Ttsu works in iOS, and 10ten is the closest to Yomitan. It’s good, but not as good as Yomitan…
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Awesome post! Such a relatable question that I am sure most people experience to some either major or minor degree when they first start reading, and potentially for a long time after!
This is a great description, and I think you really hit the nail on the head. Having learned to read in two languages other than English (Swedish and Japanese), I would say that the experience was entirely different for each. In Swedish, I was able to make so many more inferences based on my understanding of the world that had been pre-built in English. English and Swedish happen in the same consciousness of how the world works. So even when my vocabulary was not the greatest, I was still ‘conscious’.
I use that example because I believe that learning Japanese is fundamentally different. Basically, you are linguistically unconscious when you start reading Japanese. It’s like being a baby all over again when you can snatch little pieces of information but forming webs of related context is incredibly difficult, because you have not become ‘conscious’ yet. I guess this consciousness that I am trying to describe is similar to the point when you’re about 3 years old where most people can recall their first memories. We could say that a contributing factor to that person developing memories is that they have become linguistically ‘conscious’, and that they are capable of reflecting on that memory using language. All memories before that point are from the theater in the fog.
It sounds like you are highly aware of the points you need to improve, and I agree that you are probably correct in that you don’t need anyone to explain vocab or grammar to you. You just need to become more aware of what you are reading.
I definitely went through this issue and would describe it in the same way you did. It’s succint, and paints a good picture of honestly how it feels. The one thing I remember doing that made the biggest instant impact for me was not just saying the words in my head as I read, but actually saying each word loudly and with intent in my head as I read. Use your inner voice to shout the words at yourself. This may potentially seem silly, but it helped me way more than I care to admit. It’s like shouting the words blows the fog aside so that you can get a better look at the stage. You’re trying to fast-track that ‘consciousness’.
Sorry if this is weird advice 
, I just really vividly remember this stage and how it made me make the link between conscious and unconscious understanding, regardless of whether or not that is even a good analogy 
.
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Yeah, I feel like I’m at the same level right now. Sometimes it’s alternating between “oh, I sort of understand everything, amazing, didn’t think I’d get there” and “wow, I have no idea what they’re talking about, even though I know every word here…”. Sometimes it happens on the same text passage
Though I think the fog lifts. As others have already said, it’s just a matter of more reading, studying and giving it a couple more years. As a non-native that was my experience with English, too. I still remember trying to read and feeling like I only have a rough idea what’s going on. Fast forward maybe 5 years and reading is not a problem anymore.
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Relatable. Going from English to Dutch was a completely different experience than to Japanese. Even with very insufficient vocabulary, at least the general shape of things made intuitive sense. Actually, it would be interesting to try to read something now and refresh that feeling.
Learning to read English as a foreign language… was probably confusing, but primary school kids have different brains and expectations, so I cannot really say anymore.
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Thank you. This is a more streamlined way of doing something I’ve been doing, which is basically highlighting what I don’t get (on my Kindle, mostly), using the internal dictionary, finishing the sentence, rereading and then using the translator when those sentences become impenetrable. Since I’ve never really systematized it, sometimes it may yield worse results, so I think being more precise about how to tackle those sentences I have a hard time with could be actually a better way forward.
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“Hypersubvocalizing” makes a whole lot of sense to me! It means you have to be deliberate about your parsing of the sentence while reading, which forces you to take it slow in parsing and retrieving info. Great idea! Thanks!
My knowledge of languages beyond Spanish and English is fairly varied, and though I have reached some middling competence in at least one non-indoeuropean language (Estonian), the strong influence of indoeuropean languages on it made it much easier to parse even in light of large gaps in my vocabulary. This has been the same for other IE languages I’ve dabbled in to some moderate competency, particularly those that are rather distant from Romance languages (particularly Balto-Slavic langs). Japanese oftentimes not only trips me because of its vocab; it sometimes transcends barriers of IE sentence structure and contextual requirements! It’s both fascinating and frustrating. I think you’re also right that the fog feels like only being partially conscious in the language, like being in a fever dream. The feeling I had maybe a year and a half ago was that of profound vagueness (a worse feeling than that of fogginess). And come to think about it, that feeling has substantially subdued.
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A practical tip that might help.
Read something that you are familar with so that you can visualize the scene as you read it.
I read a light novel for an anime I’m very familar with. Even though the difficulty was way beyond my current ability, by being able to visualize the scene in my head, I could move the jigsaw puzzle pieces of text around until they fitted.
E.g. the way I’m reading it, it’s as if character A is saying it/doing it, but I know character B says this/does this.
I even went and rewatched the episodes to help with this. Of course scenes in the book that didn’t make the edit were really difficult!
but yeah, I have the same problem with unfamilar content. I just finished a short story the other day, and in this book they all have twists at the end. This story finished and I completely didn’t get whether there was a twist or not. oh well しょうがない
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Also we tend to forget the times we might read something in our native languages and not properly comprehend it first time… Huh? Why the did the police rob the store… what, wait… oooohh!
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Honestly the only answer is I think you just have to keep reading. Read every day. Read something you are familiar with already. Read something you are not familiar with. But the main thing is read every day for one month, or six months, or a year, or two years, or three years or whatever. Eventually the fog will clear and instead of simply understanding grammar and words as disparate things you will begin the picture what is being expressed in your head. I’m not familiar with the novel you are reading but even without understanding everything was able to skim read the passage and visualise the characters and their thoughts and words as my own. I could only get to that point through practice and perseverance.
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I would say I feel like I’m in the same boat.
I completely agree with many of the comments from others, too.
Something, that I think is worth mentioning as well, is finding an author you like, and reading a lot of their stuff.
Assuming I recognise the vocab, I think often the difficulty is getting used to the sentence patterns/structures. Sticking with a single author means you can really get used to the style of sentences they write, which I think can help clear the fog a lot.
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I “finished” (added, not mastered) all the BunPro items a long time ago, I know somewhere around 14-15k words, and I still feel the fog pretty strongly. The worst is when I see something entirely out of context, such as opening a Japanese website and feeling completely lost, not able to quickly glance over everything and see my way around like I can in English. I think I haven’t done a huge amount of reading compared to other people at my vocab level, so I’m hoping there’s still a lot of gains to be easily made. I don’t help myself by tending to choose to read things that are a bit difficult for my level, too.
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Its really just going to come down to grinding away and looking up (mostly) everything that you don’t understand. That feeling is totally natural, but I can assure you there is a light at the end of the tunnel. What it comes down to is what field is the book you’re reading related to? When you enter into a new field/genre you’re going to have to learn all of the common words and phrases that are typically used. But after you finish a couple pieces of media related to it then your reading speed will greatly increase. It’s always a tedious process. I recently started a novel about former empires and all of the historical and political vocab are really testing my patience. But over time you just kind of accept that it is what it is until you get used to the new material. Just remember while you’re trudging your way through it that you’re not alone in the struggle.
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Nice thread, lots of useful advice! Summarizing the ideas of everyone here (out of order):
- Reading stuff you have familiarity (watched an anime of it for example)
- Reading stuff you don’t have familiarity (never saw it in another language)
- Reading Text-only works
- Narrow Reading (reading in the same thread, like same author, same genre etc)
- “Hypersubvocalizing” (shout the words in your head as you read)
- Don’t read stuff too old
- Read more
- Highlighting the foggy areas in the text
- Break up foggy sentences systematically into simpler pieces and build them up again
- ttsu reader + Yomitan (or 10ten on iOS)
The stuff I would say were already said before by everyone. As by the thread you linked, I’m also going through the fog, hallo 
. For me, highlighting and hypersubvocalizing are new, and the breaking up of sentences, I really should be doing more… Well, let’s keep going, one day we may look back and notice we already didn’t have anymore fog for ages, and sit down to look at the sunrise
Also, for those on Android, it’s a good idea to check Jidoujisho, it fuses a bunch of stuff (including ttsu and yomitan) together, it’s pretty cool.
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I usually compare it to static like when you’re listening to the radio and you can hear that there’s a station but you can’t entirely make out what’s being said - just a few words here and there. As you progress, it’s like a slight adjustment to the tuning knob on the radio and the signal starts to become clearer and clearer until finally you get it.
When I first started reading there was a lot of static and I had to look up just about everything that was being said. But as I continued to read more every day, I began to see a lot of progress. I love reading in Japanese.
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Just want to add, and something to consider, is you’re comparing your current Japanese reading experience to your current native language reading experience. I would guess that you likely have a lot more years in your first/native language and probably only a few in Japanese. You probably encountered just as much fog years ago.
Just my opinion, but as we get older we tend to try and quantify and compare our abilities constantly. If we’re not “getting it” we start to get nervous. Yet, when we were children we often just “did stuff” without a lot of thought and strategy. You got handed a book about a cat in a hat and you just went with it. You didn’t spend the whole time reading it wondering if you understood a particular grammar point and how much vocabulary you needed to put into flashcards after; you just read about the cat in a hat.
You likely had the same issues you’re having now when you were learning your first language, but back then you just didn’t care as much and probably don’t remember it. So now, as an adult looking back, it seemed a lot easier than it really because you didn’t care about the struggles and didn’t bother to remember them.
You’re probably doing just fine. I think we probably all are. I think we just get bombarded by our own worries and a bunch of “I read every book by Nasume Souseki in under 3 hours and I just started learning Japanese two days ago! Everything you’re doing is wrong!” YouTube videos and forget that.
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Thank you for posting this. “Fog” is such a good way to describe it.
Like you, I struggle with reading. I’m way behind you, in fact. I can read about a page before the compounding bits I don’t get grow too much and the fog becomes so impenetrable I can’t focus anymore and have to stop. I’m not used to this! I’m 42, and I have a PhD in the humanities. I’m used to understanding everything I read in seconds, unless it’s very technical and outside my field, in which case I have a really simple ‘way out’ without needing to feel stupid. Japanese makes me feel - no joke - very stupid and very illiterate.
And that’s exactly what it is! I have a vocabulary of around 40-50,000 English words, and a very large active vocabulary, mainly due to all my (over-)education. By my best estimate, in Japanese, I’m a fair bit behind you - I probably have a Japanese vocabulary of around 3000 words, if that, and they are all very, very general. As soon as I start reading something that deals with a specific topic, I notice that I start encountering the same words I don’t know over and over - which is how context, and reading, work. But I find it super exhausting in Japanese in particular trying to recognise the kanji, remember the reading, and also internalise the meaning - all while trying to internally relate it to the contextual clues that might help me remember it.
No advice, just recognition. I’m myself trying to get over the intermediate plateau/hump and I’m finding it very demoralising. Just liked the idea in the thread title.
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It was your thread that finally pushed me to posting this one, actually! It resonated with the issues I’m currently facing with Japanese. One day we’ll have a clear landscape, not a foggy one!
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You’re right that the drive to compare yourself with others creeps up, and the whole “optimization” focus of the online Japanese learning communities is often maddening. At the same time, the quantifiable aspects of learning are seemingly useful guidelines and goalposts, but I think being aware of one’s own shortcomings is incredibly hard. Sometimes, after so many hours of studying, I may feel a sense of entitlement–how can I not know this, I ought to, etc.–so when that happens I have to stop myself and remember that learning isn’t a mechanistic process. With Japanese though, I have to be even more deliberate in avoiding this thinking–because in practicality it is so different to the other languages I have learned to a more than functional degree, it takes a lot more humility in myself to accept my own suckiness. I’ve struggled with other languages, certainly, so I’m not unfamiliar with the fog, but the feeling of the Japanese fog is so much more confounding that others I’ve been exposed to! I am, however, hopeful: We’re, as you said, probably doing just fine 
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I haven’t read long blocks of text yet. The longest is the “story thus far” on the manga inside cover.
I never stressed about understanding it cause I did read it already.
Reading your example I could see things popping out of the fog!
Seeing everyone’s advice makes me think I can try reading a light novel
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Thanks so much for starting this thread! It’s reassuring to see other people describing the same feelings I’ve been having, and offering helpful suggestions.
In my own study, I think I struggle to hold a good balance between a high volume of exposure while not getting bogged down by overanalyzing everything, and taking the necessary time to really fight through the fog with challenging sentences. Both of these seem important, but I suspect I need to dial up the discipline a bit and spend more time consciously wrestling with things - as @josh did in his sentence breakdown.
I think lots of the time I don’t even take the time to identify which aspects of a sentence might be causing my confusion - instead just feeling frustrated and disappointed that “after all this time” (about 2.5 years of spare time study) I can still trip over things that look pretty basic.
Luckily there’s something about this language I can’t resist, so the journey continues even when I feel frustrated. And I love those moments when I see some clear evidence of progress.
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