I can read kana and a limited amount of kanji. I also know basic grammar and a little more advance grammar for conditionals, causation, comparison, etc.
But my vocabulary is far from N5 even. And while I know how to “by grammar” to conjugate verbs, I don’t to practice. I am focusing on acquiring Japanese for now and so I understand the different conjugations in context and do understand them (but probably can’t tell you if a verb is a go-dan or ichi-dan verb).
I am focusing on acquisition right now. And while I do read beginner materials, I find them uninteresting, but I can understand the sentences a lot lot more than Japanese novels. I also read transcripts of anime and drama which uses conversational/anime-type Japanese and I do find them fun, but since it’s part of a audio-visual material, a lot of context is offloaded from the sentence to the scenes and so I usually have to know the film/animation before hand.
So, I wanted to read more interesting content, so I started Japanese literature here <https://www.aozora.gr.jp/> and it has been good, but the sentences here have way more complexity.
I want to know if by just doing this, I would eventually get/acquire (acquire as defined by Krashen) the sentences? Or do some of you know of easier (or those with shorter sentences) Japanese short stories ebook site (not the one for primary school children).
Anyone doing massive input or LingQ? What do I have to look forward to by continuing this or is there a way to tweak this path to make it easier but still interesting.
PS. I also have some Japanese class which lets us practice output and conversations, but this is for absolute beginners(which I am).
PPS. I am reading a very fun novel and I am enjoying it, but I am bit slow, but the story itself makes me want to continue.
5 comments
Personally, I think what you’re doing is fine and probably effective.
Thing is, learning a second language doesn’t really have a “correct way” to do it.
If you enjoy reading your material, and that lets you engage with the language more often, you’re winning more than half the battle already. Reading real sentences (not learner sentences) has benefits if you are patient enough to work with the material. Your study habits in using the material will dictate how much the language actually sticks with you e.g., do you just do a quick look up and then move on, or do you make effort to maintain vocabulary or grammar knowledge using additional methods like anki, flashcards, notes, writing examples, etc?
Although Krashen’s methods are pretty popular, I have my doubts that merely reading will result in fluency. But reading what you’re interested in is surely better than boredom and less time with the target language.
The answer is yes, in fact it’s exactly what I did, but I feel that you need to make sure you meet a few conditions before and while doing so. These conditions are:
1. You have the ability to distinguish Kanji from each other mentally. This means that you can recognize that you have seen a Kanji before, can distinguish it from every other in your mind, and sometimes even recall a word that it’s used in. This is important because if you cannot do this, it will become extremely difficult, if not downright impossible to learn large amounts of new vocabulary, much less do intensive reading. Going through RTK or a similar book like KKLC will help with this problem. If you see every unknown Kanji as a random squiggle like I used to, you should go through one of these books first.
2. You create flashcards for every common word you see while reading through the text. This is critically important to increase your vocabulary and understanding of the text as much as possible, especially as a beginner. Unfortunately, this can mean taking hours to read through a single page when you start, and creating multiple cards for every sentence. It is important to not misunderstand Comprehensible Input, you will not learn anything if the sentences are not “mostly” comprehensible to you. Not many people have the patience to do this, but if you can manage to get through a single book, every single one thereafter will be much easier.
I think you’re on the right track with your thinking, but it requires extreme dedication, far beyond what can be expected of most people. But the rewards for that dedication are definitely worth it.
If your aim is to acquire vocabulary through reading, there are two main approaches that have both proven to be successful.
It comes down to how much you will be looking up. For the intensive reading approach you are focusing on new words to translate and deeply understand every sentence of what you are reading. You will be spending a lot of time on a text but you will have a whole list of new words and grammar points at the end.
For the extensive reading approach you are focusing on the texts you read. Unknown words are not looked up but their meaning derived from context. For this approach you’ll need reading material where you already know most words, more than 80%. It will reinforce vocabulary you already studied, expand your passive vocabulary and overall reading comprehension. You will be able to read faster and more texts, but the amount of vocabulary you will acquire will be fewer.
In any way, new vocabulary should be put into an srs so you can remember it better.
Krashen’s hypotheses rest on things being comprehensible. What kind of books are you looking at as a beginner?
A full novel for adults will require kanji and a huge about of vocabulary plus grammar. Every sentence will require a lot of look ups, which eventually bring you into grammar-translation. This is potentially hundreds of look ups per page.
At your level graded readers or books for young, young children (think “A is for Apple. The Apple is red.”) would be more beneficial for the time being.
The answer is yes, you can read novels and native material from the start; however, it depends on how many look-ups you’re willing to do. There are two forms of reading: intensive reading and extensive reading.
Intensive reading, which is what I’ve been doing with visual novels from day 1, is where you stop after every sentence and look-up every unknown word and grammar piece in a sentence, trying to break down and understand the sentence. This is much more akin to textbook learning where you look up grammar explanations and vocab words to try and make sense of each sentence you come across. If you still don’t understand a sentence, even after a minute of trying to figure it out, don’t dwindle on it and move onto the next sentence. Enough intensive reading will slowly become extensive reading over time.
Extensive reading is where you read without doing any look-ups. This helps to build automaticity and improve your reading speed as you’re only reading through a text and understanding what you can. The more you read like this, the more it builds up automaticity, which is the ability to recall something without having to think about it. If you also sentence mine, you can find a lot more I+1 sentences to mine by reading extensively. However, reading extensively only works with texts that you can understand like 95-97% of, so do it with easier texts.
For reading novels and literature, Google around [Anna’s archive](https://annas-archive.org) for epubs and check out [ttsu reader](https://reader.ttsu.app/manage). It’s a digital ebook platform that allows you to import your own Japanese epub files for reading light novels and other novels. Also check out [Yomichan](https://youtu.be/qK5Gwl72vkk) as it will help to automate the look up process for words.