Every Level/Free Content Diary

Hello fellow Natively-ers.

I am grinding out all free, non-textbook texts on Natively and thought I would start a log of my thoughts. I was hoping to find someone’s description of how they felt about their reading ability at each Natively level, but I did not, so I’m contributing my thoughts here. Admittedly, I did not look too far and partially just want to blab about myself.

Anyway, I am starting this in the middle of level 10, so I will just jot down what I remember about previous levels.

Note about what I read

At the N5 level, almost all the texts are Tadoku readers. However, some of the free readers are not marked as free. So what I did was read from this list. I was able to borrow the paid graded reader collections from a friend :wink: except for level 0 and I also borrowed the Genki graded readers. Other than that, the only N5 things I am reading are the Tadoku pdfs.

And to be clear, I’m not planning on reading ALL free content, that’s just what I’ve been doing so far since there is not quite enough at lower levels.

What do I do besides reading

If you are curious about my whole approach to learning Japanese, I would say it’s about 80% Natively. But I am also doing RRTK on Anki. Hopefully when I finish that, I can start sentence mining from what I’m reading. I also listen to the Japanese with Shun podcast in the background while walking, driving, etc.

I have also read 10 or so Cure Dolly lessons on this transcript website but I stopped as I found that she was covering more advanced grammar than I was reading. I may return to this or I might just learn grammar through reading + translating + random googling.

Natively Levels

N5

Absolute Beginner (~0-6)

  • There are so many readers about food that it made me hungry. NGL I tried several asian places nearby due to this.

  • It’s really inconvenient to look stuff up when the text is not selectable. Tadoku doesn’t want you to look up stuff (I do anyway), but their PDFs are about 50/50 on selectable text. I later learned of Yomininja and now I can look up stuff anywhere I want, but when I was at this level I did not have that set up.

  • I was also just grateful for Natively existing, I learned a lot of Swedish without such a good resource like this so I can tell you that it makes a big difference. I’m really tempted to link to Natively every time someone on reddit asks almost anything about reading…

  • There was really not enough content at each level. I always felt like I was moving on to harder stuff before I was ready. I wish this style of material was more popular, but at least Tadoku exists and we have something.

  • I also wish my native language was something more obscure so that I could create some content at this level. But I think English already has enough resources of basically any kind.

7

At this level I started to feel like some grammar/stories were forming which was a nice change of pace compared to the “see spot run” type stuff.

8

  • Some degree of feeling like there was still not enough content and I wasn’t ready for this level

  • Some degree of comfort reading things like the Peter Rabbit readers and not needing to look too much up.

9

Still getting my butt kicked, this level was pretty quick though.

10

With the Genki graded readers and the Tadoku paid collection, I have a ton of material at this level. The Genki readers are really good (for graded readers) although they span most of Genki I so they are quite varied in difficulty. The final 2 introduced some grammar that I didn’t really understand and they are probably getting into N4 territory.

  • I’m starting to feel like I can sit down and power through material at this level. I don’t have to look much up, I can usually guess unknown words correctly from context, but the barrier is just mental resistance and stamina.

  • Vertical text came up more and I’m really not as comfortable with that. I can do it, but it takes more work.

  • I’ve also noticed that furigana is quite excessive. I wish the authors of graded readers would phase out furigana for the most common words, for some of them it’s just a distraction and for others it would be a good challenge. Maybe it does get phased out at higher levels of graded reader difficulty. Katakana “furigana” is especially excessive.

  • Toying with not mentally translating to English on some sentences, but I feel like it’s still a good crutch to use because I could space out and start skimming otherwise. And even if I’m focused, it’s kind of hard to tell if I understand sometimes. I think I will continue translating for a while longer, listening more is what will most likely drive “instant comprehension” due to the speed required.

  • starting to skim over “low value” words, for instance in the Sushi Tadoku, I didn’t bother to translate all the different types of sushi, since I wouldn’t know them in English anyway and don’t really care about sushi TBH.

11

  • Starting to get a bit bored of graded readers since I know I could push through something more difficult but more interesting now. But that has its own difficulties so I’m going to keep grinding.

  • Especially don’t like the “informational” graded readers such as recipes/facts about a topic (kimonos and castles at this level). Stories are much more interesting. Informational ones also tend to have more rare words related to that topic…

  • Still hard for me to skim rare words. I want to look everything up but it breaks the flow, plus you can’t always tell if it’s rare or not. Still working on it. One thing that helped is setting up a frequency dictionary in Yomitan, it’s reassuring to see that a lot of the words I don’t know are just really rare.

  • Finished Tadoku level 1, which is really the third level after S and 0. Read over half of the total Tadokus now.

  • Stopped RTK at around 600 cards and I am sentence mining now. I got yomininja + yomitan set up for pretty easy sentence mining from books. I also tried sentence mining from videos, but still, reading is my main form of immersion. My listening comprehension is still really bad.

12

This level was fairly short, although the texts themselves are getting longer which is a good sign that there will be more to read per level at higher levels because each text has more content.

N5 Reflection

I may or may not be N5 level, although I won’t be taking the test of course. I tried the official N5 sample questions and I got 12/14. But I wasn’t timing myself so IDK how I would do on the real thing. It definitely stretched my ability to recall vocabulary that I either just learned or encountered awhile back but didn’t really study.

But I think if I really wanted to, I could pass the N5 with just a bit of work. I would probably do some longer practice tests and maybe even mine them/study some missing vocab from a list. It’s good to know that basically just doing a lot of reading and a bit of Anki works to at least get you to N5.

Assuming I am N5, I can say I really have not even begun to scratch the surface of Japanese. I am learning common words and kanji and it’s going well enough, but the amount I don’t know is still massive, and even easy materials are still tricky, especially listening. I don’t know most of the grammar, I run into verb conjugations that I don’t understand frequently, and I get fatigued fairly quickly as well.

That’s not to be negative, I’m feeling good about my progress since I started with Japanese about 3 months ago and I’m looking forward to getting into some real “native content” in the N4 section of Natively.

If I had to start over, I would probably use the same method, but I can see how it’s not for everyone. It’s mostly grinding through fairly boring graded readers and still not perfectly understanding them. A lot of people recommend to just grind vocab instead and jump into something more interesting around the N4 level. I think that could totally work if that’s what you prefer.

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Welcome!

If you find stuff that’s available for free legally, feel free to submit a note on the book’s page via the Submit Feedback button, as well as where to find it for free, and Brandon can mark it as free for future users.

If you’re grinding out only free materials but count borrowing and borrowing as free, isn’t everything free? :joy: I do like the idea, though; I wonder how far a learner could get and how much they could read from only totally free sources? And let’s say that’s discounting webnovels and Aozora, because otherwise there’s no real barrier for content.

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Good point, I went ahead and sent a note about texts that are not marked as free but have a pdf link.

Regarding your second point, my main intention is to provide some commentary on the experience of each level, as well as to read at least all the free material for each level. Once you reach a certain proficiency (and this applies to all languages), there is enough free material to reach any comprehension level you wish.

Realistically, if someone were to use just intentionally free material, they would make the same progress with slightly more difficulty. So, I don’t think it would be a considerably interesting distinction.

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