Reading Japanese For Fun

Rule 4: Goldilocks was right, part 2

Not too long, and not too short. Don't start your forays into reading real Japanese with a long novel, or an enormous manga series. Reading in a second language can be slow going, and the constant feeling that you're only a tiny fraction of the way through can be very disheartening. Short stories are good: long enough to be reasonably substantial reading, but short enough to give you that motivational kick that comes from being able to say you've finished something. On the other hand, you'll often find as you read a story that the same vocabulary crops up again and again (a murder mystery is likely to throw you words like 刑事 [keiji] and 犯人 [hannin], for instance) -- and this repetition naturally helps you remember the vocabulary. If what you're reading is too short then this effect doesn't get as much chance to kick in.

Rule 5: Newspapers are Hard

In my opinion, newspapers are one of the hardest kinds of Japanese to read. An effect noted by David Moser about Chinese applies also to Japanese: even if you are at a high intermediate level, it can still be harder to understand a Japanese newspaper article than one in a Romance language you've never studied at all. This is primarily an issue of vocabulary, and secondarily one of kanji. Spanish and English share enough common roots that when you encounter a phrase like "problema mechanico" you can guess its meaning easily enough. In contrast, if you find a Japanese word you don't know, then it is much harder to guess at its meaning. The kanji aspect is that newspapers tend to more formal Japanese, which means more kanji; and of course they don't generally provide furigana.

Further, newspaper articles fall firmly into the 'too short' category above. Each article deals with a different subject and might introduce a dozen new words specific to that subject. These words might well appear nowhere else in the paper; you don't get the helpful repetition, and the effort of looking them up isn't amortised across multiple uses of the word.

This doesn't mean that there's no point in looking at newspaper articles, of course. Just don't expect it to be easy. I'd suggest picking a specific topic that interests you and trying to read short articles on that topic when they come up on the online versions of the newspapers. Use one of the dictionary-lookup-on-mouseover services like Rikai to reduce the pain of vocabulary lookups, but don't resort to it except where you absolutely must. The Asahi and the Yomiuri both have websites; the Asahi is more liberal and the Yomiuri conservative. The Mainichi's English website offers the handy feature of links from the English versions of stories back to the original Japanese.

Rule 6: You're not a kid

...so you don't necessarily have to read like one. I'm sure the average six-year-old Japanese kid could find half a dozen items in his home which he knew the words for but I didn't; on the other hand would he know 形容詞 ('adjective'), 環境 ('environment') or 客観的 ('objective'), all of which I learnt fairly early?

By all means look in the childrens' books section or at light novels aimed at young teenagers; the latter in particular are probably easier going for the intermediate student than a novel aimed at adult readers. Also, words that would be written with kanji that a reader of that age group isn't expected to have studied yet will be written with furigana or in hiragana, an aid which you won't find in an adult novel. On the other hand you might not be able to stomach the simplistic storylines. Try one and see how it goes.

On the other hand, you have a great deal more background information about the world than a six year old -- so use it! If you're an expert in reciprocating widgets and you're reading an article about them which says "the [something] enters the body of the widget 10 times a second" then you don't need to look up that [something] because any apprentice knows that the thing that goes into the widget body is the piston. In other words, try reading about topics you know about already; it's easier to fill in the gaps and you're more likely to have an interest in the actual content than to be treating it as a pure exercise in language. Geeks might try slashdot.jp, for instance. (Of course, if your interest is a technical field like computing you also get a lot of katakana words which can make life easier.)

Rule 7: Home's Best

Every genre will have its own areas of vocabulary. If you read science fiction you're going to need to know the words for 'spaceship', 'meteor', 'orbit'; fantasy manga has its 'crystal tiara', 'magic'; and so on. Obviously you can pick these up as you go along, but as usual we're looking for books where we can avoid having to lean too heavily on the dictionary. When you're learning a second language, the vocabulary you learn first tends to be everyday words: household objects, classroom words like 'test' and 'lesson', ways of describing people. Manga and books set in an average everyday environment are more likely to use words you know already than ones set a thousand years in the past or on another planet. Shoujo high school romance manga are likely to be easier to read than samurai epics.

On the other hand, this doesn't trump rule 1: if you can't stand the soppy stuff then by all means go straight for Naruto, or whatever floats your boat. Besides, I can't talk -- the first manga I read raw was Magic Knight Rayearth :-) You probably want to pick a genre and stick to it, though; at least that way the second historical manga you read will have some familiar words...

Rule 8: Try not to catch anything funny

This rule applies particularly to manga. People will often talk in styles that are:

• incredibly rude
• incredibly overpolite (Hououji Fuu, this means you!)
• dialect (often but not always Kansai-ben; if you're unlucky, totally incomprehensible)
• archaic
• an idiosyncrasy of that character (~gema)

As a rule of thumb, it's best not to trust words or phrases you've only seen in manga; treat it as a way of reinforcing things you've learnt elsewhere rather than a source of new words.

Rule 9: This stuff is cheap

Japanese books and manga are incredibly cheap. If you're not after the most recently published stuff, you can pick up novels for less than 500 yen each. Manga are typically similar prices. And this is assuming you buy new. If you're living in Japan, find your nearest Book-off. This is a second-hand manga and books chain. You have decades of back catalogue to choose from, so you don't need to buy the latest series; Book-off typically sells manga at prices as low as 105 yen a volume. (Warning: they shelve manga sorted by publisher and then by whatever magazine it first appeared in. If you're looking for a specific author you might want to do a quick web search to work out where it's likely to be.)

If you're outside Japan (and don't have a friend in the country willing to raid Book-off for you), my recommendation is the online bookshop BK1. BK1 will ship stuff to you by seamail at cost price, which is by far the cheapest way to get it and the only way to avoid having shipping costs swamp the cost of the actual books. Also as a foreign buyer you won't be charged sales tax. The one major disadvantage is that you have to be able to read enough Japanese to navigate the website -- there is no English user interface. (Amazon Japan has an English UI, but its shipping costs are extortionate.) There's also the minor irritation that BK1 won't tell you how much shipping costs until they've already sent it. (The good news is that this is because as far as I can tell they do it by actually packing the books up and then charging you whatever Japan Post charged them.) As a rough guide, four volumes of manga might cost you about a thousand yen in shipping.

Rule 10: Get recommendations

Walking into a bookshop in Japan or going to the home page of an online bookstore can be a bit overwhelming -- there are huge numbers of books, but how do you find ones which might be interesting and aren't too difficult to read? Once in a bookshop in Tokyo I saw a range of books aimed at learners of English as a foreign language -- editions of classics and modern novels, carefully graded according to level of difficulty. Sadly, I've never seen anything like this for Japanese; presumably the market is too small to make it worth doing. So I've found the best approach is to try to get recommendations of authors from fellow learners, and then (ideally) try browsing the first few pages in the shop to see whether they look tractable.

Here are a few things I think are particularly good or well suited to people dipping their toe into reading real Japanese. However, as always Rule One applies: if your tastes don't match mine then try something else.

As a manga to start reading with, I strongly recommend Yotsuba to! -- the daily life and adventures of a four-year-old girl, by the author of Azumanga Daioh. Extremely funny. Since the main character is four and much of the dialogue is by or to her the Japanese is generally quite simple, and there isn't too much of it either.

Yoshimoto Banana is the author I started with when I first tried reading 'real books' rather than manga. Her writing style is plain and conversational, and the books have quite a bit of dialogue, so they're relatively straightforward. If you're only at an intermediate level you'll find that the descriptive passages tend to use a wider range of vocabulary than you're used to; you can look some of it up or skim it as you like. うたかた / サンクチュアリ [utakata / sankuchuari] [ISBN: 4-10-135916-4] is a pair of medium length stories. I've also read Kitchen, probably her most famous novel; the cautions in Rule 4 apply, though.

This is the opening paragraph of Utakata, to give you a taste of the difficulty level:

   嵐とは一回キスしただけだ。
   ここが日本だからまだよかったが、外国だったらそんなのほとんど友達以前の範疇 だ。そしてすぐに彼は遠い所に行ってしまった。だから、私にはまだこれが恋かどう かも本当にはわからない。さっぱり、わかっていない。
   それでも嵐を好きになってから私は、恋というものを桜や花火のようだと思わなく なった。

Akagawa Jirou (赤川次郎) is an extremely prolific author of murder mysteries; Wikipedia says he's written over 480 books! I'm currently halfway through 'Misu', which the back cover describes as 'humour/suspense'; it has elements of farcical humour as well as the murder plot, and the heroine is an engaging character. Here's the opening:

   健全な目覚めは誰でも似通ったものであるが、二日酔の目覚めは　ー　まあ、これもたいてい似たようなものだ。
   真由美は頭痛と胸のあたりの重苦しさに、しばらくベッドから出られなかった。
   しかし、カーテンを通して射してくる光は、もう昼を示していたし、午後、早めに片付けておきたい仕事があることも、真由美の頭にしっかりと刻み込まれていた。

[UPDATE Jan 2009: here are a couple more opening paragraphs:

スプートニクの恋人 by Haruki Murakami (村上春樹):

   22歳の春にすみれは生まれて初めて恋に落ちた。広大な平原をまっすぐ突き進む竜巻のような激しい恋だった。それは行く手のかたちあるものを残らずなぎ倒し、片端から空に巻き上げ、理不尽に引きちぎり、完膚なきまでに叩きすぶした。そして勢いをひとつまみもゆるめることなく大洋を吹きわたり、アンコールワットを無慈悲に崩し、インドの森を気の毒な一群の虎ごと熱で焼きつくし、ベルシャの砂漠の砂嵐となってどこかのエキゾチックな城塞都市をまるごとひとつ砂に埋もれさせてしまった。みごとに記念碑的な恋だった。恋に落ちた相手はすみれより17歳年上で、結婚していた。さらにつけ加えるなら、女性だった。それがすべてのものごとが始まった場所であり、(ほとんど)すべてのものごとが終わった場所だった。

エデン改造計画 (a science fiction short story) by Hoshi Shin'ichi (星 新一):

   どこから手をつけたものか、私には見当もつかなかった。まったく、とんでもない星だ。これといったものは、なにひとつない。猛獣もいなければ、毒性を持った昆虫すらいない。
   あるものといえば、いい気候と、みどりの野山と、美しくゆたかな海と、平穏きわめる生物。それに、おとなしく純真な、地球人タイプの住民たちだけだ。いいかえれば、どこか抜けている住民たち。見わたす限り、文明と呼べるものはいとかけらも目に入らない。このいまいましい野蛮人どもめ。

End update.]

Searching the sci.lang.japan newsgroup archives should bring up further suggestions from other people, too.

But the most important thing is just to read something, anything; these rules are simply intended to help you avoid some of the common pitfalls that might result in an aversion to the whole idea of reading real Japanese. It really is worth the effort in the end.