute/childish mispronunciations. It gets a lot easier after you read a few chapters and get used to it, but it’s definitely a tricky place to start if you aren’t used to casual spoken Japanese.

   You might find something like Satori Reader is a better experience to start with.

2. Try Graded Readers or Crystal Hunters. Graded Readers has a pdf file of all 4 levels floating around on the internet so it isn’t hard to find. And the first chapter I believe of Crystal Hunters is free they have two different versions an easy Japansse and natural Japanese version and you can practice with that as well. Good luck!

3. if it’s frustratingly hard, try reading something else

   yes it’s always like that at the beginning

   and for a long time, too

   [https://indwellinglanguage.com/reread/](https://indwellinglanguage.com/reread/)

   [https://insidethatjapanesebook.com/2020/07/15/how-to-start-reading-books-in-japanese/](https://insidethatjapanesebook.com/2020/07/15/how-to-start-reading-books-in-japanese/)

4. Japanese literature is made for native speakers. You’re dealing with a TON of unknowns. Grammar, kanji, vocab…. It adds up.

   Graded readers, Satori Reader, or something digestible like NHK Web Easy are useful because you’ll have a more limited pool of all those things to focus on.

5. A) you could study the vocab before trying to read. Yotsuba has anki decks, etc

   B) join a reading group to read with others. [EX](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGhxdFwlvk0&list=PLNvL1DnM9hiyjcqo1SXEK5ht7Uo_ExaBT)

6. It’s super rough. Fortunately the tools have improved a lot.

   I’d recommend something like NHK Web News Easy, combined with 10ten reader (browser plugin with realtime mouse or finger-over kanji look-up), as well as having the whole article pasted over into DeepL.com and probably read it in English first. The articles are short, topical, and won’t be slangy. They’re not very helpful as a model for speaking, but that’s not why you’re reading..

   Read a translated version, then read the Japanese version with lots of 10ten help. When I started reading the articles, I found the grammar and word order to be way more challenging than the vocabulary itself, in terms of figuring out the right meaning. This is why I recommend putting it thru DeepL first. It’s a lot easier to spot sentence patterns if you actually know the meaning the already. If you’re trying to deduce it from a position of ignorance, it’s really hard and frustrating.

   Of course: the more you read, the less you’ll need to rely on these tools. If we didn’t have these tools, you’d be stuck with excruciating kanji lookups — maybe even with a paper dictionary. The best resources 10+ years ago would have be specially designed readers that had furigana and vocab lists and probably aren’t/weren’t as freely available.

7. ​

   Well youre just 1 month into learning japanese, you barely even started, and as someone already stated, every manga is meant for native speakers (despite special mangas like crystal hunter) so there is no thing such as a “beginner” manga, so you need atleast a solid foundation of grammar (many beginners underestimate this), vocab and kanjis to even start reading them (otherwise you will just look at gibberish).

   You would also struggle a lot if you would have tried to read a spongebob comic on english if you would have been on month 1 of learning english, so try to use material thats proper for your level, such as graded readers/easy news/crystal hunters.

   Work your way up, just remember, if you want to run, you first have to walk (and before that, you even have to crawl).

8. When I started it took me 30 minutes to read 2 pages then had to take a nap because I was so tired so I think you’re doing fine.

9. Others have already made good points so I won’t repeat them. Here are some free beginner-friendly graded readers. I found them to be a good starting point which helped build my confidence. 🙂

   [https://learnnatively.com/series/c78f246213/?sort=level](https://learnnatively.com/series/c78f246213/?sort=level)

10. Your first time reading material not intended for learners is always going to be a punch in the face, and I’m afraid the next few dozen times probably won’t be much better. You can soften the blow a bit by cramming grammar and vocab from textbooks or guides beforehand, but in the end the only way through it is to keep reading.

    Probably the best thing you can do to make it easier on yourself is to make looking up words as easy as possible. I’d recommend starting with a digital text that a) will work with a pop-up dictionary like Yomichan and b) has a translation available you can check if you still feel like you’re missing something crucial after looking up all the unfamiliar words.

11. One month in is really early. It’s definitely going to be harder to read if you don’t have a good grasp of the basics and struggle to pick out the components of the sentence (even if you don’t quite know what the words mean). I tried Yotsubato when I was in the middle of reading Genki I and got overwhelmed and gave up. I tried it again after finishing Genki II and was able to finish a whole volume and have fun reading it.

    There are reading materials made for absolute beginners like Crystal Hunters and graded readers, but I think if you’re only trying to read right now because you feel like you should, then it’s fine to wait. You can continue studying and building up your foundation until you can actually enjoy reading. It’s still going to be hard at first no matter when you start, but it gets a lot easier as you go.

12. You’ve only studied for a month. Get through a beginner’s textbook first so you at least know the basics of the basics before you start trying to read books and manga.

13. The first couple months I started learning Japanese, we would have small passages we had to read and answer multiple choice questions. I remember feeling so frustrated at the time bc I could barely understand what I was reading. I was still memorizing kana. It took about a year for me to completely memorize both writing systems. It’s normal. At some point it’s just gonna click. For me it started clicking around my third year and I was studying abroad in Japan. I wandered into a bookstore and picked up a random book and flipped through it a little bit just to see if I could understand it. I couldn’t make out some of the words but I remember being able to read the kanji quite easily as opposed to before. I was so happy.

14. Haven’t used the sources you mention, so I can’t speak much to that. However…at least in my experience:

    1. Yes, it’s like that when you start.
    2. Yes, it gets better. Quickly, even, if you keep at it.

    On top of that, once you dive into kanji, reading gets even easier. Learning them takes a while, but it’s not daunting and it doesn’t have to be a memorization slog if you just proceed organically. I’m probably only about 1200 or so in, myself, but already to a point where the hardest thing about reading earlier/simpler material is making sense of the hiragana soup.

15. It gets better, its normal to not understand everything but its important to make some notes and learn from them, you may even want to read the same chapter again afterwards and see if you now remember the grammar and words.
    Yotsuba was also one of the first books i was reading in japanese, and while it is a good entry for beginners you should keep in mind that it may contain some childish words and expressions that you dont need to learn.

    Its not important to understand 100% of the text, if you vaguely know whats going on then its fine. If you always try to completly translate and understand everything you might burn out and stop reading completly.

    Even when i was starting to learn english i couldnt understand a single word and i had to use a dictionary for every word to read / chat with people online. Eventually i got fluent at some point.

    In my opinion, you should at least finish the genki 1+2 books for some fundamental grammar and simple kanji / words. I dont know which level you are at. But simple stuff like です、ます how to conjugate verbs, adjectives, から・まで ..should be the minimum for starting reading.

16. Graded readers first. You’ll want to be pretty quick at reading hiragana and katakana and have some basic grammar down. A good baseline of vocabulary. And then the more kanji you know the better. Graded are literally step by step. So level 0 or 1, and then you get better as you progress through the ‘grades’.

    I borrowed a lot of them through interlibrary loan as they were a little pricy, but I’m so glad I read them. Then I bought a couple when I saw good deals on them.

17. I know exactly how you feel! I tried reading after a few weeks of studying as well. I thought to myself: “oooh, let’s buy a children’s book”! HA! Took me 2 hours to barely understand a page. I’ll come back to that in a few months ;))

    Here is a website with graded readers, which might interest you because a lot of them have sound recordings as well: https://tadoku.org/japanese/en/free-books-en/

18. You should not try reading a book after one month of study. Unless maybe you studied 16 hours a day with a tutor. Honestly probably not even then.

    You just need to work on your vocab (SRS, lots of options), grammar (lots of books, genki, marugoto, etc) and maybe start dipping your toe into kanji (again srs, maybe anki or wanikani).

19. I would try to get through tae kims, it is super short when compared to anything else and you would be in a good place to rough it through your first book as long as it was easy.

    Tae kims + anki is probably the quickest way to get to a good base for reading.

    Doing a little over 1 section a day of tae kims will take about a month and isn’t too bad, the sections are super short.

    your first book will still be pretty painful, there no real way around that. I started reading at n3 and it was still difficult.

20. Honestly this was similar to my experience early on. You aren’t really “reading” more “deciphering” for a while. For beginner content you need graded readers, bilingual reading (either specific resources or just buy a copy in each language), or if you are using the Genki textbooks the Appendices have some paragraph style reading at the appropriate level that you can read.

    It’s still good to put some effort into it as you can use it as a metric for your progress. I would try yotsuba again and a light novel again every few months to see how much better I was doing this time around. It mostly helped with motivation as it took quite a while before light novels got to the point of okay readability. I believe you need something like 9000 words before you can get away from “beginner resources” (which seems accurate to my situation) and that’s just that you can self-select level appropriate stuff and not that you can “read anything”; you will still hit random hard paragraphs.

21. I started reading ‘properly’ yesterday. I’m about 4 months in with 500+ kanji and ~1,600 words memorised and most of N5 level grammar. I used the Easy Japanese app to read easier Japanese articles, especially from NHK Easy. I had to look up plenty of things but I could read without it being a confusing mess or a exhausting effort. It helps that the articles are short pieces.

    I’m sharing my experience to suggest that you might have a better time learning more kanji, vocabulary, and grammar before you start reading and by choosing tools designed for learners. I’ve heard of people learning to read exclusively from reading but… even if it’s the best tool, what’s the point in making it your only tool? You also may be misinterpreting what most people consider ‘early’ in a journey that takes years to decades.

    I’m no expert in language learning and not here to tell you what to do. Just wanted to share what it’s been like for me, someone else who has taken the advice to start reading early.

    I also like the YouTube channel Comprehensible Japanese, starting with the complete beginner playlist. I think that helps with reading too because you get used to piecing your Japanese knowledge together to form larger chucks of information (sentences, paragraphs, etc).

    Good luck!

22. If you have been studying for less than a month, you are far below the level required to read even the easiest Manga. Even the simplest graded readers would be too much. There is a reason why textbooks only feature short and very simple dialogue in the early lessons and save longer texts for later. When people say “I wish I started to read earlier” they mean something like “I wish I hadn’t held off for 4 years until picking up my first Japanese Manga”.

    Even simple Manga require you to pretty much know most of Genki 1 and 2 grammar-wise. For example, causative and passive are only taught in the second half of Genki 2 but are pretty much everywhere. At your level, you are not only missing practice with reading Hiragana but you also have no grammatical foundation yet. If you read a Manga and can’t even comprehend half of it, that’s a clear sign that it’s still too early for you to read it let alone not even being able to determine where the words end and start. This is normal as you probably don’t even know most of the commonly used grammatical forms like -てくれた or -たことがある etc.

    Don’t try to overdo things or compare yourself with other people, especially on this sub. There are tons of people obsessed with speedrunning and min-maxing their Japanese study here.

23. My experience reading is this: (n5-n4 material, short stories)
    2 pages short story, takes me about 30 mins to read, but on second pass it’s about 10, after about 2 more, I’m at 2 minutes.

    Yep, reading is one of the BEST ways to learn, very efficient too, but it’s gonna suck if you don’t yet have n3 (maybe first 3k to 4k?) words. You still gotta do it tho.

24. My guy or gal, you’ve only been studying for literally weeks– you’re not gonna have a large enough vocabulary to read without a dictionary, and that’s if you can even follow the grammar

    When people say they wished they began reading sooner, they mean they wish they didn’t wait like a year or more to begin literacy. And that’s usually because kanji scary

25. >it took me 30 minutes to incorrectly read the first 7 pages

    I recall spending 2-3 *hours* trying to look up a single word found in the first sentence or two of *Is it OK to pick up girls in a dungeon?* So I’m not sure why you’re so frustrated here.

26. I’m also about a month in, nearly done with Japanese From Zero book 2 and in the same boat as you lol. The level 0 and level 1 books on Tadoku have been more appropriate for me.

27. > Is reading Japanese for the first time really like this

    yes

    > and I`m going to get better with time

    yes

    > or I`m being too rushed and should learn more grammar and vocabulary first?

    also yes, although there probably are graded readers aimed at beginners which can help you gain some experience with reading Japanese without being frustratingly difficult.

28. You’ve only been learning Japanese for a month?? You are an absolute Japanese baby still! I’ve been learning Japanese on and off for 3+ years, I’m only now starting to be able to read easy manga, and I still have to look up about 5 words per page on average. Cut yourself some slack. Also it gets significantly easier each time. The next manga you read will be that much easier.

    And I remember something someone else said about language learning in general. When you read something like a children’s book in your target language, remember that children’s books are not necessarily simple to read. They have simple themes, but are often grammatically complex, filled with puns and slangs to delight children who are native to that language but drive adult learners crazy.

    According to the internet a 5-year-old (English speaking) child will know about 5,000+ words. I imagine it’s roughly comparable to native Japanese children. If you’ve only been learning for a month I can’t imagine you know more than a few hundred words at most.

29. I’d look up the setup of Yomichan, and try reading some specifically online stuff. It’s easier to push through looking everything up with that than it is to Jisho a million sentences.

    That and you might need a little bit more vocab and grammar. Some people start after a month, but they also get at least a few hundred words learned before trying.

    I’d recommend just watching Cure Dolly or reading Tae Kim. Not like studying or grinding it out, but just reading/watching through those to get a good basic grasp and to at least have seen what you’ll need to know. And I’d go through some kind of core deck, between 500 to 1000 words into it. And then I’d start reading with Yomichan on the ready.

30. Yes, reading stuff written for native Japanese speakers is enormously difficult compared to reading textbook snippets out of Genki and the like. And it’ll be really hard at first even if you finished Genki II and all of Tobira before jumping to something like Yotsuba.

    It’s also a step you’re going to have to make at some point, because no one studies Japanese to be able to read sanitized passages out of textbooks. Personally I’d recommend making that jump after finishing Genki II since Genki I + II teach a ton of vitally important grammar as well as about 1800 words that you’ll see everywhere. So instead of having to look four or five things up per sentence it’ll be more like looking one thing up every couple of sentences.

    Yotsuba isn’t easy, it’s just easy compared to other manga written for Japanese native speakers. It’s also something fun to read for more than just learning, as the stories are hilarious and the characters well written. One month in though you’re not going to get shit out of it most likely.

    Don’t feel bad. Yotsuba kicked my ass hard when I tried reading Volume 1 after finishing Genki I. Get some grammar and some vocab under your belt and it’ll still be hard, but doable. And as you read more and more you’ll be amazed how quickly Yotsuba can become easy reading. But get the very basics down first. Walk before you run.

31. While the process will still be effective, I think it would probably be less painful for you if you waited a bit. It depends how intensely you are studying but I studied daily for about 6 months and gave Yotsuba a try and it was still a bit of a struggle. It’s easy to have your grammar, kanji, and vocab at varying levels so it really just depends on you but I would personally try and get to a point where you know most of what is required for the JLPT N5 (grammar/vocab/kanji) before you try to dive into reading something of that level. This will still be a struggle but your foundation will be more solid. I see many people saying graded readers and I think that would definitely be up your alley if you understand grammar basics.

32. You’re not gonna read a manga in a month, dude. Not even Yotsuba.

33. > i felt i wasn’t really learning anything besides some new words i didn’t know.

    That _is_ “the learning”. Things you now know:

    1. Some new words (remember, vocab is something you have to learn sometime).
    2. How to differentiate some of the words (which means other parts of the sentences will then naturally separate themselves).
    3. How to look up words (which you will be doing for the rest of your Japanese learning, so this is a very important skill).

    So you have learned. In order to maximize the return on the time you spent, I would suggest that you:

    – write up flashcards (or use Anki or something) for all the words you just looked up.
    – Practice those every day for a week or so, or until you honestly can say you can get through all of them without making mistakes or looking at the back first.
    – Write all the words again from memory, and try to remember the definitions.

    Having done this, you are ready to move on to the next stage: doing it all over again with a different set of unfamiliar words!

    Learning a foreign language is a process, which you have begun to assimilate. Now you just need to practice that process!

34. 5 years of study and I’m barely able to read a 2 page short story.

    Dont get discouraged. It takes alot of time.

    I’m convinced that without full time exposure to the language you’ll never really know it

35. Why do people upvote these garbage posts? Ban beginners please?

36. You can’t expect yourself to read much Japanese at all after 1 month of study unless you know Chinese and can identify kanji.

    Your study should be focused on building vocabulary and grammar knowledge once you can read hiragana and katakana.

    There’s still gonna be a whole lot you won’t be able to understand for a while, but consider every time you are able to understand a word or sentence as a success.

37. Others have made good points, so I won’t harp on them. A good manga (imo) is 惡の華. 95% of it is pretty slang-free, and it uses kanji with furigana, so you can more easily delineate the start and ends of words.

    But, also, yeah, you’ll need to use a dictionary for everything. Until you won’t, which is a really fun experience. You find yourself looking everything up in volume one, and then a little less in volume 2 and then less and less all the time.

    Some people hate the “look everything up” method, but I enjoy it.

38. as a dude who moved abroad, studied the language full time, reading and writing everyday and taking college courses on it…. 1 month is no fucking time. took me over a year to piece together sentences and 3 to speak coherently

39. Welcome to the club bro!!!

    Yeah this is how you feel the first time but give it some time and patience you will have to learn more words and even when you get to an advanced level you’ll still find new words and expressions.

    I can suggest you to study grammar and vocabulary first that will give you a great pull when you try to learn through native material. Practice as much as you can daily this is not an easy language for western ears so don’t give up that easily!

    １ year of study and here I am consumming native material and playing videogames entarely in japanese and until this point I keep finding new words and expression every now and then but now I can comprehend them at a native level. This was because I’ve spent all these 500 days studying at least 1 or 2 (or more) hours. If I could, YOU CAN too!!

    毎日、せめて一時間より勉強すべきです。道は時折にもう進めなかったり、全く何も把握しなくて諦めて欲しいかもしれないと思いますんですけど難しいにしろ、大変なことであるにしろいつも頑張っておけっ！！

40. Alright dude, one month is crazy early to start reading in my humble opinion, you can start by reading stories for little kids, even so, you need some basic grammar to understand what you are reading. Personally I’ve been learning for one year and a half and been reading for one hour 5 days a week for 3 months and still struggle not only to read the words but to understand the meaning. My worhtless advice would be to firtst get some basic grammar down then start reading basic material, by reading you can obtain vocabulary.

    Take it easy, being capable of reading material aimed at natives takes a bit of time for any language just keep at it and I guarantee you that you will be able to read manga as if it was nothing.