Hi all, self-learner here. I’ve finished up Tobira and Core 2.3k, and my understanding is that, at this point, my primary focus should probably be on using real native material and just learning through immersion.
That’s great – it’s awesome that after years of this I can finally start to actually use the language in earnest – but…I just feel a little at sea now. Working with a textbook/Anki deck gave me a constant sense of progress, of forward motion. Now I don’t really know if I’m getting better at all.
My attempts to just jump in and read native material aren’t going super well – I still need to look up words, grammar, and kanji pretty much constantly, so reading’s very tedious. And I suppose I should be making my own flash cards for all this stuff that I’m looking up, otherwise I just end up forgetting it…but that just makes reading even more tedious!
Anyone been in these shoes and have any suggestions about how I ought to start going about things from here on out? Some secret trick to make reading less of a chore? Are there more Anki decks I should be doing? Any advice much appreciated.
8 comments
For guides on best reading setups, how to make 1-click flashcards, and other immersion resources check TheMoeWay.
As for your troubles with native media: this is perfectly normal. Starting to read feels very much like a grind in the beginning. I had to look up basically everything and frankly I even looked up the things I didn’t *have* to, just to be sure. A good reading setup is very helpful for that. It took me until the 10-15K range of known words for reading to become easier, so expect this to take a while. That’s why it is very important to read things that actually interest you.
You can check out learnnatively.com and jpdb.io to find media that might interest you and is not too difficult for beginners. The vocabulary decks on jpdb are also your best choice if you don’t like making your own flashcards.
Good luck!
> I still need to look up words, grammar, and kanji pretty much constantly
thats exactly how it works
I too tried to tackle native media and hit a wall. Have you tried Satori Reader?
It makes looking up grammar and vocab easy because they annotate practically every word/line. It has built-in SRS or you can export words to Anki.
There’s a 1-month free trial or you can just try reading a few free articles.
For me jpdb.io was a tremendous help in actually acquiring all the vocabulary I encountered while reading. I could review core words in advance and then add words I encountered while reading to their srs. They already have decks of many popular Japanese novels and news ones get constantly added to their database.
These guys have offered good advice, so I won’t regurgitate the same thing except that looking up everything is normal. It’s how you progress, but I would like to request that you look into a medium of Japanese known as visual novels. They’re like regular novels in that they’re super language-dense, but they’re accompanied by visuals and most lines have audio. I’d recommend playing through an easy visual novel first and sentence mine what you don’t know from it, then move onto harder visual novels. You’ll progress quite a bit.
>Working with a textbook/Anki deck gave me a constant sense of progress, of forward motion. Now I don’t really know if I’m getting better at all.
Well, if textbook study worked and was fun to you, there is nothing wrong with continuing with an intermediate textbook. Textbooks grant structure and guidance.
But of course, you should also start with some native material and the most effective way to do so is just picking up something you like. If reading a book feels tedious, start with a simple manga. Usually, slice-of-life or romance stories set in our world are the most accessible. Even if reading feels like a chore at first (that’s normal btw), you will have more motivation if the thing you are reading is a story that really interests you.
As for Anki, at this point, it is better to build your own decks with the words you look up when reading new material than relying on premade decks.
My suggestion is to remember your true purpose.
I mean, which is your purpose ?
(1) You want to feel satisfied with the increase in your Japanese vocabulary as if you play a vocabulary-building game; or
(2) You have a certain interest on Japan and learn Japanese as a tool for approaching the interest.
If (2) is applicable, you can dive into a lot of contents on your interest, such as books, blogs, TV, songs, anime, manga, movies, etc. You may be afraid of unknown words, difficult kanjis, and native-speed Japanese,
What about it? Now you can know hiragana, katakana and basic kanjis and terms as well as basic grammar. If you face with unknown stuff, you can look up in a Japanese-Japanese dictionary etc. as Japanese children do. As long as you have a desire to know your interest, you would be highly motivated to learn and memorize such newly encountered stuff. Do you imagine it “tedious” ?
Good luck !
Wanikani has a book club for various levels. I recently finished Tobira and passed the N3 last December. Now I started to read books from that list. They have a shared plan so you know how much to read in a week to be up to date and they sometimes even share vocabulary lists which makes it easier to make anki flashcards! For grammar I would recommend The Dictionary of Japanese Grammar series as they have indexes and are really nice to understand new grammar.
I personally do it like this (tho I don’t follow the book club because I started too late):
– read a chapter or how much you like
– check vocabulary using online dic
– check grammar using the Grammar Dictionary
– put both vocab and grammar in Anki
– study the flashcards
– read the passage again
I would recommend you not to read too much once you start because it can be overwhelming especially with the flashcards that you need to revise so it’s better to read a little everyday.