Textbook learners evangelize here!

Japanese
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I was going to go through my library to see what I have in that region and suggest a few, but I actually have a ton. :sweat_smile: (With the caveat that some books have only been graded by me and some are still tentative levels.) So I’ll just leave the filter link here, and if/when you have any time or inclination to look through, I can answer any questions about any particular books!

Short list of suggestions; these were really difficult to pick, because there are too many series I’d like to recommend, so I tried to grab stuff with specific “learning features”:

  1. 光が死んだ夏 | L26 (manga; billed as horror BL; 99% in 関西弁, so great for sampling that dialect)
  2. 椎名くんの鳥獣百科 | L26 (manga; good for picking up animal and university heirarchy vocab. For more animal vocab check out 天地創造デザイン部 | L24??, though it’s ungraded)
  3. ゆるキャン△ | L26 (manga; good for picking up outdoors, camping vocab)
  4. あなたも殺人犯になれる! | L27 (novel; author is known as a universally easy novel read, so nice to sample him if you haven’t yet)
  5. 魔入りました!入間くん | L28 (manga; comedy; has a wide range of speaking styles, grammar I seem to recall as being somewhat tricky in places)
  6. レバダン・希望の花 | L30 (manga; historical fiction, light BL; great for getting your formal language down pat, as well as a great crash course in vocab related to medieval/historical concepts)

The list is pretty heavy on manga there, and there’s plenty more I’d like to recommend. D: Hopefully I’ll see you over in the BL club for more targeted recs. :eyes: (Apologies if you’ve read any of these suggestions already; I’m typing this list up in between work meetings.)

Yep, I definitely recommend leaning on the BL club; we’ve got a lot of really knowledgeable and passionate people who can definitely help!

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Not that I really consult it too much rn, but honestly at this point I would love something like that!! I can’t seem to find it on Amazon tho, just the 英語版. Any chance you have a link?

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This is the Amazon listing for the all-Japanese edition – they have some images of sample pages so you can see what the explanations look like. (日本語文型辞典, ISBN 4874249493 . I have the first edition rather than this revised edition, but it looks like it’s basically the same thing.)

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Ahhh, so not digital then, that explains. I found it for slightly cheaper on cdjapan, so I’ll probably add it to next month’s order there. Thx!!

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Whoops, yes, I have a tendency to forget that some people don’t read exclusively paper books like me :slight_smile:

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Over at WaniKani, Vanilla has posted a long video detailing their learning path without textbooks:

Maybe you can find some interesting bits and pieces in there.

(I think you can access the page even if you don’t have a WK account - if not, please drop me a line and I can post the youtube link here directly, but I think the discussion in that thread might also be interesting)

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Actually no idea what you’d be excited about, but I checked my list of books that I read so far, and these are the ones lvl 27-29 (there is not really anything below that, sadly):

They are all books for adults (I think), and almost no schoolchildren appear in them either :sweat_smile: I think you can also find some of them as audiobooks on audible or audiobook.jp, and some have vocab lists on jpdb.io . If you’d like to know more about them, just fire away :slight_smile:

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There’s a lot of good advice in this thread, but hopefully I can at least help with this part. Tobira wasn’t originally designed to be a self-study book so there is some vital “how to use” information missing imo.

I’ve taken some language courses like you have, and the way my instructors taught us to use the Tobira textbook was to treat the reading passage(s) as the essential central piece of the chapter. It’s not meant to be read in one fell swoop, like a novel or news article, but rather split into much smaller chunks that you work on day-by-day to annotate and summarize and translate.

For a 100-line passage, we might split it into 25-line chunks over 4 days, and each day spend our time reading the section, circling, jotting down notes, writing furigana for the new kanji, and translating the vocab and new grammar. The entire chapter becomes interactive when each following page is understood to be a supplemental reference for the passage while you read it. Then after four days of picking apart the passage line-by-line, we used the fifth day to read it all at once like you’d read any book, summarize the content, answer the comprehension questions, then shortly read the kaiwa pages aloud to work on our understanding of conversational flow. A chapter per week is a very productive pace, I think.

Depending on the amount of time you give to the new vocab and grammar – adding them to SRS, coming up with your own context sentences to build understanding, writing the kanji out by hand, or none of that and solely experiencing them in the reading passage – Tobira could be a short part of a larger daily study routine or its own long session. In the classroom, our 25-line chunks would take us 4 hours, since everything we did was supplemented with making flashcards, writing example sentences, reading the section aloud, etc. But I’ve personally whittled it down to be a 30 minute piece of my greater self-study routine since then.

I wrote a longer breakdown of how we studied Tobira in the classroom over in the Wanikani forums (here). I was afraid I’d forget everything about how to study after I stopped taking classes, so I tried to be as detailed as possible to help my future self :sweat_smile:

I hope this helps a bit, I enjoy learning from textbooks and having guidance for “where to go next”!

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I saw this yesterday when there weren’t any answers yet, thought of what to answer and then forgot to do it afterwards - and today I don’t have to do it anymore because I just learnt that @cat is basically me (but much more advanced) and made exactly the posts that I wanted to make.

(I.e. “What’s the gap?”, “What are your problems?”, “Study vocab with an SRS”. Down to this very detail: “I only used Genki I+II and then have kind of cobbled together my understanding since then by googling things I didn’t understand” - are you just describing me here, @cat? :laughing:)

This bit especially is why I think textbooks won’t help you much:

That is pretty much exactly the problem I am having right now. I am working on it in two ways:

  • Reading more books!
  • Restarting doing SRS via Anki after a big break. Right now it’s just filling in the gaps that I still left in my Core2k deck, and after that… maybe Core6k? Maybe targeted vocab study? And I’m planning to use this Anki plugin for Kanji (because I choose my tools by how dramatic the reveal videos are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXXjqNEYseY)

There will definitely be some overlap between the vocab you will learn in textbooks and what you’ll learn in fantasy novels, but it will be pretty small. Considering that you sound bored by textbooks - do you really want to try reading them just for learning a tiny bit more relevant vocab? I know I definitely won’t :laughing:

That said, I think textbooks are great when you want to generally get better at the language, especially when it comes to getting better at being able to produce (together with doing exercises, of course). When I don’t understand a sentence I don’t need a textbook to fill that in, I can google it myself; but when I try to form a sentence I don’t always know what I’m missing, so raising my general ability is good there.

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What can I say, it’s a winning formula! :joy:

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From what I understand, the core decks are made from vocab of newspapers, not from novels. So there will be some overlap as they also have the usual basic words, but then there are also words of politics, economics and jurisdiction that are rare in easier books.

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Honestly, for those looking to widen their vocab, I would highly recommend just reading and making your own flashcards. It can take a while to build up a good number of cards, but you get a much more targeted set of cards to study, and it’ll prepare you for gathering vocabulary in the L35+ levels, which are basically difficult primarily because they lean on a very specific subset of vocabulary and/or are just use very highfalutin’ language in general.

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Yeah, I know, and I’m slightly annoyed by those words, but if I wanted I could just suspend them when they come up - and most importantly the cards themselves are fantastic quality-wise. They are pretty much my ideal how a card should look like: A kanji word on one side, kanji with furigana, high quality audio and English translation plus an example sentence with furigana, high quality audio and translation on the other side.

The Core2k deck I’ll probably just finish completely because apart from anachronistic stuff like “tape recorder” I cannot see those words being useless.

The Core6k deck I might do completely at some point, or just continue what I’m currently doing: If a word I want to learn is in there, I make it so that I’ll learn that word next. Boom, instant high-quality card with no work from my side.

How do you decide which words to make flashcards from?

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Do I know the word? If not, add. I look at the word, realize I’ve seen it before, but couldn’t remember it’s reading and/or meaning? Add. I look at the word, remember the meaning but not the reading? Add. Do I remember the reading but not the meaning? Depends; about half the time, based on nothing but vibes, I’ll skip it. (This is after looking up the meaning, of course. Sometimes I’m confident that just a quick check is enough.)

Basically I have a low tolerance for ambiguity and a high tolerance for looking stuff up, haha.

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I think that compared to me you either have less unknown words in the books you read, or you have a much higher tolerance for doing SRS and turning the act of reading books into work. If I did that for any book I’m currently reading, a chapter in I’d have to take a break for a month to SRS all those new words I added, or I’d have no chance of catching up…

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Jpdb does this automatically fwiw (you can configure which things to include on either side). Tho not all sentences have audio or translation, but I think you can set it to only show you ones that do(?)

When I see it enough that it annoys me that you had to look it up again (or think I’ll have to); or if it’s an interesting (to me) word.

I personally usually only make (anki) flashcards out of words I want to reinforce (meaning or reading), rather than brand new words.

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Probably the latter, haha. It’s only been very recently that I’ve dipped back down into the sub-L30 novels, and my goodness do they feel like easy reads, haha. I have to remind myself not to get too comfortable.

On that note, a note to my method: I do indeed have a massive backlog of cards. It’ll take me months/years to actually get to the cards for books I’m currently reading, unless I prioritize them for some reason.

But I’m always reviewing new cards anyway, so the learning never stops, and it works well for “reviewing” the older cards once they come up in my decks.

And finally, to counterbalance all that, the flood does eventually slow. I still have plenty of cards, but I’m not making them in the same quantities now as I was a few years ago. That could be remedied by picking up a much higher-leveled book, of course, but the flood is not eternal.

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Haha this is me. Massive backlog of cards and also not currently doing anki. When I get back to it and work through my massive review pile I fully expect to get some “new” cards and be like “oh but I know this now actually” :joy:

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I cannot with jpdb, personally.
I also have been playing around with anki for more than a decade and have lots of card styling that I like to do. I also hate that there are thousands of words that I need to tell it that I already know for it to be useful for me. Right now I sometimes go in and go to about the 5th page when sorting by frequency in a book and grab some words I don’t know.
I get that it’s supposed to be a self contained system, but I hate that I can’t export the word list out of the site and into my anki.

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Oh, nice, I had no idea! I don’t really want to add another SRS, but maybe I’ll integrate it into my custom Anki importer at some point. Thanks!

Yeah, that’s why I feel like I adding a massive amount of new words to Anki might not be the best of ideas for me :laughing:

If I only see that new card months/years after, I feel like one of two things will happen:

  • In the meantime I have seen the word often enough that I have learnt it on my own.
  • I have never seen that word again, have no memory of how it got there, and considering that it’s apparently not coming up very often… do I really need it?

Maybe I’ll mess with making new cards according to frequency lists at some point, but at the moment I’m happy enough just going through Core2k and adding the occasional word that I personally find interesting, much like @暁のルナ described above.

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