Practice reading Japanese with Kindle
And why ebooks are better than paperbacks for reading practice
If you’re learning Japanese, you may have seen that it’s a good idea to incorporate reading in your practice. Seems straightforward enough, just pick a book and dive in, but the traditional method of reading a book with just a dictionary is really only suitable for the most dedicated. Fortunately, there is an easier way that I wish I knew of when I first started reading Japanese material. So whether you’re just getting ready to read your first book or just looking for tips, this guide should provide some help.
Digital is the way to go
This may dash some hopes of immediately collecting a nice library of physical books, but reading in a copyable (text can be copy/pasted) digital format is so much faster that it’s impossible for me to go back to paperbacks. I started out collecting some manga and novels that I had hoped would provide some concrete goals as motivation, but the experience was so clunky I could only barely manage to finish just one or two simple texts before giving up.
Physical vs Digital
Let’s compare steps to when you hit an unknown word. Here’s what I did when learning analog:
- Figure out the reading of the word. If I can’t read the word then, draw it in using preferred tool, or do a radical lookup.
- Lookup the word in my preferred dictionary.
- Copy the definition to a spreadsheet for easier lookup incase I see it again or I want to reread a previous section.
- Convert to flashcards later.
Each word could take several seconds to complete, which gets tedious really fast. Now contrast this with a Kindle book:
- Select the word.
- On a computer, copy and paste to an online dictionary. On mobile, the built-in dictionary and bing-translate will automatically appear.
- Select a highlight color for the word
This usually takes just a few seconds, and the time savings adds up quickly. In addition, Kindle can quickly make a flashcard deck from your highlights with a few clicks. It’s pretty rudimentary, but if you are so inclined there are plenty of ways to export the flashcards to other formats for use in your favorite SRS tool. As you accumulate highlights, it also becomes a lot more convenient to reread through previous pages as well. Hopefully this convinced you to go digital, so next up is buying some books.
Make an Amazon Japan account
It’ll be a lot easier to download books in Japanese if you have an Amazon Japan account. If you don’t have one, just follow the link to their English site and you can create one there. You should be able to use the same email as your existing account, but the passwords must be different, otherwise your Kindle will log into your domestic account. Once it’s all setup you can add your non-Japanese credit card and purchase Kindle books and download them into the app.
On a related note, your new Amazon.jp account may come in handy when you want to buy other Japanese products. Sometimes they may have items that won’t be available in your country, or they’ll be cheaper (even with shipping) than your domestic Amazon site.
When you get stuck
Digital or not, you’re going to encounter sentences you just can’t figure out on your own. In order to keep making progress, I’d recommend marking the sentence and continuing. Once you’ve got a nice batch of sentences (maybe collate once or twice a week) you don’t understand, then you can do one of the following two options.
Hire an online tutor
Online tutors are much cheaper alternative to traditional lessons thanks to services like italki. Since you’re reading from an ebook, it’ll be easy to screen-share over Skype and show the actual passage in question, and then they can just break it down for you. Scheduling regular lessons may also help motivate you to keep reading at a consistent pace as well. If you end up using the same teachers regularly, you should be able to ask quick questions between lessons without much issue.
Copy the sentence(s) in question and ask for help online
This is the cheaper option, but the downside is the responses will come more slowly. Here are some resources you can use:
- LearnJapanese subreddit — specifically the weekly “シツモンデー” thread. Post your sentences here and you’ll probably get a response later.
- HiNative — Kind of like Stack Overflow for language questions. You may need to pony up for premium if you end up asking a lot of them, but it has a lot of activity so it may be faster than the other two options.
- HelloTalk — More focused on the social aspect, but you can still post questions in the “moments” area. If you could find a language exchange partner you could answer each other’s questions more quickly.
If you can afford it, I’d recommend going with a tutor since it’ll be much faster overall. In addition, having a tutor is extremely helpful for your Japanese progress in general.
One caveat with manga. So far, I haven’t seen any manga with highlightable (or copyable) text, so you do miss out on the main benefit unfortunately. You can still at least take screenshots or screen-share with tutors for help.
Parting thoughts
If you weren’t reading on Kindle currently, I hope this guide has convinced you to give a try. There’s a bit of work to do upfront, but I assure you that the payoff is worth it. You get to spend less time doing tedious lookups, which leads to faster results, and more results means more motivation to continue. Thanks for reading, and have fun learning!
