Translations by Ainikki: Learning to Read Japanese

Learning to Read Japanese

This is just a PSA on how I learned to read Japanese; I'm putting it out there for people who want to be translators and for anyone curious. If you're here for a new chapter, that'll be up tomorrow morning. Pinky swear.

General method:

I learned to read by a method the Japanese call tadoku, "read lots." It's how I learned to read in English, too. (I could read English pretty well before preschool.)

However, tadoku doesn't work well unless it's at the appropriate level. Anything pitched too high is not going to teach anything; it's just going to result in frustration. The first absolutely essential step is to learn kana; my recommendation for this is the free beginner lessons on Kanshudo.com, since that's where I learned my hiragana and katakana a few years ago.

The single most useful resource for reading that I picked up in my first year of study was the Japanese Graded Reader series, which goes from barely knowing kana (Japanese syllabary letters, as opposed to pictographs, which are kanji) all the way to N3/N2 kanji. Most of the stories are interesting, it's a good mix of genres (fantasy, history, folk tales, comedy), and they will get you 90% of the way to being able to read native children's books. They were very carefully curated and selected both to appeal to foreigners and to use common, authentic Japanese.

Just like English, Japanese has a basic set of primer books and texts that are used to teach children to read. 10 Pun de Yomeru (Read in 10 Minutes) is the most accessible of these; these books are illustrated, have full furigana (pronunciation helpers) and are meant to be read aloud. They're also sorted by grade level from first to sixth grade. A lot of the stories for very young children are boring and repetitious, but that's true in English too. There's a fair amount of grinding necessary at this level of reading practice--I spent four long months here.

By the time you hit the third-grade mark, you're likely ready for a lot of the free texts in the public domain that should be posted online. Aozora Bunko (Japan's Project Gutenberg) and Reajer (also free) were my go-to texts at this point. After this, I no longer bought children's primers, instead focusing on books that I wanted to read.

There are some people who will tell you to try to read what you want to read 100% of the time while learning. I disagree. You need scaffolding. The entire language is new and strange and much of it has no one to one referent in English. You will grind; you will suffer; it will be boring; you will want to give up. Those who stick with it manage fluency in the long run. I'm not fluent yet, but I get closer with every month that passes.

I went in to Japanese learning initially with a strong focus on reading. Most people put more emphasis on speaking, but that interests me less. I can do it, but speaking resources are beyond the scope of this post. If you're curious about how to learn to speak, ask.

I acquired 90% of my books from cdjapan.com, which can ship books out to me in about a week. It's awesome, if a little pricey.

General advice:

Don't spend a lot of time or money on textbooks. The faster you can get into native texts, the better.

Most programs and tools offer you get-fluent-quick gimmicks and pitches. Don't believe them. I've been doing this for two and a half years; every short cut you take will only hurt you in the long run. The best way to progress is to have a concrete goal in mind ("I want to read X book by X date"), then break up the steps to make it happen. Here are the steps I needed to clear before reading my very first children's novel in Japanese, which was Guardian of the Spirit:

(1) Learn hiragana

(2) Learn katakana

(3) Learn basic phonetic sounds in Japanese (mostly, but not completely covered by the above)

(4) Learn Grade 1 kanji (100ish)

(5) Learn Grade 2 kanji (200ish)

(6) Learn Grade 3 kanji (200ish)

(7) Learn basic sentence order and grammar structures

(8) Learn how to read books with a Japanese layout

(9) Acquire genre-specific vocabulary (fantasy, action, history, anthropology)

(10) Acquire translation tools (dictionaries, lookup strategies)

(11) Read.

In my experience, the first few chapters of any new novel are always the worst because they introduce most of the plot and characters. After getting through that, it's usually pretty smooth sailing.

What about manga?

I tend to view manga as more of a speaking resource than a reading resource, but I may be in the minority here. Most manga features very limited stretches of connected narrative with lots of slangy dialogue. It's useful if you want to study speech patterns, modes of expression, or you just need a break from Japanese walls of text, but I don't consider manga a primary reading resource.

What about speaking/pronunciation?

While this isn't a speaking guide per se, there are a lot of pronunciation tools on the 'net. I like this one because it has audio for all the sounds.

https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/japanese-pronunciation/

Tools I use:

Kanshudo.com (free! FREE!)
Satorireader.com (Some free resources, mostly paid but fairly cheap)
Memrise (custom vocabulary lists with audio and pictures)
Duolingo (for vocabulary only)
Takoboto Android Japanese dictionary (the best free dictionary there is; my translating would be less than half as fast without it)

Books I recommend:

Japanese Graded Readers (all four levels)
10 Pun de Yomeru (Read in 10 Minutes) (complete series): Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Biographies and History, Science and Math topics are all covered
Ikki Ni Yomeru (Read in One Go) (complete series) Advanced literature, includes short stories by Murakami Haruki and Uehashi Nahoko
Long-seller collections for Niimi Nankichi, Akutagawa Ryuunosuke, Ogawa Mimei, and Dazai Osamu (these have full furigana and pictures)