This is essentially the best language learning advice I've seen on RU-vid so far. I honestly wish everyone starting on their language learning journey sees this.
I’ve picked this up in my studies. When I practice reading I read even though I have no clue what I’m reading. It helps to increase my speed and familiarity with my eyes seeing the characters
I've always done this to learn languages, Japanese is my 4th..I've found though a chill tip Never read just the SAME book or page for months..You start to memorize the pattern of words rather than the word (Hope that makes sense) But reading though one book, learning err lets say 40 words, than going to another book you'll start to see flashes of words you know and it links you to new words.. I am in month 3 of Japanese and at a child basic and must admit reading plus pimseular has made it a faster than expected journey Ahh also Rocket Japanese offers 2 free lessons 100% Rec. this, focuses on EVERYTHING .. and its like 100 USD for life if you decide to get all 40 some lessons Cheers from Vietnam
I did this too when I first learned English and Japanese! I would actually just read and read without understanding a bit of it and not going back and forth to my dictionary. But eventually words just seem to stuck and I could understand. My English teacher (back in my JHS days) also said similar things to what you said in this video 👌👌👌
Just my two cents here. I'm a native german speaker and had english in school and the lessons sucked - so I sucked at english to. Now I'm fluent (I'm sixteen, my classes started when I was eight and I went fluid around ... thirteen, fourteen) and I'll tell you what happened. When I was ten, I got my first own computer. At first, I read german things - but all the content that I wanted to see was in english. And I didn't understand most of it. My grammar was somewhat okay but I could not understand most of the tenses. I was downright awful, could probably only say things like "Hello, I can speak english, I like, I don't like" and so on. When I read things, I looked up words that I did not now. All the time. Some words I just understood by context and I know them now, I have just problems translating them back to german as I never connected the english word with the german one. I did that for a few years and then I was fluent. So looking up words all the time (without using flashcards or anything, you just look the word up again if you see it, at some point you just remember it) actually can lead to success, it just takes a while.
I am seeing just how important it is to do extensive reading before intensive reading. Extensive reading first allows your brain to be exposed to the material passively and make assumptions and connections between words before hand. I myself do get frustrated when not being able to understand what I am reading, but if you pick something at your level, you’ll be fine. As time goes on, I am starting to see more and more just how reading without looking up words helps your brain to recall what you’ve heard and said in Japanese prior to reading. Thanks so much for making this video and the video on how to read in Japanese. I really enjoyed them! It’s nice to see someone who is branching out from traditional study methods. Have a good one and good luck with your studies :)
@chad_Zimmerman This comment is going to be more of a testament to why reading daily is so important. Last year my son was in 1st grade and his teacher made a requirement that all students read for 20 min each day from Monday -Thursday and they had to track what the read, for how long and I or my husband had to sign off on it. The first month or two my son hated having to do it mainly because he had to read aloud. His fluency needed work and we wanted to make sure he wasn't creating bad habits. Once he got the hang of it and it became a habit he read Daily without being told to. After 6mo he improved a great deal in reading aloud and was reading daily (silently) without being asked to for longer stretches of time. Now as second grade is at its halfway point we can't stop him from reading. He'll read a book of 100-130 pages a day. Which is great but it's hard to get around NYC and crowds when your child's face is stuck in a book lol. Over the weekend it'll be 2-3 books if we're not too busy. All this to say that in seeing how my son has learned really is a testament to how consistent effort can pay off in a short a amount of time. I sometimes wish my mom was like me and put my own butt on the straight and narrow just to build a good foundation..so I've been parenting myself and had seen improvement in other areas of my japanese studies but reading I thought I needed to wait. However Chad makes a good point on why it is important to just read even without full comprehension just to get the brain wired for the connections made in the text. I'm heading into my final next week for my japanese 101 class. Just yesterday the answer key for the Genki books I ordered had arrived, it's all in japanese and I am thrilled! Finally text at my level! I can read and write hiragana and katakana and know about maybe 70 kanji (and learning more on my own) so I wanted to get into reading as quickly as I could but not comprehending was really off putting. Having this answer key is great but I'll also do as suggested and just read a book (or in my case a manga - Doreamon(?) lol I was told it was easy 😁 but I also have The Little Prince and Orange ) all the way through. I plan to reread it several times till I understand it. Hopefully I'll get as good in Japanese as my seven year old is now in English in one years time ^_^ On a side note, are there any books you recommend for beginners? I'm told Yotsubata (?) is great. Any others? Thanks in advance!
I know this is old, but if you want furigana then the Pokemon light novels are great. Wife bought the newest one in Japan last month while we were there and it has furigana for all the kanji. Also any Studio Ghibli books, graphic novel or story novel, will help you as well.
What I'm struggling with is Kanji. Even if I continue to read without looking things up, I wouldn't know the Kanji readings so I'll have to eventually look it up anyways...
I also think it's really smart to just first reread mangas you already read in english. Also I only read mangas with Hiragana readings, don't want rare kanjis to stop me.
This is actually really great advice. Doing Spanish American literature as a freshman was significantly more difficult than it is now. Because, even if you don't understand some things sometimes it's best to just keep reading and reading and reading. More practice is always a good idea. Read newspaper articles, product usage instructions (like an air freshener or shampoo), poems, etc. Don't be too frustrated if you don't get it, just keep going. You're reading another language! It applies to your first language too. Like Chad said, I can recall reading books beyond my understanding at a young age but I would sometimes just keep going and that helped me learn.
I actually do audiobooks with my MTS textbooks and turn it to 2x speed so I read it twice as fast and it helps me blow through entire books in no time!
And if you could read faster, you'd be able to take in more information quicker, thus cutting down on study time. I'm right there with you, I'm studying for N2 and my reading is always in the middle of the curve in class. Not the fastest, not the slowest, but I still wish I could go quicker.
ya it's like practicing a muscle, your reading muscle, just read a shit tons and you'll get the speed eventually. literally start reading like 10 volumes a day of manga. how about instead of the anime watching nights you make a manga reading circle and have people read a manga together in Japanese, seems to be a fun group activity and you could post it as a video.
thanks for posting this video. I'm actually trying to find Japanese children's books to practice reading even though I don't know any kanji yet. any suggestions? they would be greatly appreciated 😄
Try books called Graded Japanese Reader. They go from level 0 to 4, 3 books per level about 5 to 8 stories per books with about 350 vocab, 400+ kanji. Kanji has furigana and there are pictures on each page explaning what is happening.
I'm leaning Japanese and I consider myself as a beginner. I have the Minna No Nihongo textbook but there's a lot of kanji there and I really can't seem to be able to remember how to read it, even though the kanas are fine. Do you have any tips to learn kanji's reading efficiently ?
Don't worry about the writing of them, in real life you won't be writing hardly at all (and tbh most Japanese 20 somethings can't write kanji to save their lives anyways). Split your focus: learn their meaning so you can put together compound words easier, and then have your normal word study. As you go about learning Japanese you'll come across kanji attached to words, and if you can learn the kanji meaning it'll give you a pretty good guess at what the words mean, and you'll learn how to say words just by learning words as you go. Don't worry about kanji reading's just yet. In fact when I first started I didn't learn kanji at all until I learned 100 words well. And now I know more kanji than most people at my level (around 1225). You'll pick up reading's as you go, trust me. Focus on meaning first, and you'll learn their readings. I use Heisigs remembering the kanji a lot and it's been worth every penny of the $20 I paid for it.
Omg! I'm barely starting my Japanese language journey and at this point I know hiragana and some katakana so I went to my local Japanese bookstore and picked up some children hiragana books! I agree with you, even if you don't understand but can read it, its best to start getting in the habit of actually reading and seeing it in book form instead of a vocabulary sheet
Even just for speed. If you can become a quick reader, as you learn words and grammar you'll understand but make sure you can do it quickly so you can make progress faster!
Another amazing video, Chad. I think you're very talented in what you do, and have a very bright future ahead of you. Unlike other youtubers, you're very down to Earth, and I am able to connect to so much better. Keep up the great work!
Ok I might be dumb, and I’m sorry about that: I understand the point that if you want to be able to READ, you need to actually READ (not go back and forward into a dictionary). But my confusion is: if I’m interested in understanding what I read, can i go back and try to understand it? Or it’s bad? (Idk if it makes sense) Again: sorry if i miss understand everything 🥺
No you're okay! :D So you're talking two different skills and both are important to cultivate: incomprehension and the physical reading skill :) What I'm trying to teach you to do is train both separately early on when you do not comprehend much. I have another good video on this, but maybe seperate your reading time into two bits: one book is above your level so you don't think you'll understand, something like a novel or difficult manga. Read that just for the act of reading and to see as many words in as many contexts as possible without just going back and forth to a dictionary. Then, have something your level that you'd like to work on comprehending everything in it's context :) You can do this same approach with the same book, but it's often too tempting to people to just stop and look something up during the actual reading practice so for me at least I always had two different books until I cultivated my reading ability to where my comprehension ability was.
Great video! Like you said, I think msot people know on a theoretical level that reading early should be a good thing to do, but don't understand exactly why. You made such a straightforward and concise argument for the efficiency of it and why it works. Thank you!
It sounds silly, but I''ve been studying Japanese for a week (still working on learning that Kana!) and I just made a new Japanese island in Animal Crossing. I think it'll be great to see my progress with it, daily as I start to understand what I'm reading/seeing as it's happening in game. Plus, I think it's cool that it keeps track of the day you start so I can always be like, "On that day, I knew absolutely nothing, but look where I am now."
Thank you so much Sir... it helped me a lot to study the language and it’s very effective that’s why I continued to do it.. tnx for the tip.. new subs here.. like your videos.. Godblessed..
Hi thanks for making this video. I feel like this is great advice. I want to get a manga because i really like the anime series. I do want to understand it, but I can agree. Reading is definitely a skill and it would be nice and more efficient to be able to read faster. I might not be fully understanding though, i’ll go through my manga and novel and will look up the meanings. I’ll be learning to read and understand. Is my plan a good plan?
7100 sub !! i don't get it ! you deserve more , your videos are very convenient and helpful , but - that's my opinion- when you go back to japan ,you need to have your camera around you all the time not only when you are at home and start vlogging , it would be nice to film the city while talking, like in one of your videos you said you went fishing and you met a boy then afterwards you met a girl and took her number, it would have been nice if you have filmed yourself fishing , and talk about a certain topic! Anyway good luck and hopefully i can become fluent in Japanese too !
I don't like reading without understanding. My mind just screams that I need to look up what I didn't understand and I can't ignore it. Because of this, it is more useful for me to read a random string of characters instead of a complex story/article. If it doesn't actually say anything, and I know that, then my mind calms down and lets me go through it without worrying about comprehension. Of course this isn't as good as properly reading a book or article because I won't get used to the patterns in written text, but it will still help with recognizing the individual characters more quickly.
To each their own, but how would you go about reading even in the upper levels without understanding? I'm in the upper intermediate levels after studying for 3 years, and I still don't understand everything on the page! Would you need to be farther past this point before you start?
It's not the best solution, but I can't deal with not understanding what I read, so I have to deal with it. But it's not that bad. If I can understand the just of what I'm reading, then I am usually fine. I'm fairly competent at figuring out meanings by context, so as long as I can understand most of the words/grammar I end up doing fine. As an example, when I started reading Yotsubato last summer, I ran across words I didn't understand every couple of pages, but since I was able to understand from the context I only needed to look up 1 or 2 words over several volumes. Of course this will likely start to not work as well when I get to the higher level readings (Especially non-manga reading material, because it won't have pictures for added context), but at that point I will also have more kanji to help me understand the meanings of words.
thank you so much man you have opened my eyes, I'm now gonna download your entire channel to go through all of your vids and have eyes opened for much other stuff I didn't know about
Thanks Chad, this is brilliant! I am studying to be a teacher (art and design), but I hope to be able to teach Japanese one day. I feel like I could definitely use this (and more of your videos) in my Japanese classes, when I am trying to explain the importance of the tasks we do in class to students. Thank you. :-)
Nusrath Suchonq I'll put it this way: I sincerely wish I started reading after I only learned the alphabet. This video is aimed at myself when I first started learning. You're not reading for comprehension you're doing it for speed. Speeding yourself up so later in the game you can take in information quicker, learning faster.
@@LucyPero There are a lot of online sites you can get, if you need one holla, i load them on my ipad mini and its like having the book plus it cost 2 minutes of down load time not 25 dollars of money
Matías Pierdoménico I’m actually not sure since I didn’t exactly do AJATT (it wasn’t really popular when I started so I didn’t know what it was). I spent most of my day studying so I kind of de-facto did some version of AJATT :/ I will say that reading didn’t help or hurt my accent that I can tell? But my accent isn’t super primo either. I did most of my accent work in a language school in japan so I’m sorry to say I don’t have any good advice on that :(
You know what Chad. I've been watching a few of your videos, and you are just so chill with the way you talk about your hard work and experiences with Japanese. Sorry to hear with your N2 results in January but good luck with everything else. Btw, have you made a video about speaking in Japanese, as I'm really struggling with that.
Malster3 thank you so much Malster :) do you mean have I made videos of me speaking in Japanese? I haven’t done it on this channel because this channel is for foreigners. I’ve done videos with Japanese tubers where we’ve only spoken in Japanese but they never went up haha I’ll be doing some more with them in November if that’s what you were talking about haha or if it’s just speaking in general, like tips, I might be able to help if I know what you are specifically struggling with!
Anytime bro, you got this! Would love to see something like that sometime where you would communicate with Japanese peeps. But literally just general tips when it comes to speaking. I feel like I've tried everything but I'm still struggling! Recently started drilling sentences from anime. But I haven't read much other than minna no nihongo 1/2 and JLPT practise.
Malster3 tbh if you’ve only done like half of a MNN book you probably don’t have the building blocks of speech yet :/ you might have some phrases and the basic x は y です formula but that does not a-conversation make. Conversational fluency requires a bunch of little things you pick up along the long journey of language learning. I’d suggest keep inputting information into your brain, building your database for words as well as grammar. And then after about a year or so, spend as much time forming sentences with online language partners as possible. Typing will allow you time to formulate your sentences, and correct yourself. It’ll also give you some confidence while working with real people. If you can text fast enough that you don’t need to check yourself or stutter, you’re probably able to speak what you were typing pretty well :)
My apologies bro. I mean to say, I've completed Minna no nihongo book 1 and book 2. And done my JLPT N4! And I'll try texting more then :) and occasionally outputting!
Chad Zimmerman I haven't. I need to because I need to go to Japan for school. Does it cost anything... not that I can't pay just that I'm really cheap. lol
man I don't read in this moment while I learn french but I'm going to do the experiment and start reading and see if this helps me. I might do it when I start with Japanese
I didn't start reading from the beginning. My friend gifted me some Japanese manga even before I could read hiragana and katakana. (I didn't use them, back then) I try to read a lot, even without understanding. I started realizing too, that it just won't bring me any further to translate each word , which I don't understand. I just try to get through as much, as I can. With Manga it's also a lot easier than actual novels. You can follow the context way better, and you stil understand what is going on. You will recognize words, that find constant repitition, and you will eventually remember them. That is at least what I feel.
This is actually so true and so important. When I was learning Korean (yeah yeah yeah not Japanese IK lol) I read a LOT of kpop lyrics. Specifically the raps. And as I would hear the raps, I would try to read and follow along. And because some of the raps are mad fast, I had to learn to read faster and so yeah I can read at a pretty decent pace because of that. And that helps with pronunciation.
