As a fellow book lover owning many physical and digital books, I will play devils advocate and say that I prefer to never purge physical copies of seminal works (subjective). In todays world, a physical copy is worth its weight in gold. While I love digital copies for travel, a license to a digital work leaves your rights to the whims of a corporation.
7 Likes
I swear I havenât bought over 200 Japanese games and VNs I have never touched on Steam and/or a mysterious shelf of 50+ volumes of unread manga.
Additionally, I definitely wouldnât be the type of person to be 1/3 of the way through reading âTobira: Gateway to Advanced Japaneseâ a month before taking N1 despite being in possession of it for the past 3 yearsâŚ
If I did happen to be like that guy I would at least know better than to be shopping for more reading material on my days off! 
5 Likes
I have a similar problem (suitcase full of 50lbs of books coming back from Japan, 3 years in a row. Thanks Bookoff)
But the thing is, the more you read, the faster you get.
Find things you like that challenge you just enough. I know sticking with it is hard, but consistency will always be key.
If youâre having to stop to look up words too often, it can kill motivation and feel like youâre not getting better, so finding the right reading level is difficult but helpful. And also finding topics you enjoy that make the struggle worth it.
Reading is tricky, because everything ar the N5-N4 level can feel boring and like youâre just reading things that kids read (and usually that actually is the case)
But, I remember at the start of the N3 level, I finally felt like I could actually read things, but it was so slow going and frustrating. It killed my motivation when I would have to make flash cards every manga panel.
As I got into N2, things got a lot faster and I was able to find more specialized topics. That N3 wall of frustration feels insurmountable, but it pays off. Read more, find things you enjoy, take breaks, and sometimes give yourself permission to not know things and keep going, just getting the gist of it. Not everything has to feel like a lesson, sometimes we have to remind ourselves to have fun.
Give yourself permission to be bad at something and just read for the sake of reading sometimes. Enjoy the pictures, read what you can, and youâll still improve in ways thatâll help you progress.
6 Likes
I simultaneously aspire to that sort of library and also fear the day I get that bad, so my kudos to you!
As it is I think my girlfriend is going to either laugh her ass off or murder me when I bring these all home eventually.
Congrats!!
I massively prefer physical copies over digital, honestly. Even if looking up kanji is a lot slower without some of the add-ons folks use, itâs so much easier for me to focus on a physical copy, not to mention the satisfaction of seeing myself progress through it.
Itâs okay, I definitely donât know a lady with 500+ physical manga who keeps a wishlist and shops at bookoff any time she happens to be downtown, although they both sound like kindred souls for sure 
Definitely this - and it doesnât just apply to books, honestly. Iâve also found that going to karaoke with some of my other foreigner friends winds up being really good practice, too. The lyrics almost always include furigana, but trying to sing along forces you to read quickly and without stopping to worry about whether you misread something, and then it has the additional input of the sounds too.
And ditto on motivation being important! Finding the right balance of Not Too Difficult To Tackle but also Interesting Enough To Push Through can take some time.
And sometimes youâre like me, where you read something that miiiiiight be a little higher than your reading level because you think the stuff at your reading level is boring. Oops.
As for my actual reading progress today, Iâve gotten through most of a chapter in volume 3 of ăŚăĄăăżăšăŽćč¨ (about 30ish pages I think?) so far. Iâll do some more reading after lunch, though, so I might be able to finish the remainder of the volume before I get off work.
Edit: Nearly forgot, I had a super encouraging moment with the Vanitas chapter, where one of the characters used the work ĺ°ä¸ç´éިĺ , which the furigana identified as ăŤăżăłăłă.
I was curious how the kanji themselves read, though - since I recognized/knew all but the middle one - so I looked up the possible readings for the middle one, and actually managed to correctly predict the reading for the whole word! Very pleased with myself for that, even if itâs maybe a bit silly 
5 Likes
I bestow upon thee this badge, please wear it well
Editing to add so I donât plug up this post with more replies just from me:
I met my 10 page goal!! I donât have to go the farm!!!
For the moment Iâm just going to take it easy and try for another 10 pages next week.
8 Likes
I personally canât focus on digital copies, so I prefer physical too, but my storage space is small and I donât tend to re-read most things, AND I tend to hoard redundant materials (I own Minna No Nihongo 1 and 2, Genki 1, Try! N5-N3, and all of the Shinkanzen Master N3 booksâŚ). I think itâs good to own books but also not hold onto them unnecessarily (I say, conveniently ignoring the 15 boxes of books in storage at my parents houseâŚ)
2 Likes
For this reason I am a big fan of the tadoku approach, which is to read without looking up things. However, when you jump from graded readers to native material, it becomes pretty difficult to get through stuff without EVER looking anything up⌠I try to limit what I will allow myself to look up so I can strike the balance between understanding and making progress. Unfortunately I just never really make time to sit down and read for whatever reason, so for me the key step is carving out some dedicated reading time!
2 Likes
Literally this week I bought the 5-volume set of Gokinjo Monogatari, 5 more volumes of Ao No Hako, and the second volume of Shiba Inu Rooms. I have probably over 100 unread books now. That being said, this post was motivating and I finally read 4 manga volumes in the last 2 days. 
6 Likes
4 volumes is crazy work!! Thatâs amazing!
By the way, Shiba Inu Rooms is a cute name, so Iâm curious about it. Do you recommend it?
1 Like
@cafelatte
I havenât properly read it, but it looks super cute and the concept is definitely unique. Itâs a short series so itâs probably a good one for anyone struggling with motivation/completion. I received the first volume as a gift, and I decided to buy the second when I saw it came with shiba inu stickers.
Hey fren. One thing that really made me progress in my books/manga/VNs was putting aside some time specifically to read them. For example, these days I read while drinking my cup of coffee in the morning, while Iâm in the bus, and just before sleeping. If there are any unknown words, I make a mark next to them with a pencil and move on, or highlight the whole sentence if itâs digital, so I can then make sentence cards in Anki at a more relaxed time.
On to my pile of shame:
I bought Tobira and the Shinkansen Master N2 books years ago. I got through the first few chapters of the former and only finished the reading section of the latter, but theyâre now collecting dust as I already have the N1. I think Iâll read through the culture sections for fun and then send them to whoever starts learning Japanese in my family.
I also got a bunch of the Overlord books, but only read the first two volumes. I read them in English so many years ago so I never felt much pressure to go through them.
To add insult to injury, I have a ton of boxed VNs that I havenât even opened.
Now, on the other side of the spectrum I just finished 太é˝ă¨é for the second time. Itâs easily one of the hardest things Iâve read in my life, let alone Japanese.
Keep at it, fren. Youâll reach places if you keep reading.
4 Likes
I think when it comes to textbooks its essential to just hold on to em. Ive mentioned in other posts that each book explains things differently so I like to have multiple methods of reading about grammer or practice questions.
Yea I agree with this. If it seems like a one off word I dont look it up, however sometimes itll pop up like 10 times over the course of several pages, and while I maybe DONT need to know the exact word since I kinda understand ill look it up going forward.
For a little bit, with manga when I was still newer, I was reading until I hit 15 words I didnt know, toss em into bunpro to study and then start from the beginning of that day. Slowly working through like pages at a time.
Eventually stopped doing that because it was time consuming and I just didnt have the vocab that I do now. Want to start light novels soon, maybe at the new year and get back into my Kanji studies so I can focus on reading more. Been really heavy on my Grammer and Vocab so my Kanji has slacked in that regard.
Oh man, yea I read some books years ago and loved them. Would you say they are a difficult read? I seem em at Book-off and wanna buy them but I KNOW they are outta my range rn.
1 Like
Almost forgot your badge u_u
Shiba inu stickers! Iâm so in. I read on wikipedia that itâs slice of life AND supernatural, so I feel like thatâs a really fun combo that reaches a bit beyond the slice of life stuff thatâs usually recommended.
5 Likes
If you have them on Kindle or something where you can look up words easily, theyâre not that hard. Way harder than contemporaries like Mushoku Tensei or Konosuba, for sure.
1 Like
Congrats! I canât grant you a lovely badge, but you have my cheering from work
I vary a bit on how I do things - some parts Iâll stop and look up every word on a page that I donât know, because otherwise the sentence has me going cross-eyed, and sometimes Iâll try to just keep moving unless I hit a sentence where I truly donât have any idea whatâs being said.
One of my middle-ground approaches is to only look up the one word in a sentence that has me going âIf I only knew this word, I think I would get this sentence,â and anything else that I can sorta feel from context/known kanji I just take my guess at and keep going.
As an update, I didnât quite finish Vanitas volume 3 before work because I had actual work pop up, but I got quite close!
Congrats to everyone whoâs managed some reading today/this week 
2 Likes
What a a lovely thread 
Personally, I have more games (mostly visual novels) than books, I hope they count too?
Anyway I have been jumping between them, but this Monday I started playing Ayakashi Gohan seriously and itâs perfectly at the right level for me. So I hope Iâll be able to stick with it!
3 Likes
I will wear my badge with pride. 
2 Likes
Todayâs update: got through the rest of Vanitas volume three (I thought itâd be quick, since it was going into a fight scene, but it turns out that there was more talking afterwards) and another 2 chapters of ĺć˘ĺľăłăăł. Not much, but Iâll count progress as progress
4 Likes
Iâve been neglecting this thread trying to just survive this week but here is my update! I finished volume 2 of Yotsuba, and Iâve started volume 1 of Flying Witch. To be honest, Flying Witch has been really disheartening- on LearnNatively, itâs listed as N4/beginner, but there are so so many words I donât know despite passing N3, and that made it hard to skip over them and forge ahead. I found some advice though that you should read three times- First as the struggle read, just getting through it, and then the second time more closely with some word mining if you wish. And then maybe a few months later do a third read. Does anyone employ this method? I feel kind of lame reading it twice even though it makes good sense to do it. I think Iâm just feeling a bit of a mental block.
@lunchbox1 omg no way Iâm so chuffed, I should have made you a nicer badge though!! next achievement, eh!
@SofyTrancy how are you coming along with your game immersion? That sounds quite fun!
@Ayara012 thanks for updating with your progress!! It really helps me stay motivated to hear what other people are doing. I think that is a lot of progress tbh, esp if you are also juggling work or school. I need to make you a badge too!!
4 Likes
I dont think going through is a bad issue at all. Sometimes, a few of the words on ones that get used over and over. I would maybe use the first time to mine though. (Maybe make a deck on Bunpro hrrmmmmâŚ) and then read the second time once you have a better understanding of the words. Going back a third time a few months later will also really show how youâve improved too. When I finish Yotsuba 5 Imma go back and read some manga that were to difficult for me when I started them and try to go through. I have a manga about highschool girls eating Ramen and ONLY the ramen eating scenes are sexual. I think the mangaka has mukbang fetish not to kink shame.