Discussion
Books Books Books! One year of reading books (and learning some Japanese along the way)
Not sure why images look so huge to me on reddit compared to the past, sorry about that
Hello folks, been a while. One year ago, I made this 3 month post on restarting learning Japanese after years of having given up. In a nutshell, I tried a bunch of stuff, some of which worked, some of which didn't, but made progress when I started reading manga and watching anime with Yomitan and adding Anki cards.
But... I don't actually like manga and anime that much, so pretty early on, I got into my main way of learning: reading novels. Perhaps I started quite early. I did have some prior attempts at learning Japanese. I dunno. You can read the original post to see more of my early trials and struggles. I originally intended to do a 6 month post but at point I just couldn't stop reading so now we're here past the year mark.
Disclaimer: Everyone learns at their own pace, and copying someo-- learns with their own method. There are absolutely people who learned far more efficiently than me. There are people who learned slower than me. My point of view is that as long as you get hooked on the process, it's relatively efficient and you put in the time then eventually you can learn Japanese with the material that works best for you.
And for me, that's books.
Introducing: The Main Cast
So far, 53 books read, mostly in order from newest to oldest
I thought about what to say at the 1 year mark for a long time. There's all kinds of update posts. YT AJATT vids have existed for years. Some people hate them. I personally like them - I find them motivating, I learn new ways to learn. I think the main thing for me this year was rediscovering a love of reading for the first time in years, so let's talk about some of my main favorites. Note that for my reading, I had a goal of "0-4 hours a day" for reading. It probably averaged out to 1-2 hours a day for reading but sometimes got longer. I didn't feel bad though if I read a lot less one day.
Caveat: Actually, 容疑者Xの献身 and 神去なあなあ日常 are still two of my all-time favorites, but I already talked about them a year ago. So I'll talk about some standouts here, in order from most recently read to the ones that I have to scrape my head about. 2nd caveat: also believe it or not I really wasn't a mystery fan until I started learning Japanese and reading Japanese books, so I discovered a whole new genre.
硝子の塔の殺人
Wish they could make a movie
硝子の塔の殺人 is actually my most recent finished book. A renowned scientist and mystery otaku invites a large cast of characters to his mansion in remote Nagano. A doctor (our main character), a super private eye, a police detective, a mystery author, a psychic, a magazine editor, a cook, a butler and a maid all come together for an amazing announcement. However, disaster strikes as the main character poisons their host in the first scene. What follows is this intricate series of murders that pays homage to the mystery genre. They call out Sherlock Holmes, they call out Knives out, and they call out Higashino Keigo, one of my favorite authors.
火車
Yep, here it is again
火車 is actually the longest book I've read, and another mystery. Honma, a police detective on leave due to an injury, is contacted by his... late wife's cousin's son (they make a joke of what their connection is). His relative is due to get married but his fiancée suddenly disappears after failing a credit check. He asks Honma to investigate, and it turns out the fiancée is not who she says she is. So follows this heartfelt chase for a missing person whose actual identity is unknown, plus the search for the original person. I definitely plan on reading more Miyabe Miyuki books soon.
告白
Freaky
告白 is another mystery, of how a teacher finds her daughter is unfortunately murdered. The story is shown in different sections from different points of view of the different characters. It turns out that every character, even the evil ones, have another side to them. But still, no one is a hero. The teacher decides that even if the criminals are caught, they won't really pay the price due to being middle schoolers - so she decides to get revenge in a totally crazy way that they will not forget for the rest of their lives. It moved me a lot, and I really thought a lot about empathy due to this book.
聖女の救済
For some reason this image was different?
I talked about 容疑者Xの献身 last time, making me a big fan of Higashino Keigo, but also I became a fan of his Galileo series, where a physics professor helps tackle cases challenging his police detective friend. 聖女の救済 is the fifth book in the series, and criminally is one that didn't get a film. A rich company president ends up poisoned while he is at home alone. Kaoru, the young detective, suspects the victim's wife, who was across the country at the time of the death. So she enlists the help of the famous Galileo-sensei to solve the mystery. This series often has times where you think the victim is terrible and empathize with the culprit, but while that kind of happens here, the actual truth was more moving to me.
リング
In addition to mystery, I also like horror!
I'm pretty sure most people on this subreddit are familiar with リング, the classic J-horror film. But it was based on a series of books. The movie adaptations of リング and the first sequel, らせん were released on the same day in theaters I've been told. But the original end of the trilogy, ループ never got an adaptation. I want to see the original end of the story, so I started reading リング. There's a lot different from the film. Main character is a dude actually, and the guy he asks for help he believes to be a criminal. The story is interesting, and unsettling, and also different enough from the film that you may find a lot of cool new stuff here.
本好きの下剋上
Not just mystery, but also light novels!
本好きの下剋上 is the longest series out of everything I've read, and I'm still only a few books into it. Also probably the most amazing light novel that I've read. I pretty much was done with the isekai genre long before I started learning Japanese. But everyone seemed to speak so highly of Honzuki that I had to try. Where most isekai are about someone getting these overpowered abilities and using their smarts to be invincible, Honzuki is about finding out how to get nails to make a box used as one step to make paper. Or bringing over a new recipe based on Myne's earth knowledge. Or astounding the adults with audacious inventions that make the lives of ordinary people happier. This is a book that I had a massive smile on my face the whole time. It's also written for book lovers, and the author really wants to get more people into reading.
ひとりぼっちの殺人鬼
It's (kinda) another mystery
This is an interesting book about a 5th grader who... kills her best friend in the first chapter. And then we see what happens to the culprit's life from then on. And the brother of the victim. And a reporter who was deeply influenced by the story. It's a pretty serious read dealing with deep topics about how to rehabilitate child criminals, or if they even should. How tragedy can ruin someone's life. And if redemption is possible.
凜として弓を引く
One of those books hard to say if it's a LN or not
This book I believe was commissioned by a Japanese national kyudo association or something like that. It's kind of a way to make kyudo, Japanese archery, look cool. Kaede just starts high school, played tennis in middle school but notices a nearby shrine where there is a kyudo dojo. And she just starts learning kyudo, alongside people of all ages, from high schoolers, to salarymen, to elderly people. I felt like this book was just really positive and happy and made me interested in kyudo (enough to start looking up kyudo videos). I've continued the series, it becomes a bit more LN-ish as they reestablish their school's dead kyudo club, but it is a book with a lot of heart.
RDG レッドデータガール
Ever heard of Shugendo?
This is a 6 book series that I'm two-thirds done with so far. Izumiko is raised on a super remote shrine in the middle of nowhere. Every time she touches electronics they break. She never sees her parents who are overly amazing people never home. But they say she has to go to a special boarding school near Tokyo, which she later finds out is a place for people with special powers. Along the way she reconnects with Miyuki, kind a super mean guy who practices Shugendo. Turns out our timid main character has a lot more going on than she realizes, and go through all kind of adventures steeped in Japanese traditional mysticism. It got turned into an anime that is probably one of the less known PA Works series. I plan on reading another series by Ogiwara Noriko that she wrote in the 90's, see some Japanese flavored fantasy from before the age of light novels.
I want to get up to 100 books read by around when I hit the 2 year mark; you can see all the books I've read on Bookmeter
Physical Books!
At some point I decided I really wanted to start reading actual paper books in my hands if I could. Turns out the big urban library near me had a lot of awesome Japanese books in their foreign language section.
The big urban library also loans out Japanese books to local branches like this set
We're not even a coastal city or anything. If you want to find some reading materials, try your local urban library!
Surugaya is an amazing site where you can order used Japanese books. They typically are about 650 yen (they charge $4.11 USD last time I checked). Surugaya also is on sale on like every day that ends in Y - they'll have bulk sales where if you buy enough it's all 20% off or 25% off. More importantly - they will have free shipping via DHL that will deliver your books in a couple weeks.
Physical book collection!
I've actually gone ahead and gotten a number of books in there. I've got the 2nd half of the Galileo series, all 5 that I knew were out of the kyudo series I mentioned, that other Ogiwara series, another Miyabe book, another book by the リング author, and some other stuff. 新世界より I read physical for a bit but it was really hard so switched to ebook with quick lookups.
Anki stuff
I learned way too many cards in the past few months leading to these Young numbers lol
Anki was a scary thing for me at one point, but at this point it's this thing ingrained in my head. Currently I have my Mining Deck, Kaishi (which is nearly all 1 year+ plus intervals), and this grammar deck. The 500+ cards from that grammar deck, and around 500 cards that are overlapping between mining deck and Anki, make me guesstimate that my actual vocab in Anki is around 15k. I was extremely liberal with mining though, way too many collocations. I gave up on monolingual cards multiple times, but this time I think I'm actually sticking with them.
Separate studies
Last December, I took the N2 and... spectacularly failed lol. I'm not one of those study for 9 months and pass N1 lol. I did kind of wing it though, mostly wanted to see how well I'd do after reading around 30 books at the time. I got a 78.
Since then I decided I needed some additional traditional studies. I lost a lot of study time for 4 months prepping for a job cert since then, but learned some study habits. I plan to take the N1 this December. Some things I have done and plan to are:
Did a grammar deck to learn more grammery-stuff. It's monolingual, decently helpful
Picked up Wanikani again. It's not really required, but I do mix up kanji all the time so I went with the familiar thing
Picked up Bunpro again. I think they really help cement it in your head really well. Plus, I make tons of spelling errors so it's helping me there
Ordered the reading and grammar Shin Kanzen master books, lots of people recommend them here, but haven't received them yet
Doing the monolingual transition again
I don't know if I can pass the N1 but would be nice to!
Conclusion
If you've read this far then I can conclude that 1) reddit didn't break with such a long post and so many images and 2) if you can stomach reading a post this long you probably have the patience to read a novel in Japanese. I have a lot of thoughts on how I'd recommend to learn, advice I'd give (and gave a lot after my 3 month update), but this post is getting crazy lol. Just learn to enjoy a hobby in Japanese (like reading) and make it an everyday part of your life.
Honzuki is amazing! Everyone told me "need to get a few books in before it gets good" but for me it was great from the first moment. I want to finish reading my physical books (I'm banned from getting more till I read these) and then hunker down and work through Honzuki.
Kusuriya's also one I need to read one of these days for sure!
I love Honzuki so much. Just finished the 3rd book in the Hannelore side story a couple weeks ago. It’s easily my favorite japanese series, and probably one of my favorite all time book series, especially once part 4 hits. Have fun!
Felt like I was dying lol while reading. Both by being attacked by flora and fauna words, and my copy feeling like a brick.
But I switched to the ebook and all was well. And I switched right as a bunch of revelations get dropped around halfway through the first book so I got really into it then.
I've only finished the first book out of three so far though, need to continue. Current reading list is pretty long, finishing half-started series.
Nice! I guess I will try to get to that part. But like you I keep getting distracted by other books (especially since the JLPT is coming up and I'm pretty sure I don't need to know all the names of random plants lol)
Good luck on the JLPT! And yeah, random plant names less useful. That kind of vocab slows down a bit later on, you get more history, science and sociology words that are more useful.
I tend to get bored reading a series start to end in one go so I'm always rotating between different series or reading one-offs. I'm finally going to continue after リング soon, like 8 months later lol.
What was the grammar deck you used? Also, what type of ebooks were you using that gets picked up by yomitan? Was it stuff online or was it something you imported to ttsu reader? (Still learning how all this works)
It's one based on NihongoKyoushi - there used to be a link for it on the TMW website but it's dead. It's up on their discord though. Honestly though - I think it helped getting the concepts in my brain a bit but I feel like I'm retaining stuff way better with Bunpro at the moment.
For the ebooks I read them in Ttsu reader on my PC (and a while back on my android phone) but I've heard for people on iOS and android these days Hoshi reader is good. The ebooks are in epub format, which I found through TMW (the moe way).
Edit: Also in general Yomitan picks stuff up from anywhere so another couple of places that I've read are Kakuyomu for web novels (only read like 30 chapters of one but worked pretty great for that), and note.com which is like blogs about anything by Japanese people.
Just going through the main Bunpro grammar decks. That's the decks the site was originally built for, so I just learn 3 new grammar points a day.
I've already finished the N5, N4 and N3 decks, should be through N2 and N1 in October at this rate. I leave all the default settings on (aside from linking to WK so I don't get furigana for those words). That means that for me to answer I need to type it which is what I want because I've found that it makes it easier for me to remember well enough to output. And my spelling, verb conjugating are terrible so it helps with that. From N3 and up you can choose monolingual explanations. I opted to stick to English explanations because I already did that monolingual grammar deck.
They have other decks out there, like the Tae Kim and Genki decks but those are probably less complete than the main 5 decks. There's also vocab - but since Bunpro currently doesn't have FSRS it's not as advanced as Anki. Then there's some other oddball decks but I doubt I need them.
Hello fellow bookmeter user! Surprised when I see the bookmeter icon in this sub and glad to see some of my favourite books here! Wish you success when the 200 mark target!
That's also a cool idea for output practice. In the book club I'm in we also write quick reviews, and some people have started writing in JP for that. I plan to at some point, but at the moment I'm still pretty happy mostly sticking to input with occasional speaking output. After attempting the JLPT this year I'll probably have more time to work on output.
Cool! You're like at my personal endgame for reading - I want to get to over 300 books read.
Also reminds me that people recommended イクサガミ.
And yeah, there's a TMW novel club, where we vote to pick 3-4 books to read per month and like 6 to read per year. A lot of the books I read were due to that club. A lot of my surprise favorites like 凜として弓を引く came from there as well
Can you show or explain an example Anki card? I know making cards is part of the learning experience, but I get overloaded when engaging with material I might actually find interesting.
Yep! My cards on the front have the target word up on it's own, then below it, an example sentence using the word.
The back looks like this, for my cards from books:
Top left area is the word with furigana on top, and some pitch accent stuff beneath that (usually is only one per word, this one has 3 versions). There's a play button for audio for the word. If I had made the card from a video or something like that I could also record audio of the sentence. To the top right is a picture, usually the cover of the book or the latest illustration for those that have it.
Then there's the example sentence in the middle again, and below that, the main definition. I can also click on a spot and see some alternate definitions.
...that sounds really complicated but it pretty much all happens with one click. Basically set up my anki from the lazy guide where you just download their settings, follow step by step instructions and then your mining setup is just set to go.
For the back of the card at least. Front of the card is pretty much the top greenish part, and 3 example sentences and you have to remember the meaning from the middle.
I think it's pretty useful but I kind of feel like I wasn't able give it the attention needed as I'm always trying to rush through it.
Honestly, for Anki the best thing is to make it take the least amount of time as possible. You can reduce desired retention so you can learn more cards but have fewer reviews.
The other thing, is just spending the least amount of time per card. So lately, on the front of the card, I just look at the word. On the back, I just look at the furigana to see what I got wrong on the reading, and the definition to see what I got wrong for the meaning. Ultimately means I spend around 5 seconds per card.
Monolingual cards are evil because they can take forever but for meanings you just kind of go off of vibes for the definition.
Pretty good! I assumed these would be relatively simple books but looks like they are a decent level. Impressive!
How would you gauge the overall difficulty of these books? Have you noticed reading has gotten easier over time? I wouldn't mind hearing about your progression in that regard as well.
Also, Is this 53 books in 1 year or are the books shown here the ones you've read so far in the past year?
You have more novels etc read than I do and I passed the N1 more than a year ago. I'm sure if you did some traditional study the N1 wouldn't be too bad. This is inspiring me to get back into reading novels lol. Took a break after reading like 6 or 7 light novels in a month and haven't returned lol.
For the overall difficulty of the books, at the start I tried specifically easier books, but as time went on I mostly read whatever was interesting. I'm also in a book club and a lot of these were from that one. Some of the LNs are really easy, but 雪国 was really hard, really I should reread at some point. 新世界より took a lot of lookups to be comprehensible. I read a lot of mystery so those are particularly easy to understand. I feel like some authors like Higashino or Miura are what I consider the "average" serious novel difficulty and those feel pretty comfy to read.
These are 53 books I've read in a bit over a year - and it's pretty much my first real year of studying Japanese. I studied a little bit here and there over the years, longest was 3 months or so in 2017 and then living in Japan a couple years.
I think most people do more stuff before doing novels than I did - maybe more textbooks, comprehensible Japanese YT, anime etc. I pretty much started my first novels after a month in. So even though I'd read 30 novels by the time I took the N2 and failed, I still was lacking quite a bit of vocab and grammar.
Basically, I started tolerating a lot of ambiguity and looked a lot up, so more or less understood what a passage was trying to say. But nailing down specifics was hard. Nowadays it's quite a bit easier, with a lot more vocab and also just knowing grammar better.
Edit: I guess one other thing about it that increased a lot over time is reading speed. At the time of my last post I was lucky to hit 5k char/hr. Now I often am over 10k an hour. I try to finish about a book a week or so, 4 books to a month. Could be more but I read a lot of decently long books. When I was trying to power through some long ones recently I tried to read 50 pages a day, but then finishing that glass tower book I marathoned like 130 pages until like 4:30 AM lol.
Hell yeah! I literally have that queued up right now in ttsu reader. I've been really excited to dive into it!
Last December, I took the N2 and... spectacularly failed lol. I'm not one of those study for 9 months and pass N1 lol. I did kind of wing it though, mostly wanted to see how well I'd do after reading around 30 books at the time. I got a 78.
Wow, I'm so surprised to hear that. Just trying to figure out something cause I got a similar score but had read 0 books at the time lol. I did finish the Quartet textbooks and had fully completed WaniKani by that time, along with reading the news sparingly. My vocab/kanji skills were really sharp, but my overall reading speed/comprehension and general endurance for long sessions was super poor at that time, so I really struggled in the reading section.
I only say all this cause I would have bet money that someone reading 30 books would have smoked someone like me lol. Where did you find yourself lacking?
硝子の塔の殺人 is great! I've also heard samples from the audiobook that has like 11 narrators.
As for my weakness for the N2, you mentioned having finished the Quartet textbooks and finished WK. I had skimmed Tae Kim and Yokubi, had like 8.5k vocab. A lot of my grammar skills were pretty sus - I needed to build up the basics more. Or read 100 novels, pretty sure at that point you just know the stuff. Also out of my 8.5k vocab, lots were not really words that show up on the test and I was missing a lot of words that do show up on the test.
I took too long on grammar section so didn't have enough time for reading. Like I was able to read the passages and comprehend them overall, but answering the specific questions was a challenge. And listening wasn't too great.
If we both got around that score on N2 last year can certainly do N1 this year!
Ahh I see. I also got a touch nervous too cause you had a higher vocab count than me, but I totally get what you mean about vocab that would be on a test and vocab that’s very literary. I had the exact realization when I finally started diving into narrative fiction than news editorials that I would usually read. I wish you the best too!
I can’t believe I recognized 硝子の塔の殺人! In preparation for my N2 exam last year I was reading a book per month and unfortunately 硝子の塔の殺人 was the last in that series… which means it was left incomplete (I started focusing on mock tests and stuff).
I should get back to it it seems. The universe is speaking to me through you.
It's a great book! The last third of the book was really hard to put down. Also the other has some other good books, wife read a short story collection.
Luckily for us, 宮部 has written a bunch of shorter stuff as well. But 模倣犯 was 2x700 pages of 単行本 edition, so a whole reading marathon. And after 15ish years all I remember is who was the culprit and how they were exposed 😅
Another nice mystery/suspence I've read recently was 方舟 by 夕木春央.
Well done on your reading! Were these all physical books or are there also certain apps you use for this?
I'm asking because I feel like I'm at a point where I should start incorporating consuming native content in my learning, but I am not sure where to start. If you have a recommendation for an app that you used for reading that would be great!
Thank you! A majority of them were ebooks actually. I use Ttsu reader on PC to read ebooks in epub format. For mobile I've heard that Hoshi reader is good these days. Another newer one is Yatsu reader.
With technology it's just a lot easier to learn quickly nowadays, wish all this was available years ago. In addition to using Ttsu reader, I also have Yomitan installed, a popup dictionary. So I just hover over a word, press shift and it gives me a definition. I can click a button to add the word to a vocab deck in Anki.
Novels themselves are some of the more challenging things to do early on as all you have are all these words. You don't have the benefit of images like from manga, or someone voicing the words out loud unlike movies. So being able to look everything up instantly removes a lot of friction and you will eventually be able to paint the scene in your head.
After about 6 months of reading and knowing roughly 8k words I read my first physical book. Looking up words for those are more annoying, pretty much just looking things up on Jisho.org. So I don't look too much up there, if I don't know a word often I just infer meaning from context and move on.
I am struggling with the link from the physical book into Anki.
If you see a word where you dont know the kanji and reading, what is your process to look it up and generate an Anki card for it?
To be real, Anki is amazing, a truly great tool. And stuff like Yomitan are also really great advances.
However, the #1 effective thing is the simple act of reading itself (or listening). People learned for ages before they had all this technology. Tech definitely makes it much easier and quicker though, especially early on.
So I didn't start reading physical until I had like 8k+ vocab and an alright grasp on grammar. Occasionally, I'd look up things on Jisho on my phone or PC if I really wanted to know what they meant, but most often inferred from context. Of course, that got much easier once I just had higher vocab so I knew how more kanji readings worked.
A couple things also were that 1) I jumped into physical books with volume 4 of the Galileo series. I was already familiar with the setting, the characters, and the author's style. So that meant that the vocab wasn't as painful.
2) When I read ebooks I mine waaaaay too much. I'm actually cutting back a lot now, and with trying the monolingual transition again, makes sense to mine less. But if you mine a bunch from reading ebooks, have a backlog of 500+ new cards, and then go read a physical book, then for just growing vocab you don't actually need to add anything from that physical book, you are still working through the backlog.
Inspiring post! My problem has always been that I can comprehend way more when reading than listening. I feel like I don’t pick up how to say any of the Kanji that I read. How has this been for you? Are your listening comprehension on par with your reading comprehension?
I think I'll answer your questions in reverse order. At the start, my listening was better than my reading by far. I lived in Japan a couple years and my wife is Japanese. So stuff like "put this in the fridge" and other super super simple phrases I was pretty comfortable with. Reading was really hard. However, since then, after spending a ton of time in reading, reading is definitely the stronger side now.
With regards to kanji - the most important thing is that they are just a way of being combined to write words. Depending on the author, they actually may skip kanji all the time. Like Higashino never writes 言う, he always just writes いう. Or in practice, you'll see いった "they said." There's definitely a phase where the kanji helped me understand a lot, so stuff like RDG at the start made me feel like I was reading hiragana word soup.
The solutions? Learn words with the reading of the word, and the definition. Or if you only have time for one - just the reading. Anki works great for this. The other solution, and even better, is just to read more, and subvocalize everything. You can definitely get to a really high reading speed while reading it all in your head, and if you do this long enough, you associate the meaning with the words more than the kanji.
Reading is definitely easier to comprehend more than listening since you can read at your own pace and stop when you need to and look things up. Like reading, you ultimately make the most gains by just doing a ton of it. But you just have to listen for the parts that you do comprehend, and if you continue this long enough then eventually the comprehensible part grows and grows until you understand most of it. Also reading helps listening as your vocabulary and grammar grow a ton from reading so that benefits listening to.
But another approach is to become a "listening main" where you spend most of your time listening instead, and those people tend to have the most natural idea of the spoken language, and the most natural accents.
Super impressive, I've been wanting to get into more novely and less light novely things for a while now so I might yoink some of these. I was also wondering, do you mine on just your PC or on mobile devices too? Do you bother adding things / mining when using physical copies or just enjoy yourself?
I totally recommend reading some more normie novels too, I like LN's as well but both types of novels have great works.
I usually just mine on PC these days, when I got tired of sitting at a computer I started with physical books.
I went through a whole process getting Ttsu reader, Anki, Yomitan etc. set up on my android phone so I've done that but it's just not so comfortable to read there. Hoshi reader I've heard these days is great for mobile though.
For physical books I pretty much only "mine" when I see a word pop up a lot, seems useful and want to remember it. So I just look it up on PC with a random example sentence, mine it, add the cover of what I'm reading and call it a day. But when I read ebooks I mine waaaaaayyy too much and am only now recovering from having had a massive backlog, so physical books reading times are a chance for the Anki numbers to calm down.
Woow Hoshi Reader looks like a really good shout, thanks. I was pretty uncomfortable with Yomitan + ttsu on my tablet + Anki on my tablet. I gotta try a physical book out some time too.
I don't know if hoshi reader does this but with just normal yomitan etc. I have also read news articles, note.com etc. so it works alright for that. But I still find it kinda uncomfortable to accidentally tap a word and get a definition when I just wanted to scroll. Or links make things annoying.
Hmm - hard to quantify, it feels like lots of Japanese in some areas, and a lot less in others. But then even in the areas where I know the most there's still an endless ocean of more to know
Failed N2 with a 78 score! I guess you could say that I'm further along than a lot of learners as probably the vast majority are in the painful beginner stages. But in terms of how far I have to go, I've gotten to intermediate at best, in a lot of ways N1 is just the beginning. Not to mention that JLPT doesn't cover speaking or writing at all so it's hard to use that as a gauge.
Also it's funny because there are basic grammar concepts that have taken me a long time to learn or wrap my mind around (hello passive tense!) but there's grammar points marked as N2/N1 that I picked up from reading a long time ago.
Pretty sure your original post was one of my inspirations to start reading.
Last month, I decided to dedicate 90% of my study to reading, with some flashcard filler. I'm now halfway done with book 4 of くまクマ熊ベアー and my Japanese (even listening) has improved so much. I was reading a book a week, but was putting in crazy hours, now I barely got 25% because work has been crazy.
I want to finish at least until book 5 before moving on; I feel like I need to solidify my base before moving on to harder stuff. Some of the common kanji and grammar just isn't quite solidified enough to move on.
Oh that's awesome! Learning Japanese, and reading are two really awesome things to do so being able to do them together is something that I hope a lot of people can do forever.
Kuma's cool! In the book club we have Kuma emojis. I enjoyed the first one, one of these days I'll continue with it. I've been told that series goes places. While it is definitely a beginner friendly book to start with, I had read a lot of slice of life stuff so the RPG and fantasy terminology was brand-new to me, like 酸素.
I hope you continue reading a lot! Whether you go straight through the whole Kuma series, or take a break and read something else and come back. There's always going to be a bit of a learning curve as you read gradually harder stuff but the payoff means that you get to read anything that interests you, and those easier books are now even easier.
A slice of life book I liked quite a bit was わたしの知らない、先輩の100コのこと1, felt like I learned a lot from that one.
I've definitely seen a ton of J-horror films and less with the books - リング is the only one I've read so far. However, that's an awesome one and I plan on reading the whole series. There's an original trilogy, then 3 more so a total of 6 books.
Then another book which is also by the same author Suzuki Koji is 仄暗い水の底から, which is a series of short stories. They adapted the first story into the film Dark Waters which is a great horror film. I have the book, wife already read it and said it's great.
Another horror author I plan to read is Ono Fuyumi. Her books 残穢 and 鬼談百景 got adapted into movies I really liked, and also 屍鬼 looks good. She wrote the fantasy series Twelve Kingdoms which is pretty famous.
So, yeah quite a bit of horror that I plan on reading soon, (I want to read らせん within a few weeks!) but also haven't gotten around to actually reading a ton just yet.
Very cool, thank you for sharing! I think it was your post last year that inspired me to pick up some books. I've read 3 volumes of きみゼロ and it's been a lot of fun. I wanna check some of these out too.
Oh, well then you will be in the best place! If you are looking to pass the N2 then most likely by that point you can probably read books without needing to lookup much. So physical books are viable, and in Japan itself you can get tons of secondhand books for very very cheap.
I'm N1 (From a decade back... and I find books seems to fall into two categories with me:
A. Popular Fiction? Maybe need to look up something every 10 pages, or so. Often it is something ridiculous commonplace (Like a gardening tool name) I've never interacted with.
B. Books that still destroy me(Looking at you 日蝕・一月物語) far less common: Need to possibly look up multiple words a page, remind my Japanese is not anywhere near as good as I think it is.
I can definitely feel that there is a certain average level for most normal fiction novels and I feel like I can hang with those. But the books that have some really specialized vocab, or also some non-fiction makes me need to look up a lot. Like this whole section on woodblock printing that was confusing me recently.
Thank you! And glad to hear you may give some a try!
Honestly though, in a way I'm in the same boat. Reading can be tiring, it's slower than reading in English. Some books have slow parts and I start falling asleep trying to read them. And I had neglected listening for a while.
So my plan as of like yesterday is to read books when I'm really motivated and enthralled. But if I don't get much reading done in a day - I'll do some kind of mindless game and then listen to YT vids.
Of course the channel I happened to listen to the most yesterday was Masaki books lol so still book-centered. Though Goma Dango horror stories was also cool.
At any rate, I think that if you have been a "listening main" due to whatever reason it's pretty great to get that practice in!
Pretty fast yeah. A year ago I made a three month update so there's more details, but basically for the first month or so I started with NHK easy, manga, anime, beginner podcasts and so on. Plus reading Tae Kim and Yokubi for grammar, then doing some WK and Bunpro.
After around a month in I read a couple light novels, and then read my first full-length novel. The actual timing is kind of fuzzy but basically I remember starting right at the end of March 2025 and then around May I was reading novels.
To be clear I wasn't coming from zero - I had been basically stuck in sub-N5 zone for years, had studied some kanji here and there and a little bit of grammar - but I do think that I pretty quickly found that what I wanted to do was read novels so I tackled a harder thing and bashed my head against it until it stuck.
I mean I failed N2 after 9 months in or so. But yes I did learn vocab and grammar, I just don't think that if you really want to read novels that you need to spend ages perfecting them.
Vocab: I learned an average of like 30-40 words a day, starting with the Kaishi deck and then mining. I did already know a few hundred words from earlier attempts at learning JP so that helped. Also I'd started WK for the third time and probably reached like level 10 before I started novels.
Grammar: I read through all of Tae Kim and Yokubi within a few months. Really once you get through about halfway through them that's good enough. Bunpro I did for like a month, got through N5 grammar and around the start of N4 when I was starting novels, but since I'd read Tae Kim and Yokubi most of it was review at that point.
With that as background - I did start with 2 really easy high school setting light novels at the start. Level 23 on Learn Natively, there was furigana for every name and any time kanji wasn't super common. I also had Yomitan for lookups and I looked up every word I didn't know, and mined some of them. I considered those LN's to be like N4-ish. My third novel might be considered N2 as it was a full-on mystery.
At an early level, if you get the meanings of all the words in simple sentences, and you have some basic grammar knowledge you can get a serviceable understanding of most of the sentences which lets you understand what's happening. There is a lot of ambiguity, and there were lots of nuances that I didn't understand, but I followed the scenes themselves. As time went on it all became more and more clear so that several months in, while there was still a ton of words I was looking up, I was able to pretty much just focus on reading and Anki for my studies (dropped WK and Bunpro for like 9 months too).
Grammar, vocab are important - but you also learn them as you read. The #1 way to learn how to read novels well is to read novels.
OMG this looks cool yet difficult at the same time lol
Only if I could start learning japanese. But don't have any idea what to do after learning Hiragana and katakana. Genki is expensive for me rn I sm still a uni student, but I want to try to attempt N5.
Coolness! You can look at the update I made after learning for 3 months, should give some info on what I did earlier.
I think there's no point using Genki, it's slow and boring (plus costs money like you mentioned). I recommend following the Moe Way guide https://learnjapanese.moe/ as it made me get to the level where I could enjoy novels quickly
And if you're like "this moe thing sounds good but how do I actually set everything up" there's this other guide that makes the setup very simple and step by step https://lazyguidejp.github.io/jp-lazy-guide/
really inspiring to see how reading books helped with language learning! thanks for sharing your recommendations. i hope someday i learn enough Japanese to access a whole new world (of literature)!
That day may come sooner than you think! I feel like I was N4-ish level when I was like "what's the easiest novel I can find?" and once you start you only go up from there
Thanks! Honestly, the start was very slow, first couple books were very short and took two weeks apiece.
Much as I like physical books and turning pages, what absolutely made it way faster was starting with ebooks where I could look up every unknown word with Yomitan (and for some of them, add them to Anki). It started off having to look up many words per each sentence. But after enough time, eventually now I only have to look up a word once every several paragraphs, depending on the book. And now reading physical books I don't really look up for those at all (mostly as it's really annoying for lookups for physical compared to one click with ebooks).
Recently I've been working on short one page stories. I would have Chatgpt run through it and give me a breakdown with hiragana readings, grammar points, and how the writing is different from ways of speaking, it's working well so far and I'm remembering a lot. Can't imagine reading a short book yet. But I have have a few sitting on the shelf that I would pick up once in a while and see how much I can understand...
Honestly you may be surprised how things actually get easier the longer something is. With something really short, every time you start a new one you're starting from zero. With something a little longer, you start at zero but then you build up knowledge of what they're talking about, any characters, preferred vocab (every author has some words they just love to use a ton).
But also just like, massive volume of stuff is super helpful. I think having explanations of grammar and so on is helpful, especially earlier on. But after a certain point surprisingly early you can start making gains from just reading a work, then reading the next thing and so on, just accepting a level of ambiguity. Read a lot and you understand a lot.
the 'way too many collocations' line is the real tell. mining's failure mode isn't too few cards, it's that half of what you mine you'd have absorbed from the reading anyway, so the deck balloons and reviews start feeling like a tax on the thing that was actually teaching you. the cards that earn their keep are for the words the reading alone wasn't going to drill in. sounds like the books did most of the work and anki just caught the leaks. written with ai
fwiw studyly leans the other way from mass-mining, it generates targeted questions straight off your actual source material instead of carding everything you bump into, https://studyly.io/r/2w9s47fx
15
u/majideitteru Jun 11 '26
That's amazing. I managed to pass N1 from reading Honzuki, so I'm really glad to see that on your list.
I'd also recommend Kusuriya no Hitorigoto for N1.