hi i'm alivia and today i want to talk about how to go about reading your very first book
in japanese now last week i made a video talking about how to prepare yourself for reading your
very first book and i went over how you can really build your foundation in vocabulary
and reading comprehension using really easy and short materials made for beginner learners so you
might want to check out that video first but today we're going to talk about reading your very first
book that was written for japanese speakers so the first thing that you have to do is to pick a book
and i really recommend that you start with manga the pictures will really help you in figuring out
what's going on in the story and the sentences are relatively short because when you first start
reading you'll notice that your reading stamina is very low and you'll get tired very quickly
and i know last week we talked about some resources that you can use to really build
up that reading stamina by reading longer passages but since this is your first book that is written
for japanese speakers you'll notice that there's going to be a lot of stuff that you don't know
and a lot of the rules that you learned in your textbook are going to be broken in these books
a lot of new words a lot of new expressions so we want to make this first book as easy as possible
and to make choosing your very first book easier i really recommend that you check out wanikani's
community book club so if you don't know what wanikani is it is a website where i learn my kanji
and they have a really awesome community forum where any wanikani user can talk to each other
even free users so even if you're not planning on using wanikani i really recommend making a free
account specifically for what i'm going to talk about so what you're going to want to do is scroll
to the bottom of your wanikani homepage and click on this community button this will bring up the
community forum and then you're going to want to press reading under this japanese category you'll
see that there is this thread that is pinned called the master list of book clubs you're going
to want to scroll down to this absolute beginner book club tab and pick a book from this list that
seems interesting to you because if you don't like a book you're not going to finish it especially
if it's in a foreign language so from this list i've personally read doggy detectives which isn't
a manga but there's lots of pictures big brother rental and shirokuma cafe and i think they're all
really good places to start and the reason i like these book clubs is because for each book
there's an extensive vocabulary list in order of appearance in the book so while you're reading
your book you're not going to have to go to a separate website to look up every single word
that you come across that you don't understand you can simply have this vocabulary list open while
you're reading and quickly find the word that you don't know this was really a game changer
for me when i was trying to read for my first few books because there's gonna be so many words that
you still don't know and this is just gonna save you so much time in finding those words and make
it so much easier and it doesn't end there in each book club thread anyone can ask a question
about anything that they don't understand and someone else will answer that question for you
so if you're choosing a book club that's already been finished you can go through the thread
and look at any questions that someone already answered and if you don't find your question there
even if they finished reading the book three years ago you can type it in and someone will answer you
so once you've decided what book you want to read you want to set yourself a reasonable daily goal
this could be a chapter a page a panel whatever amount that you think is reasonable for you to do
every day and if you have more time you can always read more but this will just be a minimum amount
that you are committing that you will do each day being consistent will really help you improve your
reading faster it will be a lot more beneficial if you're reading one page every day instead of
reading a whole chapter on the weekend and then when you're reading have that vocabulary list
open so you can quickly look up any words that you don't know and if you're struggling with a
sentence just go look at the book club thread and see if anyone has already asked a question about
what you're struggling with and this last tip may be a bit more of personal preference but when i
was reading my very first book i did not try to understand every single sentence there's gonna be
so much new material so many new words so many new expressions and if you look up every single thing
that you don't understand it's going to take you a really long time to finish that first book you're
probably going to become frustrated it's going to feel like a chore and then you're going to be less
likely to want to finish so my rule of thumb when i was reading was that if i generally understood
what was going on if i could follow what the plot was i didn't have to look anything up if there was
something that was interesting to me or i came across a word that looked really familiar and i
want to know what it meant then sometimes i'd look it up but i did not look up every single thing i
didn't understand i only looked things up if i really needed to to understand what was going on
or if i wanted to it's gonna feel a little weird and you might feel like somehow you're cheating
but i really challenge you to really become comfortable with that feeling of ambiguity
as long as you understand the basic plot of the story just keep going because i really found that
following this rule really allowed me to enjoy my reading and therefore i read even more and
the more that i read the more that i understood the more that i understood and then i could read
faster and then i read more and just through this sheer quantity of reading i steadily became faster
and better and could understand more so that's my biggest tip for reading make it enjoyable it's
okay if you don't understand everything it's okay if you don't look everything up as long as you're
enjoying yourself and you're practicing every day you are gonna get better now i really hope that
you found today's video helpful and that it helps you in reading your very first book in japanese
and i'd love to hear down in the comments what book you want to read first and if you've already
started reading what was your very first book in japanese and if you found this video helpful i
would really appreciate it if you gave it a like so even more people can find it and make sure
that you subscribe if you want to see more and that's all i have for today and i'll see you soon