How to Read at the Sentence Level (Stagnated Reading Speed)

Hi everyone, I have a question for the more experienced readers out there - how did you go from reading at the word level, or even the phrase level, to reading entire sentences or paragraphs the same way you would in your native language?

Over the past 3 years, I’ve read over 60 novels in Japanese and my reading speed has stagnated around 30 pages per hour (with lookups every few pages). With an audiobook, I can read at 40-50 pages per hour. For reference, I’ve read over 30 of these books alongside the audiobook versions.

As my English reading speed is about 100 pages per hour, this feels quite slow, especially considering that a lot of my books read have been in the same series, and with audiobooks, so I should theoretically be reading faster.

I suspect that my problems may be coming from a few different places:

  1. I’m reading at the word/phrase level, not the sentence level
  2. I don’t tolerate ambiguity well and look up words when I’m unsure of the 読み方, although I can almost always grasp the meaning from the kanji and context
  3. I’m subvocalizing too much since I don’t want to mess up the 読み方 of the kanji
  4. I’m not reading easy enough content (?)
  5. Reading vertical sentences instead of horizontal paragraphs makes it harder to read large chunks at once

Most of what I read tends to be level 30 or above, so while I feel quite comfortable with series like ティアムーン帝国物語 and 本好きの下剋上, they might just not be easy enough content.

Thoughts? @bungakushoujo apologies for the tag, but you seem very knowledgable and experienced :face_holding_back_tears:

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Just one thought: How long did it take you to reach 100 pages per hour in English, probably more than just three years.

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Yep, I’ve got a similar takeaway. No clue what my current reading speed it, but as with most other things, the more the you do it, the better you get. And unfortunately, reading speed is measured in tens of thousands of pages and years of time.

I’d love to give more targeted feedback @NihongoLearner19, but unfortunately I’ve never been disciplined enough to be able to give you any useful feedback. :frowning:

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Sounds like you’re more or less at the same kind of place I am (except I’ve read 300 books and am still at that speed). You might be interested in the part of a thread on the WK forums that starts with this comment – Vanilla definitely reads faster than I can and some of the strategies he used to push up his reading speed might work for you.

(Although I asked him about this topic., I still haven’t tried any of it myself…)

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I would like to point out like mimc and eefara that for reading fast 3 years is tdefinitely a small number of years.
Even people who read fast in their native read more than 3 years (take actual 3 years old for example, which nomrally even if they do read they do so very slowly)

aside from that, personally (as someone who is still reading slow though) my number one jump in speed was definitely the reason from number 2.

tolerating ambiguity, meaning I know what the word means even if I don’t know how to read it or at the very least I can guess the meaning from context of both sentence and kaji, helps a lot more than I thought when I started doing it.

while it certainly isn’t ideal for learning, it makes flowing a lot easier and more importantly, gives priority to reading the sentences/book as a general rather than just expanding vocab, which I could be doing in so many other ways (such as jpdb, anki and other). I also want to point out that even in my native I sometimes don’t know the exact meaning of a word but skip it cause I “know it well enough”, meaning it is normal to do so in reading in general (at least for me).

personally I also found that memorizing radicals helped me identify kanji faster so I also recommend that if your issue is quick recognition rather than just ambiguity.

I would like to point out that number 2 kind of effects 1 and 3 so it’s essentially this chunk of things affecting each other, youdo 2 you will probably do 1 and 3 regardless if you meant to.

4 is also definitely something to look out for, if you’re reading things that are difficult regardless of language you’ll read them slowly, so maybe using the easier content to measure how fast you read should be taken into account.

about 5, I think that’s not it. It might be related if you simply aren’t used to reading vertical but if for example you test it on manga, I think you’ll see that vertical and horizontal can both be as fast as each other.
it can affect page numbers in technicalities, which you can try seeing how many pages you’ve read compared to where the content ends if it was in horizontal, but that won’t affect how fast you read bur rather the units you use to measure it…

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I suspect you’re not reading at the word/phrase level as much as you think. 30 pages per hour sounds way too fast for that to be the case. I read closer to 20 pages per hour (loose estimate based on kindle data) and I think I generally read at the sentence level, as long as it’s not a particularly complex sentence with many lookups.

I also don’t tolerate ambiguity well and I subvocalize 100% of the time in both Japanese and English. I’ve also been stagnated for 3-4 years, partly because I’ve had other life priorities, but also because I’ve been “happy enough” with my reading speed and level for now which has made me a bit lazy.

Overall it sounds like you’re a bit ahead of me and I have many of the same problems, so I don’t really have any help to offer. But hopefully knowing others are in a similar (or worse) place puts your mind at ease a bit.

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I’m somewhere between phrases and sentences, and the answer (besides vocab) is just endless input (audio + text is probably the most optimal) and some output. With enough repeated exposure, your brain develops a repertoire of all those patterns, and gets them on quick recall.

So needing to learn/reinforce vocab is holding back your reading speed. Targeted SRS is probably a good approach (at least it’s been working well for me)

My take: kanji are the representations of the words, not the words themselves. The fact that you can sometimes accurately Intuit the meaning (or even the reading) of the representation is like a nice side bonus, but it doesn’t mean you actually know the word. So either you need to learn/reinforce the word, or you need to strengthen your link between the word & its representation (kanji spelling).

Personally I always lookup words - whether for reading or meaning. There’s no way to learn 読み方 from raw text (at best you can have an educated guess, and then need to verify later). The only time I don’t is with audiobooks, bc the narrator has provided the reading for you (which can be really helpful for vocab acquisition or strengthening those links), and lookups add too much friction.

I’m skeptical that this is relevant. I’ve always subvocalized (or sometimes even read aloud), unless I was trying to scan/skim (in which case I’m not reading, I’m scanning/skimming), and don’t think it’s negatively impacted reading speed. I’m pretty skeptical of speed reading as ideal in general, particularly when high comprehension in a foreign language is the goal. The tradeoff with speed reading is comprehension

Conversely I think shadowing recently has been helping. It both helps me read (and vocalize) words faster, and internalize structural patterns in a way that I won’t necessarily get from just silently reading/listening.

It sounds like your reading speed appears like it’s stagnating bc you’ve developed a certain base reading ability, but you’re reading material that’s (relatively) too complex. So your base reading speed has probably increased, but large amounts of lookups take up the time. I’d bet if you jump down 2-3 levels, you’ll suddenly find yourself reading faster

Anyway I get the frustration, I’m constantly wishing I can read faster (even as my speed has increased). I think you’ll get there tho, and would suggest either targeted SRS or sticking with stuff that’s slightly lower level for a while.

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I saw Vanilla mention lowering font size (only as far as comfortable), and I have subjectively felt like this had some impact in the past. Particularly reading feels slower at larger font sizes. I think bc your eyes only see a certain range at once

They also said:

Before I say all the stuff I did in that ~1 year of improving my speed, I want to make it very clear that I do not suggest worrying about reading speed unless you are able to read with more or less 100% comprehension without a dictionary

While I certainly do pay attention to speed, I think they’re onto something, in like a “don’t put the cart before the horse” sorta way

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I have 2 hurdles when it comes to speed:

  1. Kanji readings
  2. Understanding

i.e. if my brain easily recalls the reading of a word and if my brain understands what I am reading, I can read fast. If not… then not. :sweat_smile: The fastest I have read so far were like 18k characters per hour (~40 pages à 450 characters per page), which is still slow compared to a native, but it felt like flying to me. :rofl: that was a level 22 book or something, though.

The more ambiguity I accept, the faster I can read, but the lower comprehension goes. I will do this, if I am particularly bored with a section - so basically like skim reading - but for learning purposes that’s not the greatest strategy. :sweat_smile:

TL;DR: If you want to read fast, read something really easy or allow a lot of ambiguity (not recommended :see_no_evil:).

PS: Vertical needs getting used to, but personally nowadays I don’t feel that the text direction makes a difference to my speed (in Japanese). :thinking:

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Mmm, and also I think while you are still in the learning phase where you have to pause occasionally for “I don’t really know that word, let me guess it”, there’s a lot of speed improvement available by being able to do that less.

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Hmm, this is a difficult one. I guess the easy answer is “just read more”, but that’s kind of unhelpful right?

Thinking about it more seriously, I think there are a couple things all wrapped up in the idea of reading “entire sentences or paragraphs the same way you would in your native language”.

For one, you are doing more than just reading quickly. You are actually looking at whatever symbols on the page, associating them with meaning, processing and comprehending, and doing it all at some speed that varies depending on how familiar you are with whatever the text you are reading is. I think you already had your finger on this with your bullet points 1-5.

To take a look at the Wikipedia page for reading comprehension, it lists these skills as necessary for reading comprehension:

  • know the meaning of words,
  • understand the meaning of a word from a discourse context,
  • follow the organization of a passage and to identify antecedents and references in it,
  • draw inferences from a passage about its contents,
  • identify the main thought of a passage,
  • ask questions about the text,
  • answer questions asked in a passage,
  • visualize the text,
  • recall prior knowledge connected to text,
  • recognize confusion or attention problems,
  • recognize the literary devices or propositional structures used in a passage and determine its tone,
  • understand the situational mood (agents, objects, temporal and spatial reference points, casual and intentional inflections, etc.) conveyed for assertions, questioning, commanding, refraining, etc., and
  • determine the writer’s purpose, intent, and point of view, and draw inferences about the writer (discourse-semantics).

You probably learned and practiced a ton of these skills in school in addition to all the other reading you ever did in your native language, so it’s a hidden part of why you are able to read faster. Now, to go from a word or phrase level to a sentence level in Japanese you have to work on all those skills again and that will help improve your overall ability (and as a consequence, speed as well) over time.

Some of those skills could be more heavily weighted in the case of learning Japanese versus your native language, such as knowing the meaning of all the words or knowing the connector words/identifying antecedents (aka more grammar and some more vocab), but they all go together.

Looking back at my own reading experience so far, the most important thing was just knowing many, many words, which meant doing lots of look ups over time. The second most important thing was having a strong grammar base so I didn’t become lost in what was happening in a book. With those two things plus exposure, I could start to deepen my understanding of the other things such as the authors intent or understand mood. I also became more able to visualize what I was reading and start chunking the words to read faster, because I could anticipate what words may come next to an extent (for example, you know the verb may be at the end since Japanese). So, from my own experience I guess I would give the advice for where you are at just to keep going with what you’re doing and not get discouraged and make sure you’re reading lots of fun stuff that interests you!

(I still don’t know words, misunderstand things, and read slowly at times btw. I don’t want to claim to be some kind of expert. :laughing: I’ve just been reading a lot for several years now…)

———

Looking beyond that, if you’ve already read very extensively and feel pretty solid in your reading comprehension, there are other factors that impact reading speed that I’ve personally encountered as physical versus digital, font size, actual book size (if it’s physical), how fast you push yourself to read, familiarity with the author/genre/time period and more. I’ve also noted that when I don’t read in Japanese for a while and have been reading in English or Korean, the transition back to vertical text is kind of jarring and slows me down. That’s all to say there is some kind of unknown X factor based on different things that make you faster or slower.

———

I feel relatively solid reading in Japanese (my reading speed is still much slower than in English, though), so a lot of those thoughts are coming from hindsight and me reflecting on my own experience and don’t have specific suggestions for how to deal with kanji or readings. But, I am going through the same process of slowly trying to become literate in Korean and retracing those steps, so I definitely think about this topic frequently. :slightly_smiling_face:

Some more concrete thoughts based on my Korean learning that are maybe helpful?:

  • Learning and internalizing linking words between sentences and clauses has been very helpful
  • Audio from dramas combined with reading webtoons and manga has been helpful for understanding slang and contracted speech in written form
  • Learning more vocab is king!
  • Listening more has helped to internalize the rhythm of the language, which helps me read more fluidly even if I don’t sub vocalize everything
  • Reading at my level or easier things lets me flex my currently skills and build on them in a manageable way. Caveat, I’ll need to push past this and read harder stuff eventually, but I don’t have a strong base.
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Thanks to everyone for their valuable comments! I appreciate the help.

Lots of replies below; I hid them behind detail tags so this doesn’t get too hard to read.

@mic

mic

Yes, very true! It probably took more like 5-6 years after I started reading, not to mention having the advantage of being a native speaker.

@pm215

pm215

Thank you for sharing your experience, as well as the link! I’ll try some of Vanilla’s strategies out, although as I’m also mainly reading physical books these days, I’m not sure how to implement some of them. At the very least I can try to chunk things out more when reading and see how that goes, though!

@shablul

shablul

These are all helpful points, thank you. I think I’ll try to borrow some of the books on my want to read list that are below L29 from the public library and read those extensively (I’ll have to put my phone in another room so I can’t look up words :rofl:)

It will be interesting to see how the easier content feels to read versus the harder stuff that I’ve spent most of my time reading, as well as how it impacts my reading speed, as well as my tolerance for ambiguity.

@seanblue

seanblue

I’m relieved to hear that someone else is in the same boat, haha. It’s really hard to know what’s “normal” as a second language learner, particularly with Japanese, since very few people bother to read this many books and then post on the internet about it. :sweat_smile: Thank you for sharing!

@暁のルナ

暁のルナ

Thank you for your input! I’ve been doing Anki for the past few months since I’m currently in Japanese language courses in Japan, so I’ll try importing words I’ve saved but never looked at from Jisho. I’ve noticed that it is helpful as long as I keep things at under 5-10 minutes of Anki per day (~10 new cards), to prevent frustration and burnout.

It’s good to hear that other people are subvocalizing and feel that it’s not holding them back. I subvocalize in English as well.

I should clarify that I’m not trying to speed read, just read more quickly while maintaining my comprehension. It sounds like a combination of Anki, mixing in easier books, and experimenting with targeted sessions to try and read faster (or reread select passages) should work well.

The shadowing is an interesting idea! I’ve been wanting to try and do some to help with my speaking, pronunciation, and pitch accent, so I might give it a try.

@bungakushoujo

bungakushoujo

Thank you for making these points; it’s very easy to forget all of the things that “reading” involves!

I should say that I’ve been reading fairly intensively, so I do look up most words that I don’t know. I need to practice extensive reading with easier books and not look up words unless they appear a ton of times and I really can’t understand them.

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まとめ / Strategy Moving Forward

Thanks to everyone’s feedback, I’m planning on trying to incorporate the following methods into my reading routine:

  1. Alternating books >L30 in the series that I’ve been reading with books <L30 from my want to read list to get exposure to easier books
  2. Reading the harder books intensively and adding unknown words/phrases to Anki, with 5-10 new cards per day
  3. Reading the easier books extensively (i.e., by putting my phone in another room so I can’t look words up) and looking up words after the reading session if needed

Other Strategies

  • Shadowing sounds like it may be useful, so I’m thinking I might try to add in 5-10 minutes of that per day, maybe with an easier novel + audiobook or a news recording + transcription

Overall, it does sound like the prevailing answer is: Be patient, keep reading, and I’ll get there eventually, so I’ll do my best to keep moving along! Thank you all!

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Here’s my very unnecessary addition: (sorry in advance)
Recently I read 地球星人 which is- disturbing, and at some point i found myself DREADING to read what comes next so i took a deep breath and ran my eyes across the screen, i literally felt like someone was chasing my eyes as they ran across the page and that was the fastest Ive read, i-unfortunately understood all of it and i hit 100 pages in one day but at what cost :sob: i feel like i leveled up since then it’s like i unlocked a new skill haha.
My takeaway from this experience is reading for pleasure with 0 pressure makes my brain a bit lazy so i keep second guessing myself. Honestly i might look for new ways to recreate this experience when i feel slow again :moyai:

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Progress Update

I just finished reading an easier book (神様たちのお伊勢参り L27) extensively and it was so much faster than usual! While I think that switching up the difficulty was a big part of it, as well as using the audiobook, I’ve never actually read anything extensively before. :sweat_smile:

It was really fun to just zoom through the book without losing any comprehension. I doubled my reading speed from 30 to 60 pages an hour and I don’t feel like I was missing any details or anything. It was very satisfying and I’m kicking myself for not trying to read without lookups anytime sooner. :rofl: I only looked up 10 words in the entire book.

Anyway, next up is a harder book, 本好きの下剋上25 (L31), but I look forward to dropping back down to セーラー服と機関銃 (L29) after that to see if I can repeat this exciting experience! I have the audiobook for セーラー服と機関銃, so it shouldn’t be too bad.

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Just seeing this topic now and feel like sharing some ideas. I wouldn’t call myself a fast reader but I have put some effort into improving my reading speed and seen tangible results in my characters per minute.

tldr: read faster by practicing reading faster

The simple boring agreed-upon answer is just read more and you will get faster eventually. However, I think reading speed is also a skill that can be directly practiced. Here are some methods I have used:

Extensive reading

  • lookups are slow, it’s faster to just not do them
  • saving multiple lookups and doing them in a batch can also help to not break the reading flow

Short-passage repeated reading drill

  • pick a short passage (about a page?)
  • turn on timer and read as fast as possible while trying to take meaning
  • do it again but faster this time
  • note: this is pure practice and it can be kind of boring, similar to a pianist practicing scales

Line tracing (the “on-rails” experience)

  • Take a pen or your finger and trace the line while you read
  • Keep a steady pace without stopping or slowing down
  • This is the reading equivalent of not pausing a tv show
  • Optional: Have a jump point where you quickly move to the next line
    • for example, 3 characters from bottom of each line, you jump to the 3rd character down from the top of next line
    • basically cut off the top word and bottom word from your tracing, you either catch them in your peripherals or you just let them go

All of these methods increase the level of ambiguity. If you think about it, you probably read a lot of things in your daily life without looking at every word or sentence (news articles, google searches, forum posts, etc). For example, you could skip this whole paragraph if you want to and still understand.

It’s up to the reader to determine whether or not this is enjoyable. I choose between reading fast or slow on a book by book basis depending on difficulty and my level of interest.

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