How did you progress onto full Japanese books?

Thanks :blush:
I’ve tried jpdb but flashcards don’t seem to help me, I acquire far more through reading than I do through SRS flashcards.

I have completed a fair number of graded readers and guided short stories but trying to take the next step just seems way above my tolerance levels for ambiguity. Wasn’t sure if this was normal or if I’m doing something wrong. Guessing I might just need to dive in and wade through it. I have got Crystal Hunters so could try those.

Did you read any easier books/ articles while wading through the difficult stuff? Or did you just power through it?

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角川つばさ文庫 and 講談社青い鳥文庫 (and similar 子供向け labels) come in different difficulties. I would very much recommend those as a starting point. The こぐまのクーク (series) | L19 is very easy, for example.
orange (series) | L22 was also on the easy side, since it’s set in highschool and consists of large portions of conversations.

There is such a broad range of difficulties even in books for adults. I started with very simple, short stuff. This is aimed at adults, for example, but very easy. ももこのよりぬき絵日記 (series) | L27 It doesn’t always have to be a Level 44 book. :wink:
(There is also always the option of reading along with the audiobook. )

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That makes sense, I think my problem is that even with the stuff at lower levels (lower than 20 because even early 20s I’m struggling with at times) it mostly seems geared towards things I have very little interest in or it’s geared more towards childrens stories that I find sap my motivation to read. I’m also limited on what I can get due to finances and my delivery costs or not being able to get accessible digital content. I have a fair number of books (mostly second hand collected over the years), they just all seem to be way above my level.

I have a load of audiobooks too but reading while listening is a struggle for me as I can’t focus on both at the same time but may be able to understand both separately (depending on content and how fast it’s spoken).

The issue seems to be my vocabulary level and kanji recognition level but using standard systems for learning those doesn’t help me (I’ve been trying to learn japanese for way longer by flashcards and srs than I’ve currently been studying from textbooks and I only managed to pick up a handful of words until I started going through MNN and dropped the srs systems).

Sounds like it’s either power through stuff I’m interested in at high levels or power through the motivation lag at lower levels to get where I want to be. Or keep reviewing stuff and slowly going through the textbooks and news articles till I’ve got enough vocabulary to start understanding properly at my level. It’s still progress even if it’s slow progress though :slightly_smiling_face:

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My opinion: Learning kanji and vocab without context does not work. I.e. SRS is useless if it’s isolated from context.

I read a lot of the more difficult stuff as epub with yomichan support. Kindle Unlimited and Bookwalker’s 読み放題 have a lot to offer and usually the first month is free (or so). And KU often has 99 Yen deals. In fact, there is one going on right now.

You could check out different genres and look for things that you enjoy reading. KU includes some of the 角川つばさ文庫 as well.

If you let people know what types of stories you enjoy, they might be able to recommend easier stuff that’s interesting to read for you. :slight_smile:

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Yeah, that’s definitely what I found so stopped using those and now learn stuff as I’m using it through the textbooks and stuff I’m reading but it is especially slow going (that could just be me though because I’m still learning how best I learn things).

Not sure if Yomichan is available to me on iOS, I don’t have access to a pc, laptop or android tablet. I do have access to kindle (have a UK amazon account) but can’t get a japanese amazon account as I can’t verify it to register it (I don’t have a vpn I can change and I don’t have access to a japanese card or address). Most of the easier Japanese books I’ve come across on kindle though have all been images instead of type so you can’t search for word meanings/ readings. The more difficult ones, I’m looking up most of the words making it very slow going. :sweat_smile:

Bookwalker I’m not so sure off, have an account but I’ve no idea how to navigate it or access any of the content so far except to try to mark books I want to get or have got.

It might just be too early for me and I’m trying to bite off more than I can chew.

I have asked for recommendations previously from several forums (and thats where most of my books are all from), they’re just all way higher than my current level or they’re things I have no interest in reading :sweat_smile:

I do appreciate the suggestions though. Might try again to see if I can find a way to access and set up a Japanese Amazon account if I can. And see if there’s any way to get yomichan on iOS.

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someone here on the forum released an app recently: Immersion Reader - E-Reader & Dictionary App

you will need to convert the kindle book to epub, but that’s fairly easy to do. (amazon doesn’t like it, but it’s not illegal as long as you don’t share the ebook.) bookwalker is more difficult in that regard.

also, one more thing I forgot: a lot of light novels started as webnovels and are often times still available on those sites. That’s a completely free and legal resource as well.

I hope you find something that works for you. :hugs:

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Thanks :blush: I’ll check out the websites for previous light novels (not sure I can convert the ebooks without access to a pc/laptop but will keep that in mind for future too).

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The entirety of 異世界の名探偵 (series) | L32 vol 1 for example is here. @Naphthalene taught me that many light novels are published there ahead of being brought on by a publisher. I don’t read many light novels but there’s doubtless a list out there of more accessible ones on syosetu and the like

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There’s also カクヨム that belongs to Kadokawa. Also syosetu has a sister website for more err spicy stuff that would require an R18 tag, such as TL novels.
There’s at least one BL publisher that has their own website as well, but only the first chapter is free to read :angry: You are usually better off reading the free preview on Bookwalker/Booklive. I mean, not that I care, of course.

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To be honest, I stopped using WaniKani at some point due to diminishing returns (too many 1:1 translations) and judging books by WaniKani level is overall not an accurate metric, because a book can use 75% of 常用 kanji, but be chalk-full of difficult vocabulary. That being said, knowing you can read most of the kanji in the book is a good starting point.

Initially it was a steeper learning curve than I anticipated, partially due to the average length of a light novel and the required vocabulary :frowning: . It still feels more achievable for me to read a manga volume (takes usually 1-2 hours) than a couple of pages of a light novel. However, some novels like コンビニ人間 and 闇の守人 are to me easier than the entry level light novels like 君の名は.

I created an Anki deck I would fill up with vocab. For a long while (over a year) it was a massive pain due to the number of words daily I had to put in there, but nowadays it’s more manageable. I also cut down on reviews per day to a 100.

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I don’t really use anki anymore, but if you read on a tablet or pc, there are ways to make adding stuff to anki really efficient. I basically just had to click a button when looking something up in yomichan and it would add the vocab and its translation together with the sentence I found the vocab in as a new card. (There are even ways of adding pictures and pronunciations automatically, but I never used those.)

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That’s definitely true and I know some people do that, however I prefer more personalized cards, because I often add notes on する compounds, な-adjectives, etc.

I do use yomichan when reading online, however :smiley:

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At the beginning, I was mostly just powering through stuff that was way too hard for me (like Lvl 30-34). I’d manually translate it and color code things in a Google doc. My reading pace was slow, and I don’t recommend this. It can work well for learning songs though, since they’re smaller. As songs go, I really got into Yuki Kajiura’s music (Kalafina, FictionJunction, etc). There’s a fan site with all her song lyrics in JP, Romaji, and English: canta-per-me.net - A Yuki Kajiura Fansite » Lyrics & Song Info

For reading easier stuff, I already mentioned Crystal Hunters (use the free guides on their website, they explain vocab and grammar). At some point I started reading on Satori Reader, and that was really what made the bridge for me. If you try it out, I recommend Hole in the Wall or Kiki-Mimi Radio - possibly the “easy” edition of Kona’s Big Adventure as well. Also someone made some RPG style graded readers, which might be a good thing to try: https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/x9nrdu/i_have_made_a_third_rpg_inspired_graded_reader_n4/

Ironically now I stick to stuff that’s Lvl 26 and below, bc I got tired of looking stuff up constantly, and the grammar’s usually more accessible. I still use Satori Reader as well, but a bit less since I’m finally at a point where I can read easier manga (JP alongside translation), without being overwhelmed.

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Btw one thing that can make life easier is taking a screenshot, extracting the text via Google Lens, and then pasting that into ichi.moe or a dictionary (Jisho, Akebi, etc). Neither will get everything right, but it makes looking up words way easier. Yomichan is also great for this. Also manga with furigana can definitely help as well (tho it doesn’t always mean they’re easier)

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Sounds like it’s either power through stuff I’m interested in at high levels or power through the motivation lag at lower levels to get where I want to be.

Maybe try a little bit of both. Think of the harder stuff as more of an exercise. The point isn’t for you to read and fully comprehend (yet). The point is to absorb whatever parts are accessible, gain some new words and grammar, and reinforce ones you already know. Read the JP alongside a translation, so you’ll still know what’s going on, even when you can’t understand the sentence.

My process there is: read JP, try to process meaning (or at least get how the sentences breaks down grammatically), compare to translation, reread the sentence and see if you can identify the vocab or patterns more (now that you know the meaning). If not, then just move on from it, and you’ll eventually come across ones you can work out.

One challenge with manga is figuring out who’s saying what. Sometimes I’ll read a bubble, be totally lost, then look at the translation, and realize it was the other character. Suddenly it makes way more sense.

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Yeah, I think the manual translation and slow reading has been ok for me with some things, same with ambiguity. But there are quite a few books where I don’t really know if I want to re read them once I start if I’m only understanding a small percentage of the story but don’t want to read it at such a slow pace so was hoping there might be an easier way to help me read it extensively that didn’t involve trying to learn vocabulary and kanji with flash cards. Think to do that I’ll need to read intensively first before trying to read it extensively so will need to choose something of a lower level to read during breaks and downtime at work.

I do have crystal hunters so should probably try reading that. I tried satori reader but I don’t like having to pay extra for stuff that I’ll probably only use once unless it’s a physical copy I can pass on to others learning Japanese once I’m done with it. The RPG graded reader could be quite good, I’ll check it out, thanks :blush:

I use an iPhone or iPad and haven’t yet figured out how to use browser plug ins :sweat_smile: I do have apps and such I can use to translate paragraphs of text but have to hand write on the screen or type them in character by character. Furigana helps but I prefer if it only shows you it the first time so that I won’t use it as a crutch. Most of my stuff doesn’t seem to have furigana on kanji below a certain school grade just a pity none of my textbooks teach it the same way.

Most of the stuff I have doesn’t have English translations unless it’s graded readers. Even the short stories and any of the lower intermediate or above stuff doesn’t have it, just the occasional vocab list or minimal grammar explanations. Might go back and re read a few of my guided readers to help with that.

I’m impatient to start reading native level content and get stuck into all the books I’ve got but even the manga I’ve got are over lv 25 yet my reading level is probably around lv18-19 approx. I think I just need more practice using the language/ grammar I know then trying to build on that unless I want to read one book intensively and one extensively.

Thanks for all the links, hints and tips, I’ll check those out and see what happens :blush:

If you haven’t asked here yet, you might want to try it - if just because you can ask for recommendations in a certain level range, because we’re really used to that here.

I too am finding it a bit hard to find content I’m really interested in in the lower levels. The stuff I’m really looking forward is L29+ (like you, I have been wanting to a read a certain traveler’s story for a long time), but I don’t have your stomach for graded readers, so I’m tiding myself over with manga, children’s books and light novels that at least look kind of like they might be my taste. Apart from ごんぎつね (おはなし名作絵本 1) | L23 I didn’t find anything that I really really liked so far, but it was certainly much more enjoyable than my graded reader experiences.

It might also be a good idea to check WK book club threads from time to time to see if there’s anything you like in the next reading batch (the Absolute Beginner Book Club is finishing up voting in a few hours, and the Beginner Book Club is just starting a new manga today). Book Clubs helped me a lot getting ready for reading ~L24 on my own (with heavy Yomichan vocab assistance :wink: ), and reading in company always makes it more interesting and engaging.

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Thanks, I might ask for recommendations in a few months if I’m still struggling (once bills have gone down so I’ve some money for books :joy:).

For me, reading the free graded readers were a means to an end. Short sentences and later short paragraphs that I could use to build reading speed and kanji recognition (with the help of furigana). The short story books were for helping me jump to higher beginner level content and get the gist of lower intermediate level stuff when I could understand it.

Even my manga are all lv 25+ or I’d start on those. The wanikani book clubs are where some of my recommendations came from. Still not entirely sure how to navigate those coming along after it’s been finished (unless I’m wanting to read through many comments to find questions and answers :sweat_smile:) thought about reading along with them but haven’t done so since I usually don’t have the books already. Might try that too though. Thanks gor the suggestions :slightly_smiling_face:

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i used one of those reshipping services to give me a physical address in japan, and with that i had no problem opening an account on amazon.co.jp. making an account with the reshipping service was free, any fees would only apply if i were to actually use them for physical goods. i forget which one i used though, and can’t find it in my notes.


on topic: i pretty much just jumped in. i’d tried reading a bit of NHK Easy News, but didn’t stick with it because it was boring. the graded readers i’d seen didn’t catch my attention either. but i’d loved the やが君/Bloom into You anime, and when someone on WK suggested a bookclub for the manga, i decided to go for it.

i was not ready! with maybe 400 kanji (being generous there) and grammar maybe at N4, i was looking up almost everything. it wasn’t only a question of copying it out into google translate or deepl or ichi.moe, it was learning how to look up kanji, how to recognize furigana when they’re just to small and blurry, how to interpet kanji which have so many strokes that it all blurs, and so on and so forth.

the bookclub was only marginally useful. my speed rarely matched that of the club, and most of the discussions on grammar went way over my head. but it was a good place to gush about the story and how it was hitting me emotionally (someone mentioned that much earlier in this thread, that the stories seemed to have much more emotional impact, perhaps because they were so much more difficult to read).

i got through the first two volumes then (spring 2021), and finished the series that autumn (with much improved kanji and grammar knowledge). and have been reading on and off since then.

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This is off topic, but what’s your profile picture from?

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