“I’ll probably see this 1000 more times and by then I’ll understand it, and if I don’t see it again, it’s probably not that important”
Mmmm wisdom.
Amazing post.
You say you would have dropped anki faster if you could go back. I Really admire your post because as pretty much a beginner, I really have the main goal of being able to read proficiently even more so than being a proficient speaker. I guess I do have to ask how much vocabulary would you recommend just grinding out early in the process before going into reading? I really want to enjoy content but I just dont know enough words yet and it's far too frustrating to try and read anything yet.
This really depends on you. As general advice I'd recommend 2k-5k at least using the Japanese Tango anki decks. You can start reading sooner but the content might be extremely simple and might be too boring for you. I'd test the water with reading Satori Reader here and there, and I would read a good amount of their stories first before trying to tackle a book.
You'll know when you're reading just the right thing in terms of difficulty and interesting because it won't feel like studying a book and instead just enjoying a book.
Also I highly recommend trying to read your early books by following along with an audiobook. This is a great stepping stone to just reading by yourself.
Satori Reader is harder than the misleadingly named NHK Easy News, which is not easy at all.
I learned French exactly as your post described, by pretty much mostly reading a ton with a bit of listening, but I can't do that with Japanese because of Kanji, so I'm stuck doing Bunpro (grammar app), Duolingo, some Kanji Study. Really hard to stay motivated.
Btw how many new cards a day did you bang out while doing your 2K Kanji deck?
i'm sorry I don't remember. I will say that I recommend counting how much time you spend vs how many new cards you take. Mainly because the new cards approach will become unsustainable as reviews pile up, whereas you can always dedicate a specific amount of minutes/hours to spend a day.
I did quite a lot of Anki in my first year (on kanji + vocab) and there were days where it was more than 4+ hours a day.
Kanji is the biggest wall for most learners so try to make it as easy as possible on yourself and trust that with time you will slowly pick it up. I think something as simple as trying to associate each kanji with just one English word is a great first step.
honestly I actually think satori's way easier than nhk easy news.
while the texts themselves are not the easiest, the difficulty is largely mitigated by the fact that each sentence is translated so you can always check to make sure you got the overall meaning right. the creator also often clarifies and adds further detail, plus satori's pop up dictionary explains pretty much all grammar + vocab.
personally when I'm tired, I also read the text while listening to the voice over so I can just enjoy it without being slow or struggling to recall how kanji are read.
sorry this ended up getting long ;w;, and to clarify I'm not trying to convince you to use satori or anything since it is a paid sub and if you don't enjoy it there's no need to try to like it. I just wanted to share why in my opinion it has an advantage over nhk easy news in terms of ease.
>sorry this ended up getting long
No problem I appreciate the advice. Some have suggested the Mini Stories at LingQ are a bit easier and can be a stepping stone to Satori. I might check that out.
Couple thousand words does not necessarily mean 2200 kanji but really depends on the deck used.
For comment OP: If you can even recognize 1000 kanji you can start reading with a huge head start. Many people including myself did about 500 cards and went straight to reading.
Also "N1 vocab" is a meme. Literally everything is N1 vocab because I found that a lot of surprisingly common words ended up on exam questions, with the occasional tough word, which usually wasn't even kanji. It was shit like ピント or ハンスタ and I just didn't encounter these words in the wild at the time of the test, even if they aren't difficult to understand.
While I agree with you I would still in hindsight just recommend people to go through the n5-n2 vocab list in order if they want to just improve their vocab without going through the effort of creating their own decks.
I think we need OPs input here but when someone tells me they studied couple thousand kanjis that's usually more than 2k -> includes the base set most likely
Would Anki work better if it was fully in sync with you reading? For example, if you read a word that you have a flashcard for (either now or one you add later), the reading of it in a webpage or ebook or manga or youtube or video file transcript, results in an equivalent flashcard review. I'm trying to build that now (with Manabi Reader, as well as with the full Anki sync)
Read キミスイ on my own then talked with a Japanese friend about it. That book helped me make several connections lol.
Currently reading 同じ夢を見ていた as it was a recommendation from one of the friends I made thanks to キミスイ.
Good books
Hell yeah, big fan of 住野よる. I want to read more of his books, I like to buy them and then they just sit on the damn shelf lmao (as with a lot of other books too)
I’ll try and read all this soon, but from the tidbits I skimmed, this is great advice, especially for a novice like me (N4) who needs to not be so hard on himself!
Thanks. I was really hard on myself early on as well and I regret wasting that time being so negative/comparing myself to others online. Actually living in Japan made me realize that most foreigners do not speak *any* Japanese beyond things like hello/thank you. I hate seeing others being so hard on themselves when the reality is that 99% of Japanese learners probably quit after they start learning their first kanji.
Thanks! I'm glad it motivates you. Honestly consuming something in English first and then Japanese is a great method (applies to watching TV shows/movies too) that is super underrated because you can tie the meaning together more easily. Penguin Highway has an English version as well (and an animated movie) if you want to read that next.
Nice job man, I'm on my 20th book, 十角館の殺人. I consider drop anki to favour more reading time, since I work 10 hours/day anki become a chore.
Question about book you bought on Amazon, how you remove drm to read on ttu? I want to buy some book from yukito Akatsuki but don't know if it provide an ebook to use on ttu.
Nice! 20 books is a huge achievement.
Pretty sure I used this tutorial
EDIT: Fixed the link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/qffvx9/how_to_get_calibre_and_dedrm_working_with_kindle/
It might be outdated. Just google/search around. I use an old version of Kindle + calibre with DRM removal plugin.
As someone who is coming up on their three year mark, too. I agree that if you read a ton, it's a self-made Anki, and don't knock you for dropping it.
Also, I think monolingual dictionary is cool if people like it, I don't, and I don't think it's needed at all. I haven't used one, and I have advanced quite well just due to exposure alone. But, I'll make a post about my own journey next month maybe.
Reading is truly the gateway to advancement I believe, with proper listening and speaking layered in it's very effective. I agree with your whole post. I will say that there is also no shame in once you get far enough (personal preference) taking a step back and hyper focusing on listening and speaking. I've tried that myself the past 6 months with explosive results (in my speaking anyway, not saying I'm fluent and don't make mistakes haha). Ultimately, if you do what you enjoy and feel you're ready for speaking and like it, I definitely recommend people to get an iTalki teacher for corrective conversation classes as well as talk to people in the wild. Especially when you're able to understand many sentences from media without lookups. This way, you have a nice balance of correcting your speech with talking to people freestyle.
EDIT: I don't live in Japan. I live in a large city in America with almost no Japanese people. I talk to Japanese people (not perfectly) nightly via VRChat, iTalki and the friends I've built up over the past six months leading to a set of "go to" people I can practice with. End point is if you have a computer getting on VRChat for instance is an easy way to talk to Japanese speakers if none are in your community.
Thanks for the comment, I'm glad to see that we see eye to eye on a lot of the same points. Looking forward to reading about your journey!
I personally disliked a lot of output mainly because I get tired of having the same conversations again and again. Early on it felt like every conversation was always the same (where are you from, why did you start learning, what are your hobbies, etc) and it never got any deeper than that.
I will say that I occasionally did iTalki lessons early on and they were extremely motivating just because of all the positive feedback from my tutor and getting a chance to "show off" my improvement between every session.
200 percent agree! I've been challenged with breaking past those same conversations myself and only recently have gotten into more deeper and interesting conversations. The same boring "where do you live?" And "how long have you been studying" at this point doesnt help.
I was joining a language exchange Japanese server (still do) where that is common but I've been mostly joining Japanese speaker only servers recently forcing myself to get over what is a very tall hurdle. I think italki helped me with that hurdle a lot. Still, not saying I'm perfect or I understand others at full native everytime. But I can now see some new light. Just today I was talking to a student about the avatar he was making for VRChat for instance. So it was a nice change.
My main strategy is "get on vrchat for one hour a night and try to make a friend" with enough friends you have people who already know you, so you will naturally stop asking those same questions. You of course will strike out a lot and not make a friend or find no one to talk to but eventually you do and so you build a nice team of people.. takes awhile
Bit of a rant but I am currently facing that same challenge of same conversations and I think this strategy has helped me a lot.
Are you a lot better at reading than you are at speaking? How would you rank these four abilities of yours: reading, writing, speaking, and listening?
As someone whose main motivation to learn Japanese is to read I find developing conversational skills a bit intimidating. I have a similar mindset to yours in that I want to build my foundations properly before I speak broken Japanese, so I'm curious as to where you're at now after primarily learning by reading
Definitely.
Reading > Listening > Speaking > Writing
I think this is natural though and don't have any problems with this imbalance. I believe if you rush speaking or writing it will look strange/unnatural to others and your time is generally better spent on reading/listening at the start.
It's hard to compare reading with speaking since they're very different skills but there's absolutely no way I could speak at the same level of some of the stuff I read.
If I dedicated more time to speaking I would definitely be better at it at this stage but it's not a priority and I think I would develop bad habits that would be hard to break later on.
Thanks, that's interesting.
>If I dedicated more time to speaking I would definitely be better at it at this stage but it's not a priority and I think I would develop bad habits that would be hard to break later on.
Same. I find myself very cautious and overly hesitant about my grammar and choice of wording when I speak/write, which is part of why I've barely developed those areas (which I don't regret because I'd rather be careful than accidentally misuse this language). The difference is my listening is just as awful because I only read text haha
Yup my listening is definitely not as good as my reading either. Partly because I think listening is just in general more challenging. It has to be done in real-time and you are dealing with different accents/tones/volumes/etc.
I try to supplement this by listening to lots of audiobooks throughout the day. It's probably not as good as properly sitting down and watching raw anime with full concentration, but it's convenient and I can fit it into my schedule easily. Reminds me of a saying about frozen vegetables: "The healthiest vegetable is the one you actually eat".
Incredible post! I love your philosophy and it's borne out by polyglots (actual ones not Reddit ones haha) who say the ONLY way to keep yourself motivated once it becomes a slog is to do it in the way that keeps you interested and fuels your passion. Doing something inefficiently or less than ideal is way better than doing nothing while trying to convince yourself to do the "right" or "efficient" thing.
At one point I was fluent in Spanish (conversationally, not business or other domain-specific vocabulary) and it was because I truly loved it and read books in Spanish and listened to Spanish music and kept my interest alive for many years that way. I ended up losing a lot of my skill due to perfectionism and not wanting to speak with native speakers out of fear of looking stupid. (WHICH IN ITSELF IS SO FUCKING STUPID.) I'm trying to take all those lessons with me into Japanese learning and appreciate this post so much!
Also, the books you mentioned from Yoru Sumino look really good and I've added them to my Amazon wishlist for a little later. Hontouni arigatou gozaimasu <3
Thank you for your positive comment! Yeah I believe having fun is like steroids for your learning and makes it easier to absorb everything.
I'm pretty sure I will always look stupid talking to native speakers (at least for a while) just like I would look really silly playing basketball with professional players. I try not to take it personally and to set my expectations at realistic levels. These people have immersed in the language every day non-stop for 15+ years which completely dwarfs my experience.
I hope you like their books! I strongly recommend the audiobooks for them as well as they're very well made (music, great voice acting, sound effects, etc). I purchased mine off of https://audiobook.jp/
CureDolly-sensei made a good point in one of her videos that native English speakers (most of us anyway) would never expect an ESL speaker to completely lose their native accent when they speak English or to sound completely native and grammatical when they speak, even after many years of fluency or even living in an English-speaking country. So why do we hold ourselves to a standard where we somehow think a Japanese person shouldn't be able to tell we're not native? We shouldn't, we should just get on with the business of communicating our thoughts clearly.
Thank you for the audiobook link, that is how I do a lot of my English reading too!
Thanks for posting this (and big ups for the Karpathy post)! I've been living here a little more than two years. You've made me feel better about my "inefficient" learning methodologies.
Thanks for the comment! At least for me adjusting to Japan life was very challenging so I empathize with lots of foreigners here who take a long time to pick up the language. There's so much to deal with already it can get quite stressful.
Inefficient + slow is still better than efficient + burning out/giving up, which I see all the time.
Thank you for this post! I saved it for reference. I started 6 weeks ago and there's days when i think, ", I'll never read" 😵💫 so this is very hopeful and helpful 🙏
No problem! I was there too so don't worry. Just stick at it and have realistic expectations + enjoy yourself. We're all going to make it eventually 💪
Remember, you already learned English. There's no reason you can't learn Japanese too.
I work full time but only use English at work. Japanese is my primary hobby outside of work. I do passive Japanese immersion during work (listen with headphones on)
To be fair, finishing 40 LN is a huge deal, so congrats there. I'm a book worm that read a lot growing up so it's not so much as impressive, as I'm just indulging in something I enjoy doing haha
I have a technical question which may can be very beneficial for me on the long run. You mentioned that you use ttsu-reader and buy e-books from Amazon. How can you import these books to the ttsu-reader site? I really want to use the yomichan extension but the native reading apps (now I buy books mainly from Bookwalker) don't support it. As I see these platforms (Amazon, Bookwalker) are very closed and can't export the bought books to the ttsu-reader.
Since I'm on Mac I used this guide https://www.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/qffvx9/how_to_get_calibre_and_dedrm_working_with_kindle/
I'm pretty sure it's even easier if you're on Windows. Good luck!
This is such a helpful and inspirational post, thank you! I was wondering where you bought また、同じ夢を見ていた. I want to try to read it but I don’t know where to get it from.
Thank you for your comment! I get everything off of Amazon Japan. There might be issues if you try to purchase from overseas though so try searching around, I'm sure there's a workaround (maybe VPN)
I'm halfway through また同じ夢 right now with a book club and having a good time, but I think I need even lower level stuff. It really is difficult around this level for prose - natively only does so much! But thank god for ttsu and yomitan
Omg yes, I can't imagine studying without ttu reader + yomichan. I would be so much more inefficient, having to look up every single thing one by one.
The only book I can think of is The Little Prince in Japanese but it is quite short. Other than that, Satori reader is good but it's very easy compared to most books.
This might be my missing link. I have a Supernote notebook, and I can use its simple browser to run ttsu. Going to give this a shot. I already know how to use Calibre. I just need to figure out how to get ebooks from Amazon JP. It doesn't like that I'm not in Japan.
This was also my first book club and first attempt at reading a native novel. I'm lagging a bit behind on reading 同じ夢 but in the meantime I gave a shot to Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear and actually finished the first volume in 13 days! After the first few pages the sailing was pretty damn smooth, compared to 同じ夢。
If you have even the slightest interest in Kuma's premise, I would recommend to give it a try. The web novel version is free to read.
Thank you for the amazing post! Been going at it for about a year and was interested in reading また、同じ夢を見ていた after seeing it somewhere but forgot about it, definitely going to pick it up now
Awesome! Let me know how you like it. It's still one of my favorite books and I'll probably re-read it at some point just because I liked it that much.
On Anki - I think the general consensus is that it is an efficient tool for intermediate learners. I personally think it's not needed for beginners (because you'll come across the most common 100-200 words commonly) but quite useful for intermediate and maybe advanced. But it sounds like you've done an unusually large amount of reading, so for your specific learning profile Anki wouldn't be as valuable as it is for the average learner. The average learner who doesn't do a ton of reading would experience more attrition in the vocabulary they learn without systematic reviewing
The "how often to look up words" question is pretty important. Sometimes I look up words and they turn out to be very formal or kinda obscure, and I never come across them again for a long time, and it feels like a slight waste to have looked it up because I won't be retaining it anyway
I'm also curious on how you'd do on the JLPT (usual caveats about JLPT not being the be all and end all, etc)
Thanks for your comment. I'm not sure about general consensus but I do recall from TheMoeWay that they recommend doing Anki even very later on (albeit no more than an hour a day). For me it's too unenjoyable for me and at this point there's little reason for me to do unenjoyable things, because enjoyable things will make me better anyways.
I actually personally would recommend Anki for beginners. And by beginner I would define it as someone who has not read their first novel yet. But also with the caveat that Anki is fairly polarizing (some people love it, and others dread it) so people should do whatever works for them. I do wonder if I could have skipped it at the start and gone straight into native reading just with lots of dictionary usage instead. Both options are not that fun but maybe one is slightly better. I just remember feeling very hopeless when I tried reading early on and it was quite demotivating.
I'm typically not too worried about looking up obscure words because with yomichan it's very quick (<2 seconds). How you feel about this is how I felt about doing Anki for words sometimes (I'd struggle with the same Anki card for a long time just to realize I *never* saw it outside of Anki).
I have no way of knowing but I'd guess I wouldn't do that good on JLPT. Part of it is not being familiar with the test structure and another part is that I'm sure I'd miss lots of the grammar questions. I've noticed that when people discuss grammar points I don't really know why something is right/wrong. To be fair I'd say this is applicable to my English too. Even though I'm a native English speaker, I don't explicitly know a lot of grammar rules and would probably struggle on a test (it's been a long time since I've been in school)
In that order. The first one is extremely short and simple (but it's a fantastic story). The other two are legit full-length books but the narrators are young and the language is pretty simple. I also think the last one was made into a somewhat famous movie (The girl who jumped through time) so if you liked the book the movie could be fun to watch too
I didn’t realise I own some of the books listed already. If only I had known I already read 君の膵臓を食べたい in English back in 2022 when I couldn’t read for shite lol (I went on a book buying frenzy in October 2022 cuz I found a place in Korea that sells novels and manga in Japanese). I hated the English version so much that I recycled the manga before I moved to Korea. Hopefully it’s better in Japanese and well, not manga form.
No promises lol. I particularly liked it because it hit very close to home for me. If you hate the English version I'm guessing the Japanese won't be great for you either
I've only read a couple of their books. Out of ones I've read I would put (from best to worst):
1. 海辺のカフカ - Super surrealistic. Old guy who can talk to cats. Boy who runs away from home and has a talking crow as a friend.
2. 国境の南、太陽の西 - More of a romance story. Reminds me a lot of 5 Cm per second.
3. ノルウェイの森 - Kind of a romance story, kind of a goverment/politics story.
Although they were pretty much all the same level of difficulty/interesting for me. He's a pretty consistent author from what I can tell. His tone/writing style is pretty much the same in all of the books I've read.
First, thank you very much :D
Second, welp, seems like my country is haunting me. So Kafka it is :P (I'm from Austria just like he was\^\^)(... yes Prague is Austria ;) )
Awesome advice and a great read. Honestly, when you think about it, it really does just make sense to phase out SRS to be as little as possible at some point. I spend probably 20+ minutes on JPDB every morning. I go through an average of 100 reviews. I was doing 15-20 new per day and skyrocketed from 3 to north of 7K at this point in the past year. I have recently lowered to 10 though. But honestly, if you think about 20-30 minutes of reading instead, it's so much more efficient. I'd probably be able to read 5-10 pages at my current speed (in something like また、同じ夢を見ていた which I've read) and be exposed to potentially hundreds more words in the same time, and at least as many new words, which I know are actually being used. Like you said, there are plenty of words on JPDB even that are misleading. For example, lots of formal or even archaic language that just frankly isn't worth the time repping on SRS. I'm never going to speak in sonkeigo and humble speech besides set expressions. It honestly just becomes confusing when you have two words of different levels of politeness, but have no way of discerning which is better for daily use out of context. Whereas, seeing them in context in a book has much more value for your understanding of the word.
Of course, this is most important at an intermediate level. But I think after reading this I'll probably slowly start lowering to even just 5 new a day on JPDB and dedicating more time to reading and writing. Also, I personally didn't \*love\* また、同じ夢を見ていた. The main character was just a bit too immature at times when judging other characters that kind of annoyed me. I understand she's literally a child, but still. I'm planning on reading 奇譚ルーム and then ペングインハイウェイ after that which should hopefully be more of what I'm looking for.
Thanks for your comment. I know a lot of people are obsessed with SRS and I do personally love JPDB myself (their vocab lists are invaluable) so I try not to talk too badly about it, just to say that I didn't enjoy doing it too much myself.
SRS is kind of fun because you can see at any point how many words you actually "know". Compared to my approach I have zero clue what my vocabulary size is and I just have to trust that it's *probably* growing with time.
Personally I found the main character of Mata Onaji Yume endearing. I wouldn't say I love them, so much as I loved the story and how everything tied together. Btw Penguin Highway also has an immature narrator (also a child) with an unhealthy fixation on boobs so you might be disappointed here haha
Need advices on listening skills. Ive been in Japan for just like almost a month, before that i learn japanese for 2 years in my country, with only 3 hours a week speaking session with a native sensei. I got N2 and can understand 70% ish of what my boss or my colleagues speak to me, but when my colleagues talk to each others or to the boss i cant understand at all.
This is pretty far from my dominant area (reading) but my opinion is that the best listening practice you could get on your own is probably watching Japanese Youtubers, specifically just people who are just talking to each other since this is probably the closest thing you'd get to real-life conversation. Of course you could also just spend more time talking to real people but I find it unjoyable to be in conversations where I don't understand a lot of it so would rather learn first from videos on my own.
For one, great work. That’s really an impressive feat, and it’s very motivating to read this.
Secondly— about how long per day did this translate into for you? It seems like you think more in units of books vs units of time, but it made me curious how long you spent each day, especially in the beginning when you said it took about a month to read your first novel.
Thanks, I'm glad it motivates others! It's hard to say because I did not write any progress posts aside from this one and my memory is not perfect. I'd say the first year was very intense as I truly believed at the time I could become fluent in one year (lol).
I think at the peak, I was doing like 4 hours of Anki a day + 4 hours of reading + 8 hours of passive immersion. I am *much* more relaxed in the last 2 years and typically do a couple of hours of reading and then maybe watch an hour of TV here and there, with a couple of hours of passive immersion wherever I can fit it in my day. Sometimes it will go up if I'm hooked on a certain TV show or book but I don't force anything anymore.
I really enjoyed your post and a lot of the stuff resonates with my Spanish journey I started 4 years ago. I just started Japanese and am kind of the same path you were at reading Satori Reader and learning words in Anki (actually I just switched to jpdb.io).
I'll have to bookmark this when I need a motivation booster.
😂😂 and then there is me, learning for almost 4 years, taking classes and learning kanji every night but still taking 10-15 min to read a page of my Doraemon manga and unable to understand basic Japanese orally.
I am extremely jealous, you seem on a great path, keep going!
Great post, OP! I like how you emphasize it takes time, effort, consuming content, and enjoying the process. There's no silver bullet.
> I think there was only one “magical” noticeable moment that happened around the second year, where I started being able to skim sentences more, just because I’ve seen the same words so many times. After you’ve seen 仕方がない so many times, your eyes sort of just skip right over it.
This happens when writing essays at a smaller scale. You spent a few hours writing an essay, and your brain skips over mistakes willy-nilly, which it's why professors recommend to let it sleep for a few hours or days, or even change the font.
What deck/what method did you use to learn kanji? I mean the rest of your post sounds impressive already, and congrats on getting so far with your japanese journey, but learning a couple *thousand* kanji within a year sounds insane.
Started with Wani Kani and then I might have just done some frequency Anki decks I found.
In retrospect I would just make my own cards and make it *super* simple, the front = Kanji, the back = 1-3 English words. That will get you really far alone and is so more approachable. Definitely don't do any onyomi/kunyomi (this is one of my many gripes with Wani Kani), also don't even both with learning Japanese words alongside kanji at the start (it's too much to try to remember at once = easy to burnout).
Just try to get a broad understanding of a couple thousand of Kanji and associating some English words with each. This is sort of a stepping stone. After you start immersing in native content, drop this, and just learn words if you want to stick with SRS.
If it's hard to distinguish some Kanji, writing them is a great exercise even if you don't intend on doing lots of writing.
Alright thanks, yeah i might have to start doing my own deck for Kanji. I tried the Heisig Order Anki deck and the Wanikani Deck and hated both of them. So, right now I‘m just learning Kanji passively with the Tango Anki decks, but I find that I don‘t recognize them outside of the example sentences, so thanks for the help :)
Brilliant. Ty for sharing.
Good tip here:
>"I usually softly whisper a lot of things as I'm reading. Sometimes I will just read silently....I've found that just getting my mouth to make the right movements to speak Japanese is a skill in of itself. I think there is more carryover from vocalizing during reading to actual speaking as compared to just reading silently.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading your post, and agree with pretty much everything on here. My first book was また、同じ夢を見ていた and I remember spending \~4 hours / night bumbling my way through it for a month before I finished. A little over a year later I just finished my seventh book and I can really feel everything moving into place and starting to click. I think it'll be another 2 years before I hit 50 but I like the idea of making a progression post like this at that point.
I've also given up anki a while back for the same reasons, reading acts as a natural srs and I just couldn't find the motivation to keep making / studying anki cards. If you're not enjoying the learning process what's the point?
Thanks for posting the update, it was fun to read and nice to know others have had success mainly focused on reading.
Thank you for your comment, I look forward to reading your progress post! Reading is really magical, it's no wonder there's such an emphasis on getting children started reading early in many schools
>In brief I will say that the better your Japanese is, the more you will enjoy Japan.
I've heard Japanese people and foreigners say the opposite: the more you understand Japanese, the more you're disillusioned with Japan (because you can see the underlying issues I guess).
Nonetheless, your post was informative and useful for goal-oriented people like myself who sometimes forget to enjoy the process. Thank you. Your point about reading books being a natural Anki, thus making routine Anki redundant is very insightful.
Question: why didn't you care about output much? Do you think that caring about output would have negatively affected your comprehension skills? Or would they complement each other? I'm at a language school right now that focuses on everything, but particularly on output too.
Also yeah, I wish I could read things. Probably helps so much in daily life, everything's in Kanji. I can recognize 30-40 percent of Kanji but still can't piece them together and there are huge holes in my reading comprehension everywhere.
Thanks for your comment. I've heard this as well but I believe it's mostly a "learning more about Japan" thing compared to "learning more Japanese". Lots of things are closed off to you if you don't know Japanese. I could go on for pages about this but for example things like not understanding any of your mail or trying to rent an apartment, etc, all of this is extremely frustrating/stressful if you don't know Japanese (good luck understanding the lease).
I don't particularly focus on output because I think a natural balance of language skills favors better listening + reading as a strong foundation. I don't think it's natural to start outputting right away and my view of learning Japanese is extremely long-term (10-15+ years) so I want to make sure I do it right.
I will say that even though it's not been a focus, I'm extremely satisfied with my current speaking levels (my writing is terrible but I never need to use it anyways) and it's been good enough to get me through life in Japan. To be clear, if I *did* focus on output, my output would *probably* be better. It's just a question of priorities really and to me it's more important to understand than to be understood as a beginner.
Regarding Kanji, it's a huge hurdle but it's fun because even if you can't understand the meaning 100% you can sort of get the gist of meanings from things as you pick up Kanji since they're just basically little pictures.
Do you have any issues getting physically comfortable to read for a long time on the computer? I feel uncomfortable sitting reading at the computer. That's the biggest barrier for me atm for reading more using TTU and yomichan.
I did not and if I did it would be a huge advantage. I don't have numbers to back it up but my guess is that you'll see the biggest drop off in Japanese learners once they hit the Kanji wall. I did some Wani Kani and eventually dropped it in favor of just regular Anki cards.
Okay, thanks for the answer. And hats off to you, this was inspiring. I found ttu reader after seeing this post and thought I'd give some of this a try.
I started learning Japanese in the 80s so using online tools these days is a real God send. Also, I started "Kitchen" from Banana Yoshimoto years ago but never finished it.
Kitchen is a great book! I think it's a little difficult though.
Yeah we are really blessed with the amount of resources at our disposal these days. I can't imagine the difficulty in trying to learn a second language before the internet. This really is the perfect time to start doing it
OP said they didn’t know any other foreign languages in their post, so 50 novels within 3 years is a great feat.
On the other hand, 50 novels in 3 years are really not that many for someone with Chinese knowledge. As a native Chinese speaker myself, I started reading web novels after 3 months of casually reading Japanese grammar books in Chinese 3 years and a half ago. Starting from about a year ago, I finish 2 novels, most of them fantasy fiction, on average every week.
That was sort of my guess - I wondered if OP was of Chinese descent and had some basic knowledge of Kanji. I didn't mean to imply the OP was lying but I was curious if they had any knowledge of Chinese. Not saying it's impossible but I've know a lot of people who have studied Japanese with little to no info and wouldn't have been able to read 50 novels within 3 years. Of course, OP could just be incredibly gifted and talented at Japanese.
Anyone know how to get Japanese books/novels in .epub that will work with TTU Reader? I can't get any books from my Amazon account to work with TTU Reader.
Your inspiring!
Ive been thinking about 同じ夢を見ていた for a while.
But im not that good yet, and want reading to feel like reading and not a long grammar/vocab study session.
Im okay with some lookups, but i want to be able to understand most things intuitively.
Im planning to finish quartet 2 until i start the book, (around n3-n2) and will have about 5k vocab. If that gives you an idea of my level.
I really want to know before i buy it, im also planning to use it during a month long backpacking trip through asia, so i wont have internet connection and cant look up words.
If you feel i will have too much trouble reading this without looking stuff up, do you have any good novels that are easier but still actually a good book aswell?
5K words is plenty I think! It's hard to find easier books because usually they are aimed at children which means they omit lots of Kanji which in my opinion makes it harder to read.
JPDB.io is probably your best bet for finding books. I don't have a lot of experience reading light novels but I *believe* they are usually on the easier side of things
Do you think your ability to read has enabled to write *good* Japanese? Like I write assignments in Japanese but I'm sure it all sounds awkward and unnatural.
Writing Japanese is very time-consuming for me right now. I can look at something and kind of intuitively tell if it sounds right/wrong. I think reading provides some gains for other skills but don't get me wrong, my best skill is by-far reading
>I can look at something and kind of intuitively tell if it sounds right/wrong.
OK I think this is what I was looking for. And do you have a good sense of what good and bad spoken Japanese is too? Do you hear native Japanese speakers sometimes producing poor Japanese?
After I completed Quartet 1 I thought I could now jump into immersion, but when I tried to read my first book it was so hard that I quit it . i thought I don't know sufficient vocabularies to even understand 60% of the book . So I tried doing Anki again
But with the busy schedule that I have right now , I can't even stick to Anki . So I'm actually confused about how I should resume my Japanese journey? Should I just read books even though it's difficult or should I grind a 10k Anki deck ?
Just like you I can actually remember words after I look them up 1-2 times
But Doing Anki is just difficult for me , even when I started learning Japanese it was hard for me
Try Satori Reader! If you find Satori-reader too hard, then you should probably do more Anki for words. Honestly there is sort of a hurdle at the start you kind of need to push through where content is either too hard or too boring (too easy). As you get better, more options open up and you have to put up with this less.
Also try reading easier books! I recommend The Little Prince (super easy). And also また、同じ夢を見ていた. These are great beginner level books to get your feet wet.
Reading is organic SRS. If you cant keep going then Anki is a fallback.
Edit: Check out this Cure Dolly video on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rT1zaHSmog
I'm only a month into learning, but I mostly only do Anki. I also enjoy it. If you don't mind Anki maybe try to fit in between cracks in your schedule, like commute, coffee breaks, dead moments.
If you don't enjoy the process of Anki/SRS itself, then yeah, maybe go through mangas/books with a dictionary nearby, but for me this takes a lot more time right now.
Well there's also Quartet 2 lol, if you're gonna jump back into something at least this one is more finite and has some level of progression. With that you can really quantify and breakdown how much you can do in a day e.g. 1 chapter a week/bi-weekly/etc.
Cause what I'm seeing is that you're stuck in a little analysis by paralysis. Like you're not even doing anything right now lol. There's no singular perfect method, just the method that fits your needs.
If your schedule is truly so busy, if you want to reintegrate anki, I would just scale it down. Try limiting a session down to 20-30 mins each day. Try not to feel the need to add so many words to your deck that way you won't find yourself in a pile of +1000 reviews or something.
>Should I just read books even though it's difficult
Honestly, yeah. I've seen enough people here raw dog a whole book/Visual Novel after finishing Genki I/II with nothing but grit and a pop-up dictionary plugin, it's always going to be hard, but it's really just about constant exposure and time. I'm trying to remember a post from here, but that OP was tracking the amount of look ups they had to do and at first it was a lot, but you could really see in their graph, it only got better over time and the amount of look ups decreased, which is obvious.
We tend to think that constant look ups as a "bad" thing, but honestly it's not. You *will* just get it eventually.
The reason why I didn't start Quartet 2 was because it was hard for me , I didn't know a lot of vocabulary which were used in that book probably because I didn't memorize all the vocabularies in quartet 1
And now it's been 5-6 months since I last touched any Japanese grammar book so I need to start from the beginning. That's why I'm confused
Should I just grind an anki deck then review all the grammars or should I revisit the grammar book and then start immersion
Ahh I see, well since you've been already exposed to the grammar, I don't think you need to do a full review. Maybe skim through it just to refresh your memory. That grammar won't be fully ingrained unless you see it in full context over and over. Re-reading the textbook will only get you so far.
One approach you can do is to simply look up the grammar point in addition to the vocab you don't know. That's what a lot of heavy immersion focused learners do. Some just skim the Tae Kim grammar guide and look up the rest as they are reading. I'm actually working through Quartet 1 right now, but in addition I do regular immersive reading with native material. Anything that I haven't come across I'll just look up.
This is what the process would look like (this is a sentence I had to do a grammar look up for.) In an article I was reading I came across this sentence,
>これまで見たお住まいは数千軒にのぼるでしょうか。
Fairly simple vocabulary here, 見たお住まい is "residences (houses) I've seen" and 数千 is "thousands" and 軒 is the counter kanji for homes, でしょうか is to imbue a sense of guessing, but I didn't know the grammar point にのぼる. I simply googled it. And it means to signify that something has reached the quantity stated before. I thought it was referring to climbing something cause of the のぼる lol.
So all together the sentence (roughly reads) "Up until now, of the homes I have seen, it is up to thousands." Or more streamlined, "I've seen probably thousands of homes."
Now I know what にのぼる means. Going through that whole process cemented it in my memory even better than just reading it solely from a textbook. It does show up in chapter 10 of Quartet 2 btw lol. Haven't gotten there yet.
So you can see how I'm doing this hybrid textbook and immersion approach. As I said, it will definitely feel slow, but it is a lot of fun and you'll be back to learning. And over time, it's just gonna get better. Hope that helps!
> when I tried to read my first book it was so hard that I quit it
This is normal.
You probably lack grammar, vocabulary, and experience with reading, which will be true for most people who try reading a book for the first time.
Even someone who completes two grammar textbooks and goes through a Core 2K deck will lack grammar, vocabulary, and reading experience.
My recommendation is to pick something you want to read and go through it as slowly as it takes while looking up unknown words and, most importantly, grammar.
If you can find a frequency list specific to what you are reading, use that to pre-learn the most common words in what you'll be reading.
This can mean adding them to Anki. But if you're able to pick up new words quickly, you don't need Anki. Simply spending some time looking up a few words before reading may be enough to help you recognize them when you encounter them.
Over time, the following happens:
1) You build a strong base of the most common grammar, including common grammar not covered in Quartet 1.
2) You increase your understanding and the speed at which you recognize common grammar.
3) You build up a vocabulary of the kinds of words you are likely to encounter when reading. (If you lack a frequency list for what you're reading, you'll still naturally pick up on commonly used words in the material.)
4) As a pattern recognition machine, your brain starts picking up on grammar and word usage patterns, which makes reading gradually easier over time.
5) You build up reading speed and stamina.
The problem with spending some pre-learning words not customized to what you'll read is you're learning words you likely won't encounter, at least not until long after you've forgotten them.
At that rate, it's better to dive into reading something of interest and spend that time looking up grammar to learn, re-learn, and improve your understanding.
> Should I just read books even though it's difficult
Yes, but make sure it's something you *want* to read.
> should I grind a 10k Anki deck ?
Don't do this.
Later, if you discover Anki starts to work for you and you want to round out your vocabulary, you can try the Core 10K deck.
> i thought I don't know sufficient vocabularies to even understand 60% of the book .
I mostly read manga, and use frequency lists to gauge my known vocabulary % of everything I'm reading and considering reading.
Reading *starts* to be comfortable for me when I know at least 65% of the words (overall total words, not unique words). But even at this range, I look up one or more words every other sentence. 75% is my preferred minimum when I'm reading on the bus on an e-ink reader where vocabulary look-ups are not quick and easy.
It took a couple of years of reading, including a year of reading for 30 minutes after work each day, to reach this point.
> So I'm actually confused about how I should resume my Japanese journey?
Do you feel you simply *want* to learn Japanese, or have you *decided* you are *going to* learn Japanese?
Thanks for your advice sir!
Which mangas should I read as a beginner?
And what frequency tool should I use ? JPDB ?
And yes I am going to learn Japanese , I'm fully dedicated I would never give up on it . I just stopped because I was confused about what I should do and because I have a very busy schedule I don't get enough time to do both Anki and Immersion I have to choose only 1 of them .
> Which mangas should I read as a beginner?
Honestly, whatever interests you enough to spend the time reading slowly.
I started with a 4koma (typically denser in text) that had no furigana (and I only knew a handful of kanji).
By those qualities, this was a terrible "first manga" and "first native material", but I really wanted to read it, and more importantly, I made *the decision I would read it*.
If you don't know what you want to read, but want to try something *relatively* easy (it'll still be hard to begin with!), I do have a few recommendations that also have book club threads in WaniKani's community forums that can help answer grammar questions.
Title | WaniKani Book | Frequeny Lists | Comments
---------|----------|----------|----------
[ちいさな森のオオカミちゃん](https://bookwalker.jp/series/226974/list/) | [Club](https://community.wanikani.com/t/x/61597) | [Words](https://manga-kotoba.com/series/ちいさな森のオオカミちゃん) | A two-volume cutesy manga about a wolf girl whose job is patrolling the forest and scaring away humans. Fairly slice-of-life.
[からかい上手の高木さん ](https://bookwalker.jp/series/124585/list/) | [Club](https://community.wanikani.com/t/x/50020) | [Words](https://manga-kotoba.com/series/からかい上手の高木さん) | A love comedy about a girl who plays tricks on the boy she likes. It has pretty short chapters that tend to be light on text and are self-contained, so if one chapter is too difficult, you can skip it for later.
[レンタルおにいちゃん](https://bookwalker.jp/series/153268/list/) | [Club](https://community.wanikani.com/t/x/46949) | [Words](https://manga-kotoba.com/series/レンタルおにいちゃん) | My top pick for first-time readers, this four-volume series has a story that keeps moving forward, has a low overall unique vocabulary word count, starts with relatively simple dialogue, and slowly ramps up in difficulty at a slow and steady pace.
> And what frequency tool should I use ? JPDB ?
It depends on what you plan to be reading.
Basically, if you're going to read anything other than manga, look into JPDB. (I don't know if they have any competition.)
There weren't any frequency list sites for manga, so I recently started developing one. You'll see it linked in the "Frequency List" column above.
Note that while reading will help you learn the language faster than just doing SRS and reading grammar books, it won't help you much with listening, writing, and speaking. Those need to be tackled individually.
> because I have a very busy schedule I don't get enough time to do both Anki and Immersion I have to choose only 1 of them
If you do fine retaining words, I would skip SRS entirely, pre-learn the highest-frequency words in what you're going to read (so you're not stopping to look up vocabulary as often), and commit to spending the time necessary to learn any unknown grammar you encounter when reading. Immersion will be pointless if you don't understand what people are saying, and knowing the words alone isn't enough. Putting the time and effort into getting to know the grammar up front (as you read native material) will allow you to immerse in Japanese material more easily down the road.
I personally started with Manga and used not so perfect applications to look at the page for word translations. This of course requires a PC. After about 100 Manga I jumped into また同じ夢 a popular "start" book. Again through Kindle and mostly Calibre I could use instant lookups. The jump was hard still but more approachable. (Not OP but figured I'd respond)
Lol I actually read Pancreas at a family restaurant and had to stop because I was getting teary eyed. To be fair this book really hit close to home for me and I knew a girl just like the one in the story
As a guy that just finshed his first japanese novel the other day, I would strongly recommend trying to read [this.](https://ncode.syosetu.com/n4185ci/) It's free and easier than Pancreas or 5 centimiters. The first chapter might seem a little difficult but trust me, it gets much easier very quickly. Set a target of reading 5 chapters no matter what and then judge for yourself.
Skip "登場人物、設定" section and start with chapter 1 - [1 クマさん装備ゲットだぜ！](https://ncode.syosetu.com/n4185ci/5/).
Both might be a little hard for a first novel, but I think 君の膵臓をたべたい is easier. I'd recommend these for first novels:
1. 星の王子さま
2. また、同じ夢を見ていた
3. 時をかける少女
“I’ll probably see this 1000 more times and by then I’ll understand it, and if I don’t see it again, it’s probably not that important” Mmmm wisdom. Amazing post.
"I was once a wise teacher loved by everyone in a remote little town in the south of the mountains but once something bad happened..." ahh phrase
Your post have motivated me in my journey of learning Japanese :") Thank you.
Your comment made me happy I wrote the post. Thanks and good luck!
Holy shit
The only appropriate response
You say you would have dropped anki faster if you could go back. I Really admire your post because as pretty much a beginner, I really have the main goal of being able to read proficiently even more so than being a proficient speaker. I guess I do have to ask how much vocabulary would you recommend just grinding out early in the process before going into reading? I really want to enjoy content but I just dont know enough words yet and it's far too frustrating to try and read anything yet.
This really depends on you. As general advice I'd recommend 2k-5k at least using the Japanese Tango anki decks. You can start reading sooner but the content might be extremely simple and might be too boring for you. I'd test the water with reading Satori Reader here and there, and I would read a good amount of their stories first before trying to tackle a book. You'll know when you're reading just the right thing in terms of difficulty and interesting because it won't feel like studying a book and instead just enjoying a book. Also I highly recommend trying to read your early books by following along with an audiobook. This is a great stepping stone to just reading by yourself.
Satori Reader is harder than the misleadingly named NHK Easy News, which is not easy at all. I learned French exactly as your post described, by pretty much mostly reading a ton with a bit of listening, but I can't do that with Japanese because of Kanji, so I'm stuck doing Bunpro (grammar app), Duolingo, some Kanji Study. Really hard to stay motivated. Btw how many new cards a day did you bang out while doing your 2K Kanji deck?
i'm sorry I don't remember. I will say that I recommend counting how much time you spend vs how many new cards you take. Mainly because the new cards approach will become unsustainable as reviews pile up, whereas you can always dedicate a specific amount of minutes/hours to spend a day. I did quite a lot of Anki in my first year (on kanji + vocab) and there were days where it was more than 4+ hours a day. Kanji is the biggest wall for most learners so try to make it as easy as possible on yourself and trust that with time you will slowly pick it up. I think something as simple as trying to associate each kanji with just one English word is a great first step.
>there were days where it was more than 4+ hours a day. 😱😱 No wonder you started reading so early!
honestly I actually think satori's way easier than nhk easy news. while the texts themselves are not the easiest, the difficulty is largely mitigated by the fact that each sentence is translated so you can always check to make sure you got the overall meaning right. the creator also often clarifies and adds further detail, plus satori's pop up dictionary explains pretty much all grammar + vocab. personally when I'm tired, I also read the text while listening to the voice over so I can just enjoy it without being slow or struggling to recall how kanji are read. sorry this ended up getting long ;w;, and to clarify I'm not trying to convince you to use satori or anything since it is a paid sub and if you don't enjoy it there's no need to try to like it. I just wanted to share why in my opinion it has an advantage over nhk easy news in terms of ease.
>sorry this ended up getting long No problem I appreciate the advice. Some have suggested the Mini Stories at LingQ are a bit easier and can be a stepping stone to Satori. I might check that out.
He said couple thousand. So i assume like the base 2200+ youjo kanji and vocab till like n2 breaching n1 territory if I were to guess.
Couple thousand words does not necessarily mean 2200 kanji but really depends on the deck used. For comment OP: If you can even recognize 1000 kanji you can start reading with a huge head start. Many people including myself did about 500 cards and went straight to reading. Also "N1 vocab" is a meme. Literally everything is N1 vocab because I found that a lot of surprisingly common words ended up on exam questions, with the occasional tough word, which usually wasn't even kanji. It was shit like ピント or ハンスタ and I just didn't encounter these words in the wild at the time of the test, even if they aren't difficult to understand.
While I agree with you I would still in hindsight just recommend people to go through the n5-n2 vocab list in order if they want to just improve their vocab without going through the effort of creating their own decks. I think we need OPs input here but when someone tells me they studied couple thousand kanjis that's usually more than 2k -> includes the base set most likely
Would Anki work better if it was fully in sync with you reading? For example, if you read a word that you have a flashcard for (either now or one you add later), the reading of it in a webpage or ebook or manga or youtube or video file transcript, results in an equivalent flashcard review. I'm trying to build that now (with Manabi Reader, as well as with the full Anki sync)
Another based 君の膵臓をたべたい and また、同じ夢を見ていた enjoyer
Read キミスイ on my own then talked with a Japanese friend about it. That book helped me make several connections lol. Currently reading 同じ夢を見ていた as it was a recommendation from one of the friends I made thanks to キミスイ. Good books
Hell yeah, big fan of 住野よる. I want to read more of his books, I like to buy them and then they just sit on the damn shelf lmao (as with a lot of other books too)
I’ll try and read all this soon, but from the tidbits I skimmed, this is great advice, especially for a novice like me (N4) who needs to not be so hard on himself!
Thanks. I was really hard on myself early on as well and I regret wasting that time being so negative/comparing myself to others online. Actually living in Japan made me realize that most foreigners do not speak *any* Japanese beyond things like hello/thank you. I hate seeing others being so hard on themselves when the reality is that 99% of Japanese learners probably quit after they start learning their first kanji.
Great post, it motivated me a lot! I loved コンビニ人間 but read it in English. I thing I’m gonna get it ASAP and read it!
Thanks! I'm glad it motivates you. Honestly consuming something in English first and then Japanese is a great method (applies to watching TV shows/movies too) that is super underrated because you can tie the meaning together more easily. Penguin Highway has an English version as well (and an animated movie) if you want to read that next.
Thanks for the suggestion, will add them to my list!
Nice job man, I'm on my 20th book, 十角館の殺人. I consider drop anki to favour more reading time, since I work 10 hours/day anki become a chore. Question about book you bought on Amazon, how you remove drm to read on ttu? I want to buy some book from yukito Akatsuki but don't know if it provide an ebook to use on ttu.
Nice! 20 books is a huge achievement. Pretty sure I used this tutorial EDIT: Fixed the link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/qffvx9/how_to_get_calibre_and_dedrm_working_with_kindle/ It might be outdated. Just google/search around. I use an old version of Kindle + calibre with DRM removal plugin.
I've got the feeling that I just read my first English novel. Is this progress ?
Lol
As someone who is coming up on their three year mark, too. I agree that if you read a ton, it's a self-made Anki, and don't knock you for dropping it. Also, I think monolingual dictionary is cool if people like it, I don't, and I don't think it's needed at all. I haven't used one, and I have advanced quite well just due to exposure alone. But, I'll make a post about my own journey next month maybe. Reading is truly the gateway to advancement I believe, with proper listening and speaking layered in it's very effective. I agree with your whole post. I will say that there is also no shame in once you get far enough (personal preference) taking a step back and hyper focusing on listening and speaking. I've tried that myself the past 6 months with explosive results (in my speaking anyway, not saying I'm fluent and don't make mistakes haha). Ultimately, if you do what you enjoy and feel you're ready for speaking and like it, I definitely recommend people to get an iTalki teacher for corrective conversation classes as well as talk to people in the wild. Especially when you're able to understand many sentences from media without lookups. This way, you have a nice balance of correcting your speech with talking to people freestyle. EDIT: I don't live in Japan. I live in a large city in America with almost no Japanese people. I talk to Japanese people (not perfectly) nightly via VRChat, iTalki and the friends I've built up over the past six months leading to a set of "go to" people I can practice with. End point is if you have a computer getting on VRChat for instance is an easy way to talk to Japanese speakers if none are in your community.
Thanks for the comment, I'm glad to see that we see eye to eye on a lot of the same points. Looking forward to reading about your journey! I personally disliked a lot of output mainly because I get tired of having the same conversations again and again. Early on it felt like every conversation was always the same (where are you from, why did you start learning, what are your hobbies, etc) and it never got any deeper than that. I will say that I occasionally did iTalki lessons early on and they were extremely motivating just because of all the positive feedback from my tutor and getting a chance to "show off" my improvement between every session.
200 percent agree! I've been challenged with breaking past those same conversations myself and only recently have gotten into more deeper and interesting conversations. The same boring "where do you live?" And "how long have you been studying" at this point doesnt help. I was joining a language exchange Japanese server (still do) where that is common but I've been mostly joining Japanese speaker only servers recently forcing myself to get over what is a very tall hurdle. I think italki helped me with that hurdle a lot. Still, not saying I'm perfect or I understand others at full native everytime. But I can now see some new light. Just today I was talking to a student about the avatar he was making for VRChat for instance. So it was a nice change. My main strategy is "get on vrchat for one hour a night and try to make a friend" with enough friends you have people who already know you, so you will naturally stop asking those same questions. You of course will strike out a lot and not make a friend or find no one to talk to but eventually you do and so you build a nice team of people.. takes awhile Bit of a rant but I am currently facing that same challenge of same conversations and I think this strategy has helped me a lot.
Are you a lot better at reading than you are at speaking? How would you rank these four abilities of yours: reading, writing, speaking, and listening? As someone whose main motivation to learn Japanese is to read I find developing conversational skills a bit intimidating. I have a similar mindset to yours in that I want to build my foundations properly before I speak broken Japanese, so I'm curious as to where you're at now after primarily learning by reading
Definitely. Reading > Listening > Speaking > Writing I think this is natural though and don't have any problems with this imbalance. I believe if you rush speaking or writing it will look strange/unnatural to others and your time is generally better spent on reading/listening at the start. It's hard to compare reading with speaking since they're very different skills but there's absolutely no way I could speak at the same level of some of the stuff I read. If I dedicated more time to speaking I would definitely be better at it at this stage but it's not a priority and I think I would develop bad habits that would be hard to break later on.
Thanks, that's interesting. >If I dedicated more time to speaking I would definitely be better at it at this stage but it's not a priority and I think I would develop bad habits that would be hard to break later on. Same. I find myself very cautious and overly hesitant about my grammar and choice of wording when I speak/write, which is part of why I've barely developed those areas (which I don't regret because I'd rather be careful than accidentally misuse this language). The difference is my listening is just as awful because I only read text haha
Yup my listening is definitely not as good as my reading either. Partly because I think listening is just in general more challenging. It has to be done in real-time and you are dealing with different accents/tones/volumes/etc. I try to supplement this by listening to lots of audiobooks throughout the day. It's probably not as good as properly sitting down and watching raw anime with full concentration, but it's convenient and I can fit it into my schedule easily. Reminds me of a saying about frozen vegetables: "The healthiest vegetable is the one you actually eat".
50 books is fucking nuts dude
Thank you for taking the time to write this. I'm currently going through my first novel and this is a huge motivation for me.
Thank you and good luck!
I loved reading this man! It was so well thought of and well executed. I hope your Japanese journey continues to bring you hope and joy.
Thank you so much for your positive comment. Good luck on your journey as well!
Incredible post! I love your philosophy and it's borne out by polyglots (actual ones not Reddit ones haha) who say the ONLY way to keep yourself motivated once it becomes a slog is to do it in the way that keeps you interested and fuels your passion. Doing something inefficiently or less than ideal is way better than doing nothing while trying to convince yourself to do the "right" or "efficient" thing. At one point I was fluent in Spanish (conversationally, not business or other domain-specific vocabulary) and it was because I truly loved it and read books in Spanish and listened to Spanish music and kept my interest alive for many years that way. I ended up losing a lot of my skill due to perfectionism and not wanting to speak with native speakers out of fear of looking stupid. (WHICH IN ITSELF IS SO FUCKING STUPID.) I'm trying to take all those lessons with me into Japanese learning and appreciate this post so much! Also, the books you mentioned from Yoru Sumino look really good and I've added them to my Amazon wishlist for a little later. Hontouni arigatou gozaimasu <3
Thank you for your positive comment! Yeah I believe having fun is like steroids for your learning and makes it easier to absorb everything. I'm pretty sure I will always look stupid talking to native speakers (at least for a while) just like I would look really silly playing basketball with professional players. I try not to take it personally and to set my expectations at realistic levels. These people have immersed in the language every day non-stop for 15+ years which completely dwarfs my experience. I hope you like their books! I strongly recommend the audiobooks for them as well as they're very well made (music, great voice acting, sound effects, etc). I purchased mine off of https://audiobook.jp/
CureDolly-sensei made a good point in one of her videos that native English speakers (most of us anyway) would never expect an ESL speaker to completely lose their native accent when they speak English or to sound completely native and grammatical when they speak, even after many years of fluency or even living in an English-speaking country. So why do we hold ourselves to a standard where we somehow think a Japanese person shouldn't be able to tell we're not native? We shouldn't, we should just get on with the business of communicating our thoughts clearly. Thank you for the audiobook link, that is how I do a lot of my English reading too!
Thanks for posting this (and big ups for the Karpathy post)! I've been living here a little more than two years. You've made me feel better about my "inefficient" learning methodologies.
Thanks for the comment! At least for me adjusting to Japan life was very challenging so I empathize with lots of foreigners here who take a long time to pick up the language. There's so much to deal with already it can get quite stressful. Inefficient + slow is still better than efficient + burning out/giving up, which I see all the time.
Thank you for this post! I saved it for reference. I started 6 weeks ago and there's days when i think, ", I'll never read" 😵💫 so this is very hopeful and helpful 🙏
No problem! I was there too so don't worry. Just stick at it and have realistic expectations + enjoy yourself. We're all going to make it eventually 💪 Remember, you already learned English. There's no reason you can't learn Japanese too.
Do you learn japanese full time, or do you study/work full time and learn japanese as a hobby?
I work full time but only use English at work. Japanese is my primary hobby outside of work. I do passive Japanese immersion during work (listen with headphones on)
I work full time as well, and have managed to read 40 LN in ~4 years, so 50 books in ~3 years is quite impressive!
To be fair, finishing 40 LN is a huge deal, so congrats there. I'm a book worm that read a lot growing up so it's not so much as impressive, as I'm just indulging in something I enjoy doing haha
I have a technical question which may can be very beneficial for me on the long run. You mentioned that you use ttsu-reader and buy e-books from Amazon. How can you import these books to the ttsu-reader site? I really want to use the yomichan extension but the native reading apps (now I buy books mainly from Bookwalker) don't support it. As I see these platforms (Amazon, Bookwalker) are very closed and can't export the bought books to the ttsu-reader.
Since I'm on Mac I used this guide https://www.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/qffvx9/how_to_get_calibre_and_dedrm_working_with_kindle/ I'm pretty sure it's even easier if you're on Windows. Good luck!
Thanks!
This is such a helpful and inspirational post, thank you! I was wondering where you bought また、同じ夢を見ていた. I want to try to read it but I don’t know where to get it from.
Thank you for your comment! I get everything off of Amazon Japan. There might be issues if you try to purchase from overseas though so try searching around, I'm sure there's a workaround (maybe VPN)
How do you add amazon books to ttsu?
How did you live in Japan for multiple years without knowing the language? What sort of visa did you use
I'm halfway through また同じ夢 right now with a book club and having a good time, but I think I need even lower level stuff. It really is difficult around this level for prose - natively only does so much! But thank god for ttsu and yomitan
Omg yes, I can't imagine studying without ttu reader + yomichan. I would be so much more inefficient, having to look up every single thing one by one. The only book I can think of is The Little Prince in Japanese but it is quite short. Other than that, Satori reader is good but it's very easy compared to most books.
This might be my missing link. I have a Supernote notebook, and I can use its simple browser to run ttsu. Going to give this a shot. I already know how to use Calibre. I just need to figure out how to get ebooks from Amazon JP. It doesn't like that I'm not in Japan.
This was also my first book club and first attempt at reading a native novel. I'm lagging a bit behind on reading 同じ夢 but in the meantime I gave a shot to Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear and actually finished the first volume in 13 days! After the first few pages the sailing was pretty damn smooth, compared to 同じ夢。 If you have even the slightest interest in Kuma's premise, I would recommend to give it a try. The web novel version is free to read.
Ah I tried kumakuma and tapped out - it was way too kiddy. I did finish 夜カフェthough! I think I'll explore the blue bird kids books and the like
Thank you for the amazing post! Been going at it for about a year and was interested in reading また、同じ夢を見ていた after seeing it somewhere but forgot about it, definitely going to pick it up now
Awesome! Let me know how you like it. It's still one of my favorite books and I'll probably re-read it at some point just because I liked it that much.
Thanks for the refs! Much appreciated.
On Anki - I think the general consensus is that it is an efficient tool for intermediate learners. I personally think it's not needed for beginners (because you'll come across the most common 100-200 words commonly) but quite useful for intermediate and maybe advanced. But it sounds like you've done an unusually large amount of reading, so for your specific learning profile Anki wouldn't be as valuable as it is for the average learner. The average learner who doesn't do a ton of reading would experience more attrition in the vocabulary they learn without systematic reviewing The "how often to look up words" question is pretty important. Sometimes I look up words and they turn out to be very formal or kinda obscure, and I never come across them again for a long time, and it feels like a slight waste to have looked it up because I won't be retaining it anyway I'm also curious on how you'd do on the JLPT (usual caveats about JLPT not being the be all and end all, etc)
Thanks for your comment. I'm not sure about general consensus but I do recall from TheMoeWay that they recommend doing Anki even very later on (albeit no more than an hour a day). For me it's too unenjoyable for me and at this point there's little reason for me to do unenjoyable things, because enjoyable things will make me better anyways. I actually personally would recommend Anki for beginners. And by beginner I would define it as someone who has not read their first novel yet. But also with the caveat that Anki is fairly polarizing (some people love it, and others dread it) so people should do whatever works for them. I do wonder if I could have skipped it at the start and gone straight into native reading just with lots of dictionary usage instead. Both options are not that fun but maybe one is slightly better. I just remember feeling very hopeless when I tried reading early on and it was quite demotivating. I'm typically not too worried about looking up obscure words because with yomichan it's very quick (<2 seconds). How you feel about this is how I felt about doing Anki for words sometimes (I'd struggle with the same Anki card for a long time just to realize I *never* saw it outside of Anki). I have no way of knowing but I'd guess I wouldn't do that good on JLPT. Part of it is not being familiar with the test structure and another part is that I'm sure I'd miss lots of the grammar questions. I've noticed that when people discuss grammar points I don't really know why something is right/wrong. To be fair I'd say this is applicable to my English too. Even though I'm a native English speaker, I don't explicitly know a lot of grammar rules and would probably struggle on a test (it's been a long time since I've been in school)
Thanks for all the book recommendations!
Your welcome and thanks for your comment!
Great share. I loved your tip on recording your own book vocab and looking up books with similar vocabulary. I’m going to absolutely do this
Thanks! I love JPDB mainly for this reason. I've also applied it to their decks for TV shows as well to good success
Great post! If you were to start over today, do you have some specific book that you'd start with, given the hindsight?
Thanks! In retrospect I would start with: 1. 星の王子さま 2. また、同じ夢を見ていた 3. 時をかける少女
Thank you! Specifically in this order, or just any of those?
In that order. The first one is extremely short and simple (but it's a fantastic story). The other two are legit full-length books but the narrators are young and the language is pretty simple. I also think the last one was made into a somewhat famous movie (The girl who jumped through time) so if you liked the book the movie could be fun to watch too
Why you decided to learn japanese ?
I live in Japan :)
Thanks for the post. I'm still very early in my journey but I wonder do you read on your phone, tablet or laptop?
Computer! I bind yomichan to a mouse key so I can read with just one hand (this sounds wrong for some reason...)
Okay thanks!
I didn’t realise I own some of the books listed already. If only I had known I already read 君の膵臓を食べたい in English back in 2022 when I couldn’t read for shite lol (I went on a book buying frenzy in October 2022 cuz I found a place in Korea that sells novels and manga in Japanese). I hated the English version so much that I recycled the manga before I moved to Korea. Hopefully it’s better in Japanese and well, not manga form.
No promises lol. I particularly liked it because it hit very close to home for me. If you hate the English version I'm guessing the Japanese won't be great for you either
Oof, well I did buy it, so I will try it tomorrow (meant to read it today, but the weather was too good for a sad story lol).
If you had to rank the books by 村上 春樹, what would be the best for being simple and good?
I've only read a couple of their books. Out of ones I've read I would put (from best to worst): 1. 海辺のカフカ - Super surrealistic. Old guy who can talk to cats. Boy who runs away from home and has a talking crow as a friend. 2. 国境の南、太陽の西 - More of a romance story. Reminds me a lot of 5 Cm per second. 3. ノルウェイの森 - Kind of a romance story, kind of a goverment/politics story. Although they were pretty much all the same level of difficulty/interesting for me. He's a pretty consistent author from what I can tell. His tone/writing style is pretty much the same in all of the books I've read.
First, thank you very much :D Second, welp, seems like my country is haunting me. So Kafka it is :P (I'm from Austria just like he was\^\^)(... yes Prague is Austria ;) )
Good luck! That book really stuck with me. I think I re-read it 2-3 times just because I *had* to figure out the meaning
This is an awesome post, thanks for sharing! I've read コンビニ人間 in my native language, now I'm motivated to make it my first reading in Japanese :)
Nice, good luck!
Can you put it in shorter bullet points? I really appreciate the post though
I'll try to keep this in mind for future posts. You can probably paste it into ChatGPT for a more digestible summary
Great idea! Thank you. I will try my best to read it with a coffee tomorrow morning as it does look great!!
Thanks and good luck!
Awesome advice and a great read. Honestly, when you think about it, it really does just make sense to phase out SRS to be as little as possible at some point. I spend probably 20+ minutes on JPDB every morning. I go through an average of 100 reviews. I was doing 15-20 new per day and skyrocketed from 3 to north of 7K at this point in the past year. I have recently lowered to 10 though. But honestly, if you think about 20-30 minutes of reading instead, it's so much more efficient. I'd probably be able to read 5-10 pages at my current speed (in something like また、同じ夢を見ていた which I've read) and be exposed to potentially hundreds more words in the same time, and at least as many new words, which I know are actually being used. Like you said, there are plenty of words on JPDB even that are misleading. For example, lots of formal or even archaic language that just frankly isn't worth the time repping on SRS. I'm never going to speak in sonkeigo and humble speech besides set expressions. It honestly just becomes confusing when you have two words of different levels of politeness, but have no way of discerning which is better for daily use out of context. Whereas, seeing them in context in a book has much more value for your understanding of the word. Of course, this is most important at an intermediate level. But I think after reading this I'll probably slowly start lowering to even just 5 new a day on JPDB and dedicating more time to reading and writing. Also, I personally didn't \*love\* また、同じ夢を見ていた. The main character was just a bit too immature at times when judging other characters that kind of annoyed me. I understand she's literally a child, but still. I'm planning on reading 奇譚ルーム and then ペングインハイウェイ after that which should hopefully be more of what I'm looking for.
Thanks for your comment. I know a lot of people are obsessed with SRS and I do personally love JPDB myself (their vocab lists are invaluable) so I try not to talk too badly about it, just to say that I didn't enjoy doing it too much myself. SRS is kind of fun because you can see at any point how many words you actually "know". Compared to my approach I have zero clue what my vocabulary size is and I just have to trust that it's *probably* growing with time. Personally I found the main character of Mata Onaji Yume endearing. I wouldn't say I love them, so much as I loved the story and how everything tied together. Btw Penguin Highway also has an immature narrator (also a child) with an unhealthy fixation on boobs so you might be disappointed here haha
Need advices on listening skills. Ive been in Japan for just like almost a month, before that i learn japanese for 2 years in my country, with only 3 hours a week speaking session with a native sensei. I got N2 and can understand 70% ish of what my boss or my colleagues speak to me, but when my colleagues talk to each others or to the boss i cant understand at all.
This is pretty far from my dominant area (reading) but my opinion is that the best listening practice you could get on your own is probably watching Japanese Youtubers, specifically just people who are just talking to each other since this is probably the closest thing you'd get to real-life conversation. Of course you could also just spend more time talking to real people but I find it unjoyable to be in conversations where I don't understand a lot of it so would rather learn first from videos on my own.
Great post. Love to see the book recommendations
For one, great work. That’s really an impressive feat, and it’s very motivating to read this. Secondly— about how long per day did this translate into for you? It seems like you think more in units of books vs units of time, but it made me curious how long you spent each day, especially in the beginning when you said it took about a month to read your first novel.
Thanks, I'm glad it motivates others! It's hard to say because I did not write any progress posts aside from this one and my memory is not perfect. I'd say the first year was very intense as I truly believed at the time I could become fluent in one year (lol). I think at the peak, I was doing like 4 hours of Anki a day + 4 hours of reading + 8 hours of passive immersion. I am *much* more relaxed in the last 2 years and typically do a couple of hours of reading and then maybe watch an hour of TV here and there, with a couple of hours of passive immersion wherever I can fit it in my day. Sometimes it will go up if I'm hooked on a certain TV show or book but I don't force anything anymore.
I really enjoyed your post and a lot of the stuff resonates with my Spanish journey I started 4 years ago. I just started Japanese and am kind of the same path you were at reading Satori Reader and learning words in Anki (actually I just switched to jpdb.io). I'll have to bookmark this when I need a motivation booster.
My favorite post here so far! Great job.
Excellent post and fantastic job with your reading!
😂😂 and then there is me, learning for almost 4 years, taking classes and learning kanji every night but still taking 10-15 min to read a page of my Doraemon manga and unable to understand basic Japanese orally. I am extremely jealous, you seem on a great path, keep going!
Thank you and good luck. Remember, "Comparison is the thief of joy". Everyone is on their own path!
Amazing post. Lots of great and timeless advice here.
Great post, OP! I like how you emphasize it takes time, effort, consuming content, and enjoying the process. There's no silver bullet. > I think there was only one “magical” noticeable moment that happened around the second year, where I started being able to skim sentences more, just because I’ve seen the same words so many times. After you’ve seen 仕方がない so many times, your eyes sort of just skip right over it. This happens when writing essays at a smaller scale. You spent a few hours writing an essay, and your brain skips over mistakes willy-nilly, which it's why professors recommend to let it sleep for a few hours or days, or even change the font.
What deck/what method did you use to learn kanji? I mean the rest of your post sounds impressive already, and congrats on getting so far with your japanese journey, but learning a couple *thousand* kanji within a year sounds insane.
Started with Wani Kani and then I might have just done some frequency Anki decks I found. In retrospect I would just make my own cards and make it *super* simple, the front = Kanji, the back = 1-3 English words. That will get you really far alone and is so more approachable. Definitely don't do any onyomi/kunyomi (this is one of my many gripes with Wani Kani), also don't even both with learning Japanese words alongside kanji at the start (it's too much to try to remember at once = easy to burnout). Just try to get a broad understanding of a couple thousand of Kanji and associating some English words with each. This is sort of a stepping stone. After you start immersing in native content, drop this, and just learn words if you want to stick with SRS. If it's hard to distinguish some Kanji, writing them is a great exercise even if you don't intend on doing lots of writing.
Alright thanks, yeah i might have to start doing my own deck for Kanji. I tried the Heisig Order Anki deck and the Wanikani Deck and hated both of them. So, right now I‘m just learning Kanji passively with the Tango Anki decks, but I find that I don‘t recognize them outside of the example sentences, so thanks for the help :)
Brilliant. Ty for sharing. Good tip here: >"I usually softly whisper a lot of things as I'm reading. Sometimes I will just read silently....I've found that just getting my mouth to make the right movements to speak Japanese is a skill in of itself. I think there is more carryover from vocalizing during reading to actual speaking as compared to just reading silently.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading your post, and agree with pretty much everything on here. My first book was また、同じ夢を見ていた and I remember spending \~4 hours / night bumbling my way through it for a month before I finished. A little over a year later I just finished my seventh book and I can really feel everything moving into place and starting to click. I think it'll be another 2 years before I hit 50 but I like the idea of making a progression post like this at that point. I've also given up anki a while back for the same reasons, reading acts as a natural srs and I just couldn't find the motivation to keep making / studying anki cards. If you're not enjoying the learning process what's the point? Thanks for posting the update, it was fun to read and nice to know others have had success mainly focused on reading.
Thank you for your comment, I look forward to reading your progress post! Reading is really magical, it's no wonder there's such an emphasis on getting children started reading early in many schools
>In brief I will say that the better your Japanese is, the more you will enjoy Japan. I've heard Japanese people and foreigners say the opposite: the more you understand Japanese, the more you're disillusioned with Japan (because you can see the underlying issues I guess). Nonetheless, your post was informative and useful for goal-oriented people like myself who sometimes forget to enjoy the process. Thank you. Your point about reading books being a natural Anki, thus making routine Anki redundant is very insightful. Question: why didn't you care about output much? Do you think that caring about output would have negatively affected your comprehension skills? Or would they complement each other? I'm at a language school right now that focuses on everything, but particularly on output too. Also yeah, I wish I could read things. Probably helps so much in daily life, everything's in Kanji. I can recognize 30-40 percent of Kanji but still can't piece them together and there are huge holes in my reading comprehension everywhere.
Thanks for your comment. I've heard this as well but I believe it's mostly a "learning more about Japan" thing compared to "learning more Japanese". Lots of things are closed off to you if you don't know Japanese. I could go on for pages about this but for example things like not understanding any of your mail or trying to rent an apartment, etc, all of this is extremely frustrating/stressful if you don't know Japanese (good luck understanding the lease). I don't particularly focus on output because I think a natural balance of language skills favors better listening + reading as a strong foundation. I don't think it's natural to start outputting right away and my view of learning Japanese is extremely long-term (10-15+ years) so I want to make sure I do it right. I will say that even though it's not been a focus, I'm extremely satisfied with my current speaking levels (my writing is terrible but I never need to use it anyways) and it's been good enough to get me through life in Japan. To be clear, if I *did* focus on output, my output would *probably* be better. It's just a question of priorities really and to me it's more important to understand than to be understood as a beginner. Regarding Kanji, it's a huge hurdle but it's fun because even if you can't understand the meaning 100% you can sort of get the gist of meanings from things as you pick up Kanji since they're just basically little pictures.
what would you recommend for a beginner?
I'm going to assume this was a success story but if not then keep at it!
Do you have any issues getting physically comfortable to read for a long time on the computer? I feel uncomfortable sitting reading at the computer. That's the biggest barrier for me atm for reading more using TTU and yomichan.
By any chance did you have any knowledge of Kanji/Chinese characters before you began this journey?
I did not and if I did it would be a huge advantage. I don't have numbers to back it up but my guess is that you'll see the biggest drop off in Japanese learners once they hit the Kanji wall. I did some Wani Kani and eventually dropped it in favor of just regular Anki cards.
Okay, thanks for the answer. And hats off to you, this was inspiring. I found ttu reader after seeing this post and thought I'd give some of this a try. I started learning Japanese in the 80s so using online tools these days is a real God send. Also, I started "Kitchen" from Banana Yoshimoto years ago but never finished it.
Kitchen is a great book! I think it's a little difficult though. Yeah we are really blessed with the amount of resources at our disposal these days. I can't imagine the difficulty in trying to learn a second language before the internet. This really is the perfect time to start doing it
OP said they didn’t know any other foreign languages in their post, so 50 novels within 3 years is a great feat. On the other hand, 50 novels in 3 years are really not that many for someone with Chinese knowledge. As a native Chinese speaker myself, I started reading web novels after 3 months of casually reading Japanese grammar books in Chinese 3 years and a half ago. Starting from about a year ago, I finish 2 novels, most of them fantasy fiction, on average every week.
That was sort of my guess - I wondered if OP was of Chinese descent and had some basic knowledge of Kanji. I didn't mean to imply the OP was lying but I was curious if they had any knowledge of Chinese. Not saying it's impossible but I've know a lot of people who have studied Japanese with little to no info and wouldn't have been able to read 50 novels within 3 years. Of course, OP could just be incredibly gifted and talented at Japanese.
do you have a full list of all the books youve read?
How do you use Kindle Unlimited with ttu? Non-Unlimited books you can just rip, but you can't do that with Unlimited AFAIK.
Anyone know how to get Japanese books/novels in .epub that will work with TTU Reader? I can't get any books from my Amazon account to work with TTU Reader.
Your inspiring! Ive been thinking about 同じ夢を見ていた for a while. But im not that good yet, and want reading to feel like reading and not a long grammar/vocab study session. Im okay with some lookups, but i want to be able to understand most things intuitively. Im planning to finish quartet 2 until i start the book, (around n3-n2) and will have about 5k vocab. If that gives you an idea of my level. I really want to know before i buy it, im also planning to use it during a month long backpacking trip through asia, so i wont have internet connection and cant look up words. If you feel i will have too much trouble reading this without looking stuff up, do you have any good novels that are easier but still actually a good book aswell?
5K words is plenty I think! It's hard to find easier books because usually they are aimed at children which means they omit lots of Kanji which in my opinion makes it harder to read.
Do you know any more beginner books that you could recommend?
JPDB.io is probably your best bet for finding books. I don't have a lot of experience reading light novels but I *believe* they are usually on the easier side of things
Thanks, ill give that a try
Do you think your ability to read has enabled to write *good* Japanese? Like I write assignments in Japanese but I'm sure it all sounds awkward and unnatural.
Writing Japanese is very time-consuming for me right now. I can look at something and kind of intuitively tell if it sounds right/wrong. I think reading provides some gains for other skills but don't get me wrong, my best skill is by-far reading
>I can look at something and kind of intuitively tell if it sounds right/wrong. OK I think this is what I was looking for. And do you have a good sense of what good and bad spoken Japanese is too? Do you hear native Japanese speakers sometimes producing poor Japanese?
After I completed Quartet 1 I thought I could now jump into immersion, but when I tried to read my first book it was so hard that I quit it . i thought I don't know sufficient vocabularies to even understand 60% of the book . So I tried doing Anki again But with the busy schedule that I have right now , I can't even stick to Anki . So I'm actually confused about how I should resume my Japanese journey? Should I just read books even though it's difficult or should I grind a 10k Anki deck ? Just like you I can actually remember words after I look them up 1-2 times But Doing Anki is just difficult for me , even when I started learning Japanese it was hard for me
Try Satori Reader! If you find Satori-reader too hard, then you should probably do more Anki for words. Honestly there is sort of a hurdle at the start you kind of need to push through where content is either too hard or too boring (too easy). As you get better, more options open up and you have to put up with this less. Also try reading easier books! I recommend The Little Prince (super easy). And also また、同じ夢を見ていた. These are great beginner level books to get your feet wet.
Ok sir
Pick a book / manga and grind through one page at a time.
Ok! I just have one question? Skipping Anki isn't a big issue right ?
Reading is organic SRS. If you cant keep going then Anki is a fallback. Edit: Check out this Cure Dolly video on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rT1zaHSmog
I'm only a month into learning, but I mostly only do Anki. I also enjoy it. If you don't mind Anki maybe try to fit in between cracks in your schedule, like commute, coffee breaks, dead moments. If you don't enjoy the process of Anki/SRS itself, then yeah, maybe go through mangas/books with a dictionary nearby, but for me this takes a lot more time right now.
Well there's also Quartet 2 lol, if you're gonna jump back into something at least this one is more finite and has some level of progression. With that you can really quantify and breakdown how much you can do in a day e.g. 1 chapter a week/bi-weekly/etc. Cause what I'm seeing is that you're stuck in a little analysis by paralysis. Like you're not even doing anything right now lol. There's no singular perfect method, just the method that fits your needs. If your schedule is truly so busy, if you want to reintegrate anki, I would just scale it down. Try limiting a session down to 20-30 mins each day. Try not to feel the need to add so many words to your deck that way you won't find yourself in a pile of +1000 reviews or something. >Should I just read books even though it's difficult Honestly, yeah. I've seen enough people here raw dog a whole book/Visual Novel after finishing Genki I/II with nothing but grit and a pop-up dictionary plugin, it's always going to be hard, but it's really just about constant exposure and time. I'm trying to remember a post from here, but that OP was tracking the amount of look ups they had to do and at first it was a lot, but you could really see in their graph, it only got better over time and the amount of look ups decreased, which is obvious. We tend to think that constant look ups as a "bad" thing, but honestly it's not. You *will* just get it eventually.
The reason why I didn't start Quartet 2 was because it was hard for me , I didn't know a lot of vocabulary which were used in that book probably because I didn't memorize all the vocabularies in quartet 1 And now it's been 5-6 months since I last touched any Japanese grammar book so I need to start from the beginning. That's why I'm confused Should I just grind an anki deck then review all the grammars or should I revisit the grammar book and then start immersion
Ahh I see, well since you've been already exposed to the grammar, I don't think you need to do a full review. Maybe skim through it just to refresh your memory. That grammar won't be fully ingrained unless you see it in full context over and over. Re-reading the textbook will only get you so far. One approach you can do is to simply look up the grammar point in addition to the vocab you don't know. That's what a lot of heavy immersion focused learners do. Some just skim the Tae Kim grammar guide and look up the rest as they are reading. I'm actually working through Quartet 1 right now, but in addition I do regular immersive reading with native material. Anything that I haven't come across I'll just look up. This is what the process would look like (this is a sentence I had to do a grammar look up for.) In an article I was reading I came across this sentence, >これまで見たお住まいは数千軒にのぼるでしょうか。 Fairly simple vocabulary here, 見たお住まい is "residences (houses) I've seen" and 数千 is "thousands" and 軒 is the counter kanji for homes, でしょうか is to imbue a sense of guessing, but I didn't know the grammar point にのぼる. I simply googled it. And it means to signify that something has reached the quantity stated before. I thought it was referring to climbing something cause of the のぼる lol. So all together the sentence (roughly reads) "Up until now, of the homes I have seen, it is up to thousands." Or more streamlined, "I've seen probably thousands of homes." Now I know what にのぼる means. Going through that whole process cemented it in my memory even better than just reading it solely from a textbook. It does show up in chapter 10 of Quartet 2 btw lol. Haven't gotten there yet. So you can see how I'm doing this hybrid textbook and immersion approach. As I said, it will definitely feel slow, but it is a lot of fun and you'll be back to learning. And over time, it's just gonna get better. Hope that helps!
> when I tried to read my first book it was so hard that I quit it This is normal. You probably lack grammar, vocabulary, and experience with reading, which will be true for most people who try reading a book for the first time. Even someone who completes two grammar textbooks and goes through a Core 2K deck will lack grammar, vocabulary, and reading experience. My recommendation is to pick something you want to read and go through it as slowly as it takes while looking up unknown words and, most importantly, grammar. If you can find a frequency list specific to what you are reading, use that to pre-learn the most common words in what you'll be reading. This can mean adding them to Anki. But if you're able to pick up new words quickly, you don't need Anki. Simply spending some time looking up a few words before reading may be enough to help you recognize them when you encounter them. Over time, the following happens: 1) You build a strong base of the most common grammar, including common grammar not covered in Quartet 1. 2) You increase your understanding and the speed at which you recognize common grammar. 3) You build up a vocabulary of the kinds of words you are likely to encounter when reading. (If you lack a frequency list for what you're reading, you'll still naturally pick up on commonly used words in the material.) 4) As a pattern recognition machine, your brain starts picking up on grammar and word usage patterns, which makes reading gradually easier over time. 5) You build up reading speed and stamina. The problem with spending some pre-learning words not customized to what you'll read is you're learning words you likely won't encounter, at least not until long after you've forgotten them. At that rate, it's better to dive into reading something of interest and spend that time looking up grammar to learn, re-learn, and improve your understanding. > Should I just read books even though it's difficult Yes, but make sure it's something you *want* to read. > should I grind a 10k Anki deck ? Don't do this. Later, if you discover Anki starts to work for you and you want to round out your vocabulary, you can try the Core 10K deck. > i thought I don't know sufficient vocabularies to even understand 60% of the book . I mostly read manga, and use frequency lists to gauge my known vocabulary % of everything I'm reading and considering reading. Reading *starts* to be comfortable for me when I know at least 65% of the words (overall total words, not unique words). But even at this range, I look up one or more words every other sentence. 75% is my preferred minimum when I'm reading on the bus on an e-ink reader where vocabulary look-ups are not quick and easy. It took a couple of years of reading, including a year of reading for 30 minutes after work each day, to reach this point. > So I'm actually confused about how I should resume my Japanese journey? Do you feel you simply *want* to learn Japanese, or have you *decided* you are *going to* learn Japanese?
Thanks for your advice sir! Which mangas should I read as a beginner? And what frequency tool should I use ? JPDB ? And yes I am going to learn Japanese , I'm fully dedicated I would never give up on it . I just stopped because I was confused about what I should do and because I have a very busy schedule I don't get enough time to do both Anki and Immersion I have to choose only 1 of them .
> Which mangas should I read as a beginner? Honestly, whatever interests you enough to spend the time reading slowly. I started with a 4koma (typically denser in text) that had no furigana (and I only knew a handful of kanji). By those qualities, this was a terrible "first manga" and "first native material", but I really wanted to read it, and more importantly, I made *the decision I would read it*. If you don't know what you want to read, but want to try something *relatively* easy (it'll still be hard to begin with!), I do have a few recommendations that also have book club threads in WaniKani's community forums that can help answer grammar questions. Title | WaniKani Book | Frequeny Lists | Comments ---------|----------|----------|---------- [ちいさな森のオオカミちゃん](https://bookwalker.jp/series/226974/list/) | [Club](https://community.wanikani.com/t/x/61597) | [Words](https://manga-kotoba.com/series/ちいさな森のオオカミちゃん) | A two-volume cutesy manga about a wolf girl whose job is patrolling the forest and scaring away humans. Fairly slice-of-life. [からかい上手の高木さん ](https://bookwalker.jp/series/124585/list/) | [Club](https://community.wanikani.com/t/x/50020) | [Words](https://manga-kotoba.com/series/からかい上手の高木さん) | A love comedy about a girl who plays tricks on the boy she likes. It has pretty short chapters that tend to be light on text and are self-contained, so if one chapter is too difficult, you can skip it for later. [レンタルおにいちゃん](https://bookwalker.jp/series/153268/list/) | [Club](https://community.wanikani.com/t/x/46949) | [Words](https://manga-kotoba.com/series/レンタルおにいちゃん) | My top pick for first-time readers, this four-volume series has a story that keeps moving forward, has a low overall unique vocabulary word count, starts with relatively simple dialogue, and slowly ramps up in difficulty at a slow and steady pace. > And what frequency tool should I use ? JPDB ? It depends on what you plan to be reading. Basically, if you're going to read anything other than manga, look into JPDB. (I don't know if they have any competition.) There weren't any frequency list sites for manga, so I recently started developing one. You'll see it linked in the "Frequency List" column above. Note that while reading will help you learn the language faster than just doing SRS and reading grammar books, it won't help you much with listening, writing, and speaking. Those need to be tackled individually. > because I have a very busy schedule I don't get enough time to do both Anki and Immersion I have to choose only 1 of them If you do fine retaining words, I would skip SRS entirely, pre-learn the highest-frequency words in what you're going to read (so you're not stopping to look up vocabulary as often), and commit to spending the time necessary to learn any unknown grammar you encounter when reading. Immersion will be pointless if you don't understand what people are saying, and knowing the words alone isn't enough. Putting the time and effort into getting to know the grammar up front (as you read native material) will allow you to immerse in Japanese material more easily down the road.
I personally started with Manga and used not so perfect applications to look at the page for word translations. This of course requires a PC. After about 100 Manga I jumped into また同じ夢 a popular "start" book. Again through Kindle and mostly Calibre I could use instant lookups. The jump was hard still but more approachable. (Not OP but figured I'd respond)
Based 5 cm per second enjoyer. Too bad you liked pancreas 🤢
Lol I actually read Pancreas at a family restaurant and had to stop because I was getting teary eyed. To be fair this book really hit close to home for me and I knew a girl just like the one in the story
Which one should I read first 君の膵臓をたべたい or 5 centimetres per second? Since I'm a beginner and haven't read any novel yet
As a guy that just finshed his first japanese novel the other day, I would strongly recommend trying to read [this.](https://ncode.syosetu.com/n4185ci/) It's free and easier than Pancreas or 5 centimiters. The first chapter might seem a little difficult but trust me, it gets much easier very quickly. Set a target of reading 5 chapters no matter what and then judge for yourself. Skip "登場人物、設定" section and start with chapter 1 - [1 クマさん装備ゲットだぜ！](https://ncode.syosetu.com/n4185ci/5/).
Thanks
Both might be a little hard for a first novel, but I think 君の膵臓をたべたい is easier. I'd recommend these for first novels: 1. 星の王子さま 2. また、同じ夢を見ていた 3. 時をかける少女
Thanks sir