I’ll come up with a funny sub title later
Formatting TBD. I’m sitting in the office and can’t concentrate on work too busy trying to find a reasonable reading order of those new 60 volumes I got during Black Friday amazon Japan sale on top of the 60 I had before it.
This will be a thread for me to scream into (and make the life of my irl friends easier as they have no idea what I’m talking about lol)
So yeah, Japanese. I have VERY unbalanced skills.
If I had to give it numbers, I’d go as far as to say that my listening is N1, grammar as a result is also N1, but kanji&vocab are N4 at best. So I’d answer those high level JLPT questions way easier if I could actually hear the words pronounced lol.
Trying to balance them out by pulling my ability to read up but God drilling kanji is so boring I can’t, they are just squiggles to meeee.
Personal history no-one cares about
About me:
watching anime since I was 10 (2005?)
started watching without translation since 2008 on and off (mostly off). That was “Shugo Chara doesn’t have subs anymore??” and “What is this kuroshitsuji episode one and why is it also ‘raw’?..”. (Tokyotosho was my love at that point)
learning grammar (ha) by recognizing repeating “no”, “ha”, “ga” in the romaji of the songs…
Learning kana only to immediately forget katakana…
Listening to a couple of Drama CDs / seiyuu interviews / etc
Reading parts of raw spoilers here and there (only with furigana)
when pretending to prepare for JLPT I relearned kanas and tried to learn some kanji but it’s going quite… Badly
I’m a poster child for learning by exposure that works when you have a lot of free time and impressionable mind.
My 2 JLPT attempts with 5 year break to immigrate, go to uni in a new for me local language (life happens) and become a corporate slave:
Passed JLPT N4 in 2017, just as an attempt to prove to my parents that I do understand the “cartoons” I’m watching
Passed JLPT N3 in 2024
Signed up for N2 in 2025 (yeah, no, I’m just trying to see where a mess like me is on the exams scale)
Study resources notes (Currently - a week before N2)
KKLC (Kanji Study app): I have officially seen 602 kanji in and I’ve got a whooping 147 as known and 215 as almost known.
NativShark - my year of subscription expired in May 2025 at Part 2 Unit 52, will resubscribe on New Year’s sale
Just made a renshuu account when it came up in Flesh&Blood book club. Book vocab study like this has never worked for me before because of kanji disbalance but I’ll try
JPDB.IO didn’t work out much for me (see above) but I really like the concept
Wanikani’s mnemonics are too long, they didn’t lure me in either
Trying to work up bravery to shamelessly say “Yes I will be reading lower 20ies manga only with furigana because it’s the only thing that I can do 0 lookups for and just read normally”
without feeling like a fraud when I can’t read 当然 in a book/L17 without furigana
My current plan is to get motivated to study kanji vocab by going to JLPT
Resources for 2026:
KKLC (book, app, its graded readers in the app)
+
Renshuu app of the KKLC vocab to make sure reading examples stick in my head (their shiritori and crosswords are kinda fun too)
+
NativShark (after I get them of sale for the year) with the amount of the vocab they have I can avoid creating/looking/choosing flashcards forever
Interesting background, welcome! I’m jealous of people who already have a high level of speaking and listening skill. I think once you get into it, reading will catch up very quickly
haha, I use that, too, and I recognised you when your log came up because I had seen you on the activity feed.
why not, you have to start somewhere
I’ll be interested how you get on
At first, I didn’t realize we could mark study books here too, so I was very excited to mark it, but looking at the sheer size of my physical copy, it feels like it’ll stay in progress for the next 5 years or so
Book club 4 - reading out loud (ouch) and discussing (no furigana this round) 雨と君と 1 | L18
It might be too much, but one of them is almost done, and another one is 1 hour per week.
Manga series I'm aiming to actually catch up with (and finish)
Now my personal TBR is a mess, but conceptually, there are three manga series I’m aiming to read through right now. And
Tantei Gakuen Q - because I binged it as a teen and hated that it had no English translation then. I’m struggling with getting through a volume in one sitting, it does require some concentration 探偵学園Q | L26
Kono Oto Tomare (if I pirate raws as they come out and read them immediately, I can - and did - buy all released volumes. A volume takes me about two hours to read) この音とまれ! | L24
And then this school romcom-ish thing happened because it was on sale and I read the first three volumes for free in 3 hours (that’s my Kaoru Hana pace, which is tempting) so I got uhh the rest ピンクとハバネロ | L20
Yeah, I also see how the difficulty keeps decreasing…
I think I'm also still learning what exactly and how/why I want to read
What I think I want to be reading: 本好きの下剋上 | L30 (I read 6 out of… 60+ volumes the Junior edition will end up having) best style ever, I like my easy-going fun writing style under which a story is building up as crazy
What I am reading spontaneously: 元婚約者から逃げるため吸血伯爵に恋人のフリをお願いしたら、なぜか溺愛モードになりました | L21mm yesss a play-pretend fiance of a guy that for fun pretends to be a vampire and scares the hell out of other nobles
The second one will increase my reading speed for the first one, right?? It’s all connected, right???
Also no, I will not listen to it as an audiobook, that would be too easy. As it is, I’m using Honzuki as a motivator.
And about audiobooks. Honorary mention to ゴーストハント | L33, which is the best thing ever. I will never forgive animators for doing 6 volumes out of 7 and leaving all the SECRET REVEALS to manga / novel readers. I’ve recently started vol 7 on Audible, but while I’ve got motivation to read, reading gets priority.
My skills are also unbalanced into listening’s favor (although not nearly as much as yours are!). I also did a lot of music and raw TV back before there were other options, but probably not as much since streaming wasn’t a thing yet, so getting enough TV was hard.
One thing that I’ve done a lot to help my reading skills is listen while reading with an audiobook. I would much prefer everything be spoken to me and reading for myself is so much harder. But I’ve found if I read along with the narration , it does help me pick up words and readings.
That said, I do have a university degree in Japanese studies, so I did have to learn a lot of kanji for that, and I’ve also been though RTK (reviewing the kanji? I forget exactly what it stands for..) with anki before. Kanji is actually one of my other very strong JLPT sections along with listening, but I’m still not great at reading.
Someone told me in the forums a while back that you can only get better at things you do, so I spent a lot of very frustrating hours this year reading without audiobooks, but I would still so much rather have someone just read to me why don’t manga have audiobooks??, so I get your pain. Just keep at it. The way I try and make myself feel better is reminding myself that you’re supposed to be able to listen way before you can read, so we’re at least doing it correctly!!
Hmm, never combined it before. I should try that on something I don’t feel like is the golden source of motivation (Honzuki). Maybe スレイヤーズ 1 | L34… I had it for a while, and I was debating if maybe listening to it would be funnier.
Is it grammar or vocabulary that is tripping you up more? Trying to see what the pitfall could be if I lean 200% into kanji somehow.
It’s mostly vocab I think. I can guess a decent amount knowing enough kanji, but there are words that you can’t guess from keywords–手間, 残念, 珈琲(lol)–and I’m much much faster at reading words I don’t have to decode like that. Putting the time into kanji is worth it, but I’d only recommend doing it as long as it feels like it’s serving your goals, which is my advice for most things!
Currently, my biggest struggle right now is less reading comprehension and more reading speed. I can read most of the books I want to, but it will take me longer than I can sustain interest in a book for.
Oh you just reminded me these have audiobooks! I’ve been doing less of the read+listen trick as my listening alone has become good enough to just listen to a lot of audiobooks, but I think Slayers is still out of my listening comfort zone. Maybe I’ll give that a try in the new year.
Very neat to see how you got here! I love seeing all the different paths people take and how they differ; I was not foresighted enough to work on my listening at all in the 10+ years I’ve been learning Japanese, which I immediately began paying for once the thought entered my head that I probably should. So I’m jealous of all you folks who’ve already put in the hours, haha.
Wow, for someone with so little confidence in their reading, you’ve got a bunch going on! And I feel like I’ve sensed nothing but confidence from you in the top two clubs on your list, so you definitely don’t come across as someone struggling too bad!
For Flesh&Blood, there are drama CDs for the first 24 volumes that are pretty faithful, so that could potentially be a resource for you when we start reading in January! The CDs are physical-only, unfortunately, but you can find them online if you look.
I just come with the mindset that it’s ok to lookup every word haha. My boyfriend cracks up sometimes when it’s quiet in the room and the only noise is me clicking on the sound icon on kindle dictionary cos I’m too lazy to scroll down to a translation. Their dictionary entries are hit and miss with the pronunciation.
But then I see how people get bummed with more than X look ups per page and feel a bit… Yeah, I’m not there like at all
I had to lookup 遠い today so the only way is up
You are so hyped about it it makes me excited too! I’m very slowly working my way through the vocab deck, but I’m not worried much.
BL pirate time travel is bound to keep me way more entertained than 変な家 | L29 and I finished that one with a club too.
Same here! It definitely does get easier, but the flood of words can be a bit much sometimes. I was doing some book club reading while visiting my sister once, and she said that, due to how I was holding my book with my phone sitting in between the pages, it looked like I was in school trying to avoid doing reading because I kept playing with my phone.
鈍い is my nemesis. For some reason it doesn’t want to stick.
Awesome!! I hope the participants enjoy the book! No worries if you don’t, I just like people trying the series.
It definitely does get easier, but the flood of words can be a bit much sometimes. 
