I bought a Japanese novel for the first time today! It’s about 300 pages and I’m very excited! I’ve read plenty of graded readers and manga before but I’ve never attempted reading something this long or text heavy. This text is a little advanced for me, but I did that deliberately because I wanted to challenge myself and I plan on taking it very slow so I don’t get overwhelmed. Does anyone have any tips on how to increase my comprehension/ note-taking/ etc?
Thanks!
There are essentially two ways: intensive reading, where you dissect every sentence and word in order to understand 100% of it (I’m not fond of this method, I find too tiresome and boring) or you go with an extensive approach, where you try to just read, as much as you can, and I mean read a lot. I like the second approach. And in order to do the second option, I set myself for success grabbing something that’s slightly above my level. Both methods are fine and largely used.
If you want, you can check this post: How to start reading books in Japanese that became a reference for some, including myself.
And the most important thing is: have fun!!!
if the story isnt compelling to you instantly drop it. sounds radical but the most effective engine in language learning is true interest. i dropped alot of novels until i found one that made me want to know what was going on to the point i forgot i was reading in japanese.
a huge mistake a lot of japanese learners do is that they want to learn the language for the sake of it and then get burned out fast.
Fellow novel reader, welcome!
I agree with Pettyscan above, it’s much easier to read through something to the best of your ability but still challenge yourself. I would also recommend the slower “write down every word you don’t recognize” method but it depends on how fast you want to get through the book and how much you want to study at once.
Some tips would be to still look up words in a dictionary like jisho or takoboto if you don’t know them - even just a few per chapter. But PLEASE use the radical search option and don’t just take a picture to translate; it’ll help you remember better. Reading aloud also helps but even just pronouncing everything in your head is great too.
Best of luck my friend! What novel are you reading through right now?
If you are quite sure that you like the book, see if you can find an audiobook version to read along with. Some productions have multiple voice actors and ambient sounds which gives you more context for comprehension. It can also help keep you moving forward even when you are feeling a bit uncertain about certain specifics which makes it easier to read a chapter more than once. If the book is advanced for you, it’s likely you would be able to listen to the same chapter multiple times in the time you would have spent reading it once without the audio.
If your goal is to understand everything, what you might want to do is transcribe it into a Google Doc. I’ve done that with a few books. I’ll type the whole thing down, read it once myself, then copy-paste it into DeepL to check my own work. But that’ll tremendously slow you down, so I don’t recommend it unless you’re using it to, like, update a Fandom wiki or something.
If you find yourself looking words up repeatedly, you might want to make a mini-vocab list, so you can glance at one document rather than type the same thing into a dictionary over and over. As a rule, I add words if I look them up more than once.
If you’d like examples, I’ve been reading Japanese math books and my Google doc for that is here (perhaps counterintuitively, I’ve found technical documents are actually the easiest thing to read in another language; fiction is way harder). I’ve also been reading Xenogears Perfect Works and here’s the vocab list I just started on the other day. Good luck!