Hi all. This is my first time making a post on these forums so I apologise if this is in the wrong category.
I know that to some extent, the Natively levels for books are more of an estimate than exact facts, especially when it comes to JLPT levels. However I was wondering what people think the jump in difficulty is like between levels (for example from an L30 to an L31), and whether this jump is very noticeable, if that makes sense. I’m thinking specifically of orange/N2 level books, but I’m interested to hear people’s thoughts in general. I try not to get too hung up on levels but they are very useful when deciding which books are approachable given my reading ability.
JLPT levels: This is basically meaningless for me. The books are geared towards native readers and don’t adhere to any levels when it comes to grammar or vocabulary usage. So you cannot assume that you can read and understand 100% of a “N3” book once you passed N3, as an example.
Having said that, of course lower level books (and thus lower JLPT-level books) tend to be easier.
Natively levels: These levels are very subjective as they are derived from readers’ gradings, i.e. everybody is asked to compare a book to other books they have read. This comparison depends of course on very personal criteria, i.e. one person may find the kanji very hard, or the vocab, while the other person struggled on grammar more and thus rates the same book pair differently. Also, maybe the person doesn’t remember exactly how hard the other book was, or their perception of difficulty changes over time as they improve their skills. So it’s not a scientific thing.
But again, one can see certain trends between books. A L40 book will probably be perceived as harder for everybody, compared to a L30 book. So what I take from this is that one can rely on ranges to a certain extent (e.g. the range of books around L30, the range of books around L35 and so on). There you will probably feel a difference. But I doubt that you can reliably feel a difference in difficulty between books that are only one level apart.
Last not least, how hard you find a book is also very much influenced by your interest. If you really really want to read a book and fight through it, you might get farther with it than with any other book that you find boring but that is ranked 10 levels lower. So it’s not so much the book’s level but rather your interest that will keep you going.
If you are worried that you might lack the stamina, maybe join a book club, or just ask in the book club thread for some like-minded people and form a book club on the spot?
Good luck and enjoy whatever you’re reading!
I agree fully with @nikoru 's post so I’m not going to repeat the same things.
I would like to add that in my experience, popular books’ ratings are more reliable than unpopular books, simply because they have more gradings. And note that the rating of books with two question marks like lv30?? are complete guesstimates; the person who added that book to the site singlehandedly decided that rating, probably without even reading the book.
The difficulty of certain books also might just be different for you than it is for other people: If you read a lot of fantasy books you’ll know more fantasy specific vocabulary and that in turn makes fantasy easier to read.
Just read whatever you like and if it’s too hard you can shelf the book until later with no harm done. I treat all the levels as estimates. You’re doing the right thing not getting hung up by levels
Emphasizing the “level ranges” thing, it’s not uncommon to see certain books shift up or down a level or two… So like a book that was L32 later became L30 or vice-versa. It’s the still the same book - so clearly there isn’t an objective difference between levels
That seems like an overgeneralization, and more likely they’re just the default levels (ex: if I don’t specify a lvl for an LN, Natively puts it at L30??. Manga is L24 iirc)
I tend to take the level estimates as having a range ±3 or so levels in potential overlap. A level 25 or 26 book is probably going to be more difficult “on average” than a level 23 one, but for you personally, that may not be the case due to differences in what you’ve learned, what you find difficult, and what you find interesting. But there will be a starker difference between the level 23 book and a level 29 book.
This can also happen with works people have read/watched when the system doesn’t have enough grading information to confidently work out a level yet. For a few works I’ve entered, it seems to be because I didn’t have enough “easier than” ratings to give a good upper bound, and nobody else has read/watched them yet, but I’ve also seen ?? ratings on works where a couple of people had read them but the comparisons were kind of all over the place.
I agree with everything that was said above, so I’ll just add that there may be (especially in the very high levels, like 40+) islands of books that were graded against each other, but not against the rest of the books in here. I found that it artificially inflates their level due to how the system works: it tries to compare it in priority to books of a similar level. Well, actually, the series I had in mind (TRPGプレイヤーが異世界で最強ビルドを目指す | L41) received a lot more rating since 2 years ago, so, while I feel like that level is overkill, maybe it is deserved? Still, it’s wild to me that it’s ~10 levels above 本好きの下剋上 | L32 when the average text difficulty is about the same. (Main difference is that the former starts with a hard section while the latter has similarly hard sections in later volumes).
Oh, and on that note, level maybe made inconsistent by people who grade stuff based on the first volume (or couple of volumes) versus people grading the series as a whole. Natively technically supports splitting the difficulty between volumes, but it requires the admin to make the split manually, so it doesn’t happen often.
To put the numbers into a more personal perspective, I can say that level 12 is easy for me. 14-15 is comfortable, but level 18 can be a chore.
While ready 100+ of the Tadoku graded readers, I noticed that the rating was not just based on vocabulary and grammar, but also on text length and text-picture ratio.
For example, if I found a long story, then I knew that it would be easier in terms of vocabulary and grammar, because it would be rated higher due to requiring more stamina.
Personally, I find that there’s a disparity between media. The easiest mangas are around 12~14, but I personally find them more difficult than graded readers of the same level.
I can only talk about N5 and N4 when it comes to the comparison to the lower JLPT levels. I have the feeling that being on the end of the spectrum is required to feel comfortable with the given JLPT level.
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