Yotsubato can be a bit tough as a first manga because it has so much colloquial language. I personally recommend Aria the Masterpiece. Most of the language is more standard (with occasional colloquial of course) and it’s pretty interesting too.
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I have a pretty good solution that worked for me, having had the exact same problem. My advice is start reading manga with Furigana. Once that becomes comfortable for you to do and you’ve read a significant amount (not just a few volumes of Yotsuba) move to manga with no furigana. Again once you feel like you can just pick up any manga without furigana and read it without much trouble you should move to the next step. I would recommend familiarizing yourself with JLPT style readings while you’re doing this (at least being able to read N2 lvl material and comprehend it). At this point you need to decide what kind of thing you are interested in so that you will actually read it. It might be news articles, or short novels. If you try to jump from not reading very much to reading a book (even a beginner one) it’s gonna feel like a slog and you’re gonna get discouraged.
One more thing is to not look up every word, I fact I would only look up a word if you see it and think “ah I’ve seen this before what does it mean again?!” Or if you run into it multiple times, or of course if it looks like something very context important that you need to understand in order to understand the progression of the events happening.
As for listening, I gave myself a cutoff point for when I would switch to Japanese subs only. For example “when I finish this season of terrace house and finish hunter hunter that’s it for English subs, then it’s Japanese subs from here on out.”
At first it will be hard but you WILL get used to it after a bit, and probably faster than you think. That’s true for each jump you make.
At any rate the key is not to get hung up on how much you’re improving or how many words you can’t understand it’s just to read read read, listen listen listen; trust that the skill will come along with that.
As a side note I like to set an hour or so for reading before bed every night to make sure I do it.
It takes time and patience and constant daily effort. I’ve been living in Japan for 3 years and self studying all the while and I still have trouble reading things in the newspaper or novels and terrace house is always throwing new terms at me.
Good luck to you!
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I think this is overkill for reading your first book. N3 is more than enough for your first book.
This differs very much person to person. I read my first children’s book around N4 level. It was difficult, and I read only 10 pages a week, but it was doable. What made it work for me was reading at a steady pace with a book club.
I think the most important think is to do something interesting. If someone wants to study for 2-4 years to reach N2 before reading a book, go for it. But personally I would have stopped learning Japanese by now if I wasn’t reading both manga and books along the way.
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Just to clarify I meant that while you’re reading whatever it is you choose to read you should also be improving your skills and familiarity with JLPT style readings up to N2. This is not necessary but it will help you a lot when trying to read a comprehend things like Magazine or news articles. If you only read manga and children’s books I think you’ll develop a sort of gap in your reading comprehension.
I don’t mean that you must not read anything for fun and just focus on getting to N2 level for 2-4 years.
You’re right I suppose it’s different for everyone, but I would recommend something like Yotsuba rather than a beginner novel. To each his own.
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If you’re at N2 level and you are trying to improve your listening you really shouldn’t be using any subtitles at all. When you’re reading the subtitles you’re not actually improving your listening ability much because you’re just reading and hearing the Japanese in the background alongside your reading. The goal of listening practice is to practice the skill of listening so that you can understand Japanese by hearing it without reading anything. Real life doesn’t have subtitles. JLPT listening tests dont have subtitles. You need to practice what you want to get good at, if you really want to improve listening and you’re already devoting so much other time to reading why not focus purely on listening? Check the subs afterwards to see if you understood it or not but I think you won’t improve your listening as much relying on subs.
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Well seeing as I listen to non-subtitled real Japanese for about 9 hours a day at work and then whenever I go anywhere, subtitled Japanese movies or tv shows are really helpful for me.
I was trying to say that Japanese subtitles are the next obvious step from English subs. Of course once you get better you’ll wanna switch to no subs eventually, I just don’t necessarily recommend going straight from English subs to no subs because in my experience it was too much of a jump and I never looked forward to watching anything.
And being N2 level does not mean you can understand any significant percent of native Japanese media without subs. The level of the N2 listening section is so much easier that it’s not really comparable to any real Japanese imo. It’s kind of like graded readers for reading.
Again everyone’s gotta tailor their studying methods to work for them specifically. I just wanted to give my 2 cents for what helped me since OP specifically asked for how to input more.
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Oh, I thought that the time you were listening to shows was your main time spent listening to Japanese and aside from that you were mostly just reading.
I didn’t mean to suggest that passing N2 means you can understand native material or even N1 for that matter, but kind of the opposite, what I meant was that you should start trying to watch native material without subs even before N2 if your goal is to improve your listening ability precisely because if you don’t start watching native material without subs you won’t get much better at doing it just from progressing on the JLPT track because as you said, the JLPT stuff is too far from it. Even people who ace the N1 still struggle to understand native media without subs if they haven’t been trying to practise doing it and probably always will if they dont practise doing it. I think this video also by Matt about it is a good example of that: https://youtu.be/k5t37q1neC4
Another example would be the Japanese English teachers in Japan, most of them, in my experience, spend very little time, if any, trying to watch English native media without Japanese subs and so they can’t really do it even though many of them have been studying English for decades and it’s their profession.
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Okay yeah sorry for the confusion. What you said was really spot on. I guess I wasn’t very clear in my initial post.
I will say though that if you can ace the N1 listening section you’re probably pretty good at listening cause that section is really hard haha (I think so at least).
Anyways just to reiterate one more time, I recommend OP to take things on in steps if they find themself not inputting because it’s too annoying or unfun or hard to do. Once you start reading manga it will be hard and slow, but you’ll get used to it. Then when you bump up to no furigana it will be terrifying and weird but you’ll get used to it, etc etc.
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I’ll add onto this that people should look into the concept of dopamine starvation.
The idea being basically like… if you eat very sweet sugary processed food all the time, then fruit will probably taste bitter and not that great to you. Especially if you eat it right afterwards. If you stop eating white sugar and highly sweetened stuff for a while though, your tastebuds adjust and suddenly fruit tastes much sweeter.
The dopamine center in your brain operates in a similar way to some extent, if you are always doing highly stimulating easy things, then it becomes a lot harder to focus on less stimulating harder things. So basically, if you starve your brain of dopamine, that can be one way of finding watching Japanese without subs and doing other difficult things that require more focus much more engaging. Personally, I have found it helpful.
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I am using JA sensei as a mean to learn the language and recently they added a ver nice feature called Assisted reading. Basically you have stories that are read by a native speaker whith the text in from of you . At the same pace of the reading teh text is highlighted and vocabulary are displayed on the side, grammar points highlighted and link to explanation provided. quite a nice Feature worth having a look i think.
https://www.japan-activator.com/en/natural/readalong/text/id/1
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Is there anything you can search to find manga that has furigana on all kanji? Since is still fail some of the にん／じん reading of 人, I feel it helps me so much to get it for every kanji, not just some of them.
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Most all kids manga I’ve ever come across has it on all kanji. Case Closed/Detective Conan is one example. If you browse through Amazon Japan’s manga ebooks, they’ll let you glance at the first few pages and you can check that way before you buy.
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Anything with tsubasa bunko (角川つばさ文庫) on it should have furigana. check their website as well for freebies.
Also the “Alive series” from MFコミックス and Media Factory have them, like the manga version of Re:Zero kara hajimeru isekai seikatsu (Re:Zero から始める異世界生活)
Or just like mentioned above, in books aimed at natives from primary school to high schoolers, you’ll find furigana. You can check some pages on amazon to make sure, but you’ll know just by looking at the back of the book. If the brief has furigana, so will the book.
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I love reading Quora in English and French, and enjoy getting the teaser article headers, tailored to article topics I usually read, in my email that I can click on. I recently added Japanese as a language and it’s been a challenge. But, like the guitar guy said, I’m reading Japanese and it’s a blast! I was never a great guitar player (maybe upper beginner), but I knew riffs from Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Chicago, Jethro Tull, and others–that people could recognize as I played and that was fun even while making tons of mistakes. Also, no big deal if I don’t recognize every Kanji in Quora or get the gist of every sentence. I remember from the AJATT credo that it doesn’t really matter. Just keep reading, even if parts of the sentences you don’t understand yet. I also get rapid chunks of listening and reading Japanese every day through a clozed test app. Little blasts of Japanese through short articles and clozed test reviews are the way to go for me.
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I didn’t see it mentioned but I’m reading Japanese baby books right now via Ehon Navi and I’m finding it strangely motivating. For example, when reading ともだちタワー I just felt like I finally understood some “real” Japanese. Even if it’s a book from the “0-year-old” category 
Here’s a guide on how to use the site and here’s the WaniKani book club / challenge thread.
It’s a free way of getting “native graded” reading material, I guess (and fresh hell when trying to figure out if something is a random sound or an actual word…)
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My best piece of advice for how to start a new habit is to prime your environment. For example, it is hard to start a habit of eating healthy if your home is full of junk food and no fresh food. To start eating healthy, you would remove the junk food from your home and fill it with fresh food. This would allow your environment to maximally support the formation of the habit.
Do something similar to start the habit of listening and reading to Japanese material. For example, get a Japanese book and set it out on your table by itself, so that when you see it, you will remember to give it a read. Additionally, you could load up a Japanese video on youtube, whenever you are done using your computer, and leave the page open. That way, watching the video will easily be the first thing you do the next time you go to use the computer.
I hope this helped.
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Japanese is probably the one foreign language that I listen “too much” (though there’s really no such thing). The langauge has permeated my subconscious in the years since I started studying and using Japanese.
I genuinely like J-Pop, J-Rock, anime, etc. so it’s not difficult for me to listen to them. I think that enjoying yourself is pretty important to have a foundation to build a sustainable listening/reading habit.
For example, I’m learning German in university and I’ve found German covers of anime songs like the one below to immerse myself in the German language and still have fun listening to anime songs.
Actually, this is a German song sung by a German cover artist who mostly sings covers of anime songs. <-- wow that’s long
As for reading, my inclination is to see if there’s any manga I’ve read before and see if I can understand a bit of the raw manga. There’s always some time where I’m just not really doing anything, so if I use that to read instead, I’d be a more proficient reader in Japanese.
Hopefully this helps somewhat, as there’s been a ton of replies.
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