Please help me determine/execute the best action plan for learning to read Japanese

April 27, 2012 10:36 PM

I want to be able to read Japanese. There, I said it. I know other people in the world have accomplished this feat, so it shouldn't seem so impossible. But as long as I've been at it, I feel that my progress is excruciatingly glacial, which makes me feel I must be doing it wrong. So I'm here to ask for help. I have seen the many previous questions about learning to read/speak Japanese. There are so many that I won't link to them here, though I have them open in 50 tabs as we speak, and I promise to go over them carefully once again -- but in the meantime: Is there a generally agreed upon BEST METHOD for learning to read Japanese? If time and money were not an object, what would get me where I want to be? Am I being unreasonable to expect a higher rate of forward progress? Am I just doing it wrong??

Please note:
- I live in Japan, and have for exactly a decade now. My first Japanese language class was 17 (!?) years ago.
- I can speak Japanese with relative ease, unless the topic gets too esoteric or too specific or something, and it IS NOT speaking (or listening, or writing) with which I am currently looking for assistance.
- I can read to a point. I don't know how to quantify that point. I guess I know probably 200-300 kanji (+/-??), and I can read very simple texts. I am not looking to start from 0; I would like to be able to read non-fiction Japanese books.
- My spouse is Japanese, and we speak mostly Japanese around the home.
- I have taken a variety of Japanese classes in a variety of schools over the years; most recently, I have taken taken private lessons A: a one-week intensive, geared toward reading/memorizing kanji, and B: weekly lessons where I was trying to make progress, with the instructor's assistance, through a specific text in Japanese that I really want to read.
- I have tried spaced recognition memorization for kanji: Anki, Smart.fm, Sticky Study, Japanese, etc. I find that I can stick with it for about a month, then I lose interest because I'm not seeing any real world results and so give up in frustration. Fast forward 3-6 months and I try again, with the same results.
- I have looked at AJATT; the IDEA of switching everything around me to Japanese-only makes sense, but getting through an article on a Japanese website takes *hours*.
- My current job actually leaves me with a fair bit of time that I know I could be applying to this, including more than a month off twice a year, when I could schedule some intensive classes, if I just knew what/where.
- I'm not really interested in manga or anime.
- I've tried reading "readers" that include furigana, but I seem to just end up reading the furigana and ignoring the kanji; covering the furigana as I read seems to help, but only in the short term.

posted by segatakai to Writing & Language (12 answers total)

You could try this site. It's not free like it was when I used it, but it still seems like the most useful tool for learning to read Japanese that I've seen online. Since you are already proficient at speaking, you basically just need to match up sounds you recognize with symbols you don't.

In the quiz I linked, you see a word and type it out phonetically instead of only saying it in your head. I think that's why it worked better for me than Anki; typing out the words over and over gets your muscle memory involved with the process and makes it less burdensome. Also, it makes you focus on learning to recognize words rather than individual characters. That's pretty important if you want to avoid being frustrated by each character having multiple sounds.

Once you know around 1000 characters, you can start reading simple novels. Just skip words you don't know; you'll be able to work out most of the story through context. Use a dictionary for unknown characters that show up often enough to get annoying. The more you read and the more words you learn, the easier it will be to memorize new characters. That's why it's useful to read as much as you can, even before you know as much as you think you should.

As a side note, I think that the vertical text in books is much easier to start out with than the crowded horizontal text you see on most websites. Buy some young adult novels. Having a long story you can get emotionally involved with is much more motivating than slogging your way through dozens of news articles, and it's also a better way to pick up useful words.
posted by lali at 11:37 PM on April 27, 2012

Damn, lali beat me to it. Read the Kanji is easily the most effect tool I've used for learning to recognize kanji. Bear in mind, though, that outside of the site's quiz style atmosphere, it still takes some work to transfer those kanji into a "working in the real world" part of your brain. In about six months of seriously using that site, though, I went from a functional understanding of maybe two or three hundred kanji to eight to nine hundred. Spare ten minutes? That's at least thirty kanji flash cards to check, depending on your speed, maybe more.

Aside from that, start texting in Japanese more. Your phone probably has predictive text input, but you still need to check to find the right kanji out of all of those choices. When I made my junior high students keep an English diary for winter vacation, they demanded I do one in Japanese. I could have done it easily, speaking. Needing to write it out, and fun the correct characters really helped me with my grammar, and also provided a decent bump to my reading comprehension.
posted by Ghidorah at 11:46 PM on April 27, 2012

There's really only one key to reading Japanese (or, in fact, the entire language): Kanji

As you know, memorizing kanji is hard work.
If you don't enjoy it and memorizing kanji is just a painful chore for you, then forget it, you'll never be able to read beyond a basic level.

You'll need to find out what works best for you. I don't know any of the programs you mentioned, but what worked for me was the kanji kentei exams. You may have heard of those. They are held every few months at a location near you and go from something like 8-kyu or so all the way up to 1-kyu. I started with 5-kyu and worked my way up to 3-kyu. There are study books with which you can do mock exams and measure your progress. This is important to keep you motivated, as it tells you "I'm at so many points right now, so if I study another two weeks, I have a good shot at 4-kyu (or whatever)."
Also, with the kanji kentei, you'll see how the kanjis are used in context (words and sentences). This is essential. Knowledge of the kind "生 = life, living, raw, birth" is pretty much useless if you don't know how the kanji is used in context, i.e. you also need to build a strong vocabulary. Kanji kentei does just that.
An important part of the kanji kentei is being able to write the kanji. You should not skip or work around that. It might seem superfluous if all you want to is being able to read, but believe me, an active knowledge is much more valuable and stable than a passive knowledge. A passive knowledge may devolve into forgetting the kanji altogether, but while an active knowledge may devolve into passive knowledge, if at one point you were able to write it (from memory), then you'll probably be able to read it FOREVER. I don't know what "spaced recognition memorization" is, but if it means that it will train you only to recognize kanji but not to be able to retrieve them from memory and actively write them, then you should forget those study methods. In fact, this might be the reason you never made much progress.

Parallel to that, you should, of course, read as much as possible. Look up every kanji you don't know. Write them down. Ask your wife if you can't figure out how to read them or can't find the word in the dictionary. But reading books or newspapers will be too slow if you don't have a basic knowledge of kanji. 200 - 300 is not nearly enough, you need around 1000 at least to get to an acceptable speed. So at first, concentrate on increasing your knowledge of kanji.

It probably doesn't matter, which program you use, as long as it requires you to be able to write, like the kanji kentei. But I think that classes don't make much sense. In a way, this is just rote memorization. The task is to get as many of those kanjis from the books into your head. This is accomplished by seeing the kanji on paper and recreating it, i.e. writing it down 10, 20 times in a row the first time you learn it (and I mean "writing" as with pen and paper). No teacher assistance can help you with that. YOU need to write it, not the teacher.

And now go and learn your kanjis!
posted by sour cream at 11:49 PM on April 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

Here's more info on the kanji kentei.
posted by sour cream at 11:57 PM on April 27, 2012

When you say writing do you mean in hiragana + the 200-300 kanji that you know? That is, can you write those kanji? I'm one of those crazy people that learned kanji the Heisig Remembering the Kanji way. I found it easier to learn the kanji as characters apart from their meaning and use and that made reading random texts (books, blogs) a ton easier. Maybe it would help with your furigana'd text reading if you knew how to write and recognize the kanji as easily as you know the alphabet.
posted by zengargoyle at 1:33 AM on April 28, 2012

It sounds like Heisig's Remembering The Kanji might help, with one caveat: since you're already pretty fluent in Japanese, use Japanese keywords for the kanji.

I'm at a level where I can read most fiction fluently and most nontechnical nonfiction not quite as well, and I've done very little deliberate kanji study. The only thing that ever helped for me was reading a lot, using a dictionary when I had to and when I wanted to. I started reading adult novels when I was at your level in terms of kanji recognition, though much lower in overall Japanese ability, and I just bull-headed my way through them. I wouldn't do that now -- I'd spend more time with novels for elementary kids -- but since you say that furigana are too much of a crutch for you, adult novels might be the way to go. (Or light novels, which sometimes have furigana for the first appearance of a particular word and not later appearances.)

Mix things up between intensive reading where you look up almost every words you don't know and extensive reading where you try to refer to a dictionary only when necessary. Also, try not to read things at the edge of your ability, saying that you CAN read harder stuff so that you SHOULD be reading harder stuff. I found that I had to read a ton of relatively easy books (mostly light novels) to build up the kind of base where I could read fast and well and when I read harder books, I was reading fast and well even though I was more frequently interrupted by unknown words.

I'm sure you already know about these, but for quickly looking up kanji so they don't interfere too much with my reading, I like to use a dictionary with handwriting input (nciku) and a dictionary with multiradical lookup so that, for example, you can get 激　by clicking on 白 and 方 (I find tangorin easy to use.)
posted by Jeanne at 4:49 AM on April 28, 2012

Nthing that you need to focus on Kanji. Being able to read 300 kanji means you effectively can only read at a 3rd grade level. I don't think you'll find much that you'll be able to read with any fluency other than children's books or manga (which you seemingly have no interest in).

I don't know if I can add to the good advice that's already been given here, but I can tell you what helped me become literate in Japanese. I'm not nearly as fluent of a reader as I'd like to be, but I can read probably in the 1200-1300 kanji range. The two things that helped me build my current level of literacy are my job and reading Haruki Murakami.

I work in educational administration, and having to read and understand office memos, translate university publications, and communicate via email with colleagues in Japanese every day really pushed me to learn a ton of new kanji and complex grammar structures. I'm also a huge Haruki Murakami fan in English, and he has a number of short essay books in Japanese in which each essay is almost always only two pages long. They have been perfect practice for me because they are concise and usually focus on one particular topic (meaning there is a lot of repetition of the same kanji). The tone is also casual enough that there aren't a lot of complex grammar structures or uncommon, stuffy formal Japanese.

When it boils down to it, the only way you'll really get better is by dedicating time to studying kanji and reading authentic Japanese Every. Single. Day. Maybe you can find (or your wife can recommend) an author that writes short stories like the ones I described. You could, for example, make it your goal to read one story and learn five new Kanji from it each day.
posted by Kevtaro at 4:53 AM on April 28, 2012

It's not generally agreed upon as the "best" method for learning the kanji, and is far from perfect, but Heisig's Remembering the Kanji and a good spaced repetition setup (reviewing the kanji website, anki, mnemosyne) is the only method I would recommend. Just add time and effort. The spaced repetition is key to your success with Heisig, so if you don't like using an SRS, then too bad.

Heisig's system is elegantly simple, and the more energy you put into creating your stories for each character, the bigger your payoff in learning that character well. Complete your training the Heisig way well enough, and you'll find it pretty hard to forget the meanings. Rote memorization it ain't, but neither are the results.
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 9:55 AM on April 28, 2012

Extensive reading may be a good approach for you here. I did this while I was living in Japan and was eventually able to pass the old 2-kyu test in this way. I started by reading kids books - 200-300 kanji probably pus you around grade 2 to 3 level, and books in the library are usually divided up by grade level. In addition, you can use the kokugo books published by companies like Kumon. I used these extensively to prepare for 2-kyu and they were actually really good at helping me to learn the grammar and common structures necessary for reading general Japanese texts.

Short version is: read simple books at your level until it gets too easy then move up a level. The reading of the kanji then becomes instinctive. Assuming that you don't want/need to learn how to write them just yet I wouldn't bother too much at this stage with individual memorisation or writing practice.

Good luck!
posted by mukade at 5:10 PM on April 28, 2012

Response by poster: Thanks, everyone, for your suggestions. I will work with Read The Kanji, and try to find some reading material that is at the appropriate level, and make sure to work at it a little each day. KanKen is probably beyond me, for the time being.
Thanks again!
posted by segatakai at 11:16 PM on April 28, 2012

At a certain point, it just comes down to memorizing the damn things... but it gets easier after you have mastered the first 1000.

I lived in Japan for about 4 years and achieved a certain level of competency - I could write simple sentences and paragraphs if I used a dictionary, but my vocabulary was quite limited greetings and basic conversations were all that I could manage.

The breaking point came when a Japanese colleague told me she could not take me seriously because I spoke like a 10-year-old boy. Humiliated (there were other issues), I decided to learn the kanji.

Starting out being able to read maybe 100 characters, I studied about 8 hours a day for a year (this was before kids, and at the time I only needed to work about 4 hours a day to make ends meet). Basically my life revolved around studying Japanese.

I used a series of workbooks and textbooks to structure my study. I also read the newspaper and took note of new vocab (newspapers are great because the language is very simple).

I watched the news in the evening, which often reported on the same things that were in the newspaper, so it was a good way to reinforce what I had been studying during the day.

While I had always been interested in manga (usually stuff aimed at "salaryman" audience, or gekiga), I also started taking books out of the library about stuff that I was interested in - local history, geology, folk customs.

I was also teaching in a Japanese school at that time, so I sat in on Japanese lessons and social studies lessons. I got copies of the Japanese textbooks that were being used in classes and read them (I had just got an Education degree and had taught in Canada, so this was an interest, too).

I read all of the notices and printout sent out to teachers in the staff room, and asked questions about what was printed on them. I also started tutoring students to help them pass university entrance exams, so I learned a lot about talking about grammar of all things, in Japanese.

But that year spending 8 hours a day studying Japanese was in many ways one of the best years of my life. And I didn't stop there.
posted by KokuRyu at 9:56 AM on April 30, 2012 [1 favorite]

I have been studying and speaking Japanese for about 20 years. A practice I have kept is to know how to read every word I know. It would feel odd to me to see a sign for a common word like 自動車 and not know that it says "jidousha".

As far as learning kanji, I think the best practice is to add them to your active memory. The way to do this is the way the Japanese do: by writing them. Many people prefer pencil and paper, but I have recently taken to using Skritter, which allows one to drill kanji writing very quickly using a SRS system. I rather enjoy it, and the metrics give a real sense of accomplishment.

I would also recommend going to a bookstore and picking up kanji study materials made for Japanese children. A book for drilling the 1,006 kyouiku kanji would serve you very well.

Although you said you lose interest, I must also recommend Anki. I use it to learn 40 new words a day, and the results are quite obvious especially if you have a deck loaded with high frequency words. There are some JLPT decks in the public Anki decks. I would download the N2 and N1 decks and run through those.
posted by Tanizaki at 12:38 PM on July 20, 2012