I’m one year into learning Japanese, and currently at mid to upper N4 level, with a dash of N3 stuff since I learn stuff randomly. I don’t track my kanji knowledge but it’s pretty good since I’m Chinese.
Nevertheless, when I see a wall of japanese text my eyes just glaze over. It’s like I need to flip a switch to “Japanese reading mode” in my brain, then I can start to read the text. It’s not as fast as English reading, but definitely faster than when I was a beginner.
Anyone else can relate? When did that “switching” go away for you?
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I’ve been studying for 5 years and passed N1 a year and a half ago, and that “switching” has still not completely gone away. I still can’t instantly read and process Japanese at a glance in the same way I can with English. My reading ability is still way better than it was a couple years ago though, so it’s not like you won’t improve at all. Assuming you’re a native English speaker, you’ve had your entire life to familiarize yourself with English and get to the level you’re at now; these things just take time.
after about 8 years
you may not realize how quickly you can read english (or your mother tongue). nobody is gonna be able to read a flash of japanese text in less than a second without many years under their belt.
if your question was “how long did it take you to read japanese decently well”, then 3 years or so.
After 10 years, not yet.
Native Cantonese speaker here. After reading a few novels, i guess I became more comfortable reading Japanese. It’s now reading cramped wall-to-wall Chinese text, like in government letters, feels more daunting to me (too many kanji, maybe?). Chinese novels still seem ok which I haven’t read much in the last 2 years. My Japanese reading speed is still not as fast as in English or Chinese. It takes me about 4 days to finish a 400 pages novel which would have probably taken me half the time if it’s in English or Chinese at around the same length.
But I learn Japanese using Chinese resources, so I was able to start reading novels after no more than 70 hours of study.
The more you read, the easier it gets.
I’m an English speaker, so it’s a bit different for me, but I’ll read the sentence or paragraph in Japanese, and I’ll paraphrase it in my head in English pretty quickly.
I’ll usually keep the core of verbs and nouns, then maybe adjectives and adverbs if they seem important.
I’m N3, Chinese, and still have that. I’m not fast enough to catch flashes of Japanese text that last a couple of seconds. And reading Japanese commenters on Twitter or YouTube is easier but still takes longer than reading English. I wonder if it’s just an exposure thing. My reading level in Chinese is already slower.
There might be some internalised thing going on too. Personally, whenever I’m checking the comments of Japanese videos, my eyes skim over the JP comments looking for English ones – even though I could probably read those comments. It’s as if my brain instinctively wants to get the easiest information possible.
On one hand, I read English pretty slowly as it is (especially with fictional prose that I read for fun), so it wasn’t particularly hard to get up to speed.
That is, if you don’t count the six or seven years I spent already knowing a decent amount of kanji but slacked off on reading anyway. In which case, it’s been just under nine years.
But if we’re only taking into consideration only the time when I was actually focused on reading, about a year and a half. I only bring this up because the bulk of my progress came from this time spent on building a consistent habit. Plus it sounds less abysmal and more impressive to say “a year and a half” than “nearly a decade of slacking offl” lol.
I don’t think this “switch” you’re imagining ever happens. I’ve lived in Japan for 5 years and had N1 before coming here. My reading was my strongest section in JLPT, I’d say I read pretty well. I can read small bits of text like signs instantly without too much thought. But even though I can read Japanese articles without any issues, I read at probably half the speed of a native Japanese person, and it’s definitely not as effortless as reading in English. The feeling of めんどくさい to read in Japanese has never faded haha. I will always choose to read in English if the same information is available in English.
3 years of college classes, and then maybe another year of reading 20-30 pages a day + anki reviews before I could just start zipping through Japanese books comfortably.
For most people, being able to read “well” is a skill that we have to train irrespective of our actual language knowledge. You’ll never actually develop the skill if you don’t practice, no matter how much time you spend studying.
>when I see a wall of japanese text my eyes just glaze over. It’s like I need to flip a switch to “Japanese reading mode” in my brain
That’s perfectly normal. It’s the same feeling as when you get off a plane in a foreign country and you’re forced to think exclusively in a foreign language.
Just read and push through it. It’s like working out: the feeling of being overwhelmed will slowly subside with time and the load will feel lighter. Reading aloud, or at least doing the mouth movements, helps. Be sure to pay attention to pauses, the intonation, etc. as best as you can.
Not a direct answer, but I’d suggest you try Tadoku graded readers. They’re free. And there’s like 700+ pages of reading material. They were the first thing that felt easy enough to read it felt like English, and after going through a lot of them, I felt that feeling started to translate to reading manga. I’m still working on starting to read novels, but I can at least follow the plot now with some word look ups so that’s progress to me.
This is what makes Japanese hard for me. I study Japanese casually for a year. I know some common words, verbs and some syntax. However I can’t read Japanese at all. Each time I open some Japanese text it just doesn’t have any familiar words in and and grammar is so flexible I have a feeling that I know nothing. This is really demoralizing knowing that you put decent time into learning a language but due to it being non Indo-European branch you basically can’t read it at all until you learn literally everything.
Never. It never has and never will.
I have N1 and read Japanese books. Not only is it not nearly as fast, but I find I can read French and Spanish (which I barely speak) faster that Japanese. The romaji just leaps off of the page. Or, as Japanese people say, ’斜め読み’
Never lol. I mean I can sit down and read a Japanese general-interest text without any reference materials and understand it, even if there may be some words I don’t know, but still my reading speed is slower.
I got N1 in 2005 (before it was even called “N1”) and i still have that initial, “oh I can’t read that” reaction when faced with a block of Japanese text. Even though I totally can read it.
You mean read like a native speaker?
I didn’t have a background in any Asian languages growing up. I’ve been living in Japan 8 years, had 4 years of university Japanese before that. So 12 years total? I have N2, and I still can’t read like a native.
There are tons of vocab and grammar patterns that exist exclusively in literature. I’m forever learning new stuff. But I don’t regularly read novels, news, etc., just pick one up occasionally, and my work generally doesn’t require Japanese.
I got more than 30+ on dokkai n2 last year, but I my reading speed is still slow. I tried to read japanese news, manga, books, vn but nothing interest me anymore. I also think the manga quality has been dropped recently, so now i read more manhwa than manga.
The only japanese that I read right now is youtube comments, hellotalk and some discord, but it is still slow
I’m only N3 and if I read a sentence I can understand, it just happens like reading English.
Think about this question: How long did it take for you to read English smoothly? Ten years, I’m guessing.
That’s how long it takes Japanese people to read Japanese smoothly.
And that’s not even for adult-level material.
I don’t even think I could follow the TV news properly until I was over 12 years old. What is GDP? Economic stimulus? Recession?
Never. Honestly, in my opinion your first language/s will always feel more natural than others learned later in life, and that’s fine.
You’ll probably never get”there” as I understand– your brain is naturally gonna be primed for familiarity.
5-6 years
(my native tongue is not even English, im from Hungary, currently living in Osaka)
I haven’t tracked stats much, so it’s hard to say. I’ve spend ~500 hours primarily learning grammar (around 1.5-2k kanji and slightly more than 2k vocabulary) and at that point I had around 50 words/minute reading speed. It doubled in the next 100 hours of content, but to get 200 words/minute reading speed it took me another 300-450 hours.
300 words/minute is exactly where problem comes. If you have right tools to translate, translation is done almost immediately, but nonetheless it takes some additional time. And this gap in the reading speed is mostly produced by unknown words, to get rid of it we either need to learn ~15k vocabulary and try to understand unknown words from context, that works more or less fine. Or we need to learn something like 30-40k vocabulary and then unknown words won’t be more common than in our native language.
So if we talk about a kind of a feeling, how we can enjoy content and how comfortable it is, then entry level is actually quite early. It’s more in our mindset and using tools for fast translation. But the final switch from this decent level to nearly native takes a lot of time.
I will tell you in detail how my brain works, and I hope i can make it helpful and clear enough.
The switch for me is kinda more ‘granular’ and not related to time or immersion but depends on each individiual sentence. To be more specific, it depends on what I can ignore from a sentence vs what I already know.
For example, once I see no Hou ga/Yori, like in this sentence
**昨日より今日の方が暑いです。**
I don’t think about the meaning at all when I read every word. I read the entire sentence first, and immediatly interpret its a **comparison** sentence because the Houga/Yori structure is easy to identify, then quickly focus on what is **better/worse** then whom and that’s it. Reading the verb or sentence end first helps as well sometimes to realize what type of sentence you are actually reading. Oh it’s **atsui**, and what’s before Houga is probably the atsui thing, another quick glance tells me there isn’t anything more or no other grammatical patterns needed to infer or deepen the meaning, so I go with that interpertation. I extract the information I want just like I do in english based on what my mind needs to know.
If we look at the english alternative
**It’s hotter today than it was yesterday.**
here I just grasp the meaning based on hott**er today** and **yesterday**. I don’t really care about **it’s** or **than it was** or the rest of the filler. When I read them I ignore them because they don’t add anything other than extra grammatical flair. Just like how Desu doesn’t add anything when you read it in Japanese. You read it once and u know what purposes it serves, no need to go over it multiple times.
I mainly look at the sentences’s ‘outer hue’ as I like to call it, and interpret the meaning rather than slowly identifing every word. For example, I read this 秘密 just because the two slashed heart radicals are in very iconic positions side by side that makes the word itself from a far immediatly recognizable. I don’t look at all the radicals to recognize it.
That’s how I study all Kanji. I first make myself perfectly aware of all Kanji components, then devise a way in my mind to recognize them in the wild with the least amount of effort, which is actually a helpful method the more kanji words get complicated like 自動販売機 you might think I’m reading all that but no I actually don’t read the Kanji in the middle at all i am like Self buy machine something and go Aaah it’s vending machine. My thinking might also be influenced by how I cram for exams, and for sentences is the same.
Same here
別に彼のために作ったわけではない。
the wakedewanai already tells you what the verb is about. Yeah this is a sentence about something the speaker denies. As I said before I read the ending verb first then make my way to the rest of the sentence to have better context. I filter that first, then see if there are any components that might influence my first hasty interpertation of the sentence as “I didn’t make it for him”, and see Betsu ni and i’m like oh I missed that and do quick corrective action “It’s not like I made this for him or it’s not like I went out of my way to make this for him”. One more quick glance to see if there’s anything else that might influence my understanding. None. Great.
I do lots and lots of minute corrective actions to enhance my speed reading. There are a handful of ways people use to express things anyways, and they all get repeptive by design. So for me it’s better to check if the sentence correlates to the established pattern of expressing things in my mind, rather than to actually read it.
You won’t get a prize for reading the same sentence a million times anyways, and you are probably doing that automatically already by omitting reading hiragana and katakana or reading them once then ignoring them and focusing on words you don’t know. Think about how Hiragana and Katakana became natural for you, and how you feel about them when you are reading them now, and you will realize you are not actually reading them. You are just skimming them fast while hastily assuming they mean what you think they mean. And that’s reading.
I also do this, I also listen to bilingual podcasts and my brain just shuts off when I know English is coming
Never, and never will
When learning English, it happened around 3-5 years I guess. I remember vividly when an Obama speech was going on TV and I realized that I was understand every word he said with almost no effort.
I hope that eventually happens with Japanese as well, but ngl learning Japanese is a lot harder than English ever was. Even after years of watching subbed anime and reading VNs.
I guess having the same alphabet, similar grammar structures and tons of cognates helped me a lot when I was learning English, I have none of those to help me now with Japanese.
N1 level, working in Japanese companies for about 6 years now, been studying for 16 years. You never really fully get there. You just do a little better each time.
Do not let that discourage you. It is worth the struggle.
I feel like hiragana are pretty second nature at this point. I can’t read them as easily as block-printed letters, but I probably read them as fast as I can read cursive script (which I can write in; I’m old enough lol).
Kanji..just depends if I know the kanji or not. If I do, I just cruise along same as with the hiragana (as above), but if I don’t, it’s just a hard stop. Oh well.
However, like others have said, when I see a “wall of text” in Japanese, I kind of shut down and desperately look for other options of finding it in English or toss it into google translate.
I feel like it’s easy enough to read Japanese stuff serially..but I can’t scan/search it well at all. When I go to a webpage, I’m generally looking for some specific info, and when the page is in Japanese, I feel very incapable. I think it has as much or more to do with the lack of whitespace, and I’m not attuned to what I should be looking for in its stead. All my classes/learning have focused on reading serially (from the start, sentence by sentence), so that’s what I’m comfortable with.