I'm in my 5th month of intense learning I'm in what some would call the 4-12 months blues.
Lots of learning but still seeing little effect. Although I'm still determined I get a little frustrated at times.

Last time I tried to read japanese manga - most I own come with furigana.
I tried reading and I understood goose egg. nothing. I turned the page and tried again. Not even close, not a chance.

How long did you guys learn japanese for until you tried your first manga? I suppose some manga are of course easier than others, many people recommend Yatsubato, because it's quite easy.

But I mean how long did it take you until you were able to read something of intermediate difficulty, as in manga written for teenage boys and young men and such.

Don't tell me now 5 years, because I'll quit and learn Spanish instead. Yes I'm kidding.
Thanks.

A few questions.
When was the last time?
Is this the first time you started learning? Like were you starting at 0?
When you say nothing, do you mean not any useful understanding? or not even a single word had any meaning?
And when you say intense learning, do you mean you're studying just kanji? Words? Sentences?

I started after about 4-5 months (I had done heisig 2 months before but kept stopping and restarting. I was doing sentences at that point) and I couldn't understand everything, but I understood about 1/3 of sentences. And 1/2 the words within the other sentences I didn't fully understand.

After about a year, I could read a lot more smoothly in manga with furigana. Mostly understanding all, but missing a few words every page. But only I subjects in I was familiar with (Slice of Life or Pirates).
All guesses and estimates.

maxwell777 Wrote:But I mean how long did it take you until you were able to read something of intermediate difficulty, as in manga written for teenage boys and young men and such.

Since most of these kind of manga don't have furigana and can be difficult depending on the manga. N2 to N3 is needed, so you are looking at something in the range of 2-3 years maybe? Really its a matter of vocabulary though, and you can easily do the Core6k in 1 year which gives enough words to let you read even some light novels with moderate lookup.

I started not long before you. Reading manga isn't really a goal of mine so I haven't tried anything particularly difficult but I briefly flicked through a shoujo magazine recently and was able to make sense of fair amount. The reading itself was actually incredibly easy since it's a skill I have built up with Assimil, but I found my vocabulary to be lacking.

Ultimately there is a reason you can't read manga and I think for sure you definitely need to identify the problem. You didn't recognise the words? The grammar? Is reading sentences in a new writing system just a skill you haven't developed yet? For me, if I want to read manga comfortably I know that it's mostly just a question of how long will it take me to learn X amount of words. You should try reading again and ask yourself exactly what the problem is.

Anyway, to get to the point where I am now:
August - Started working on Tae Kim, Core 10k (~10 new words per day), and RtK (however many kanji I could be bothered with, sometimes zero). Burnt out after a month or two. I guess the combination of these three is recommended by a number of people here because it actually works, but for me it was insufferable. This is my first real attempt at a language and I quickly learned that I can't deal with materials that I find boring.
September - Began Pimsleur Japanese. Mostly a confidence booster because speaking a foreign language really did terrify me. It also helped to build a solid foundation of oral fluency, I don't know a lot of Japanese but what I do know tends to come out of my mouth quickly and naturally. Also shadowing JapanesePod101 dialogues by this point just to get used to speaking Japanese.
October - Traded in Tae Kim for JtMW. I'm still working on this but it's mostly just for light reading, a chapter here and there when I get a minute, I wouldn't want to read it from cover to cover. Like I said, I'm not very interested in manga but the panels are a whole lot more fun to look at that Tae Kim's sentences, and I found the explanations more to my liking too.
December - Assimil's Japanese with Ease. I just got done with the passive wave and it's been nothing short of a miracle for me. Working through it was painless but extremely rewarding. Ultimately anything I can read, I can read because of Assimil. JP101 and Pimsleur are great and I recommend them to anyone who understands their strengths, but I didn't learn much actual Japanese with them. I think it's perfect for people who want to learn via immersion/native materials but perhaps want a few months of hand holding first. The audio is too slow but it's a good tradeoff providing you find something suitable to follow up with (more Jp101 for me).

If I could go back to last summer I would start out focusing on Assimil and Pimsleur, one lesson of each per day. That means I never have to spend more than an hour or two a day, not really what I would consider "intensive learning." I'd probably dedicate the rest of my time to shadowing JapanesePod and maybe looking at relevant chapters of JtMW. I would also start doing private lessons via Skype or in person after maybe two weeks or a month, basically as soon as basic sentence structure begins to appear logical.

Hi,

Since I just finished my first manga yesterday (and enjoyed it no less), I can give you an answer about my experience that might be helpful. Basically, my answer is the same as what I gave when I wrote What level is NHK Easy News?. The numbers haven't changed much in the intervening two weeks.

My feeling with literacy is that it starts in between N4 and N3. Of course, there is literacy at all levels (e.g. street signs, self-introductions, things written in textbooks, etc.). But I passed N4 last December and have been studying for N3 since then. And it's only now that I can read the "easy" things written for a Japanese audience.

You asked about things for teenagers. I don't expect to be able to read something like that in the immediate future.

My feeling with literacy is that it's a lot like the proverb "as soon as one door closes, another opens." So now that I have read my first things, I realize that the difficulty of the text matters a lot. I don't think that I was able to fully appreciate that before I successfully read my first news articles and manga.

Measuring things by months (or more precisely, by a length of time) doesn't really mean much. I've been studying Japanese for 10 years but I would say I still can't read the vast majority of manga. Though I have read maybe 20 volumes of various easy ones.
Probably knowing all N4 grammar and Core2k vocabulary are what I would say are "prerequisites" to start into the easy manga. And then from there you keep reading, keep learning, keep building a larger vocabulary, and the more standard manga slowly start to become accessible.

It doesn't take too long, if you know your grammar. Grammar is essential, yet it's something that a lot of people neglect when they're starting out because (let's face it) it's kind of boring, and you can't quantify progress in grammar the way you can count how many words you memorized with a flash card app. But if you can't take moderately complex sentences apart, even knowing 10k words by heart won't do you any good.

For instance, let me find some random web manga in my bookmarks... ah, this one will do:

http://kingbee.xxxxxxxx.jp/jam.html

アンズ、なんかオレに隠してやったことあらひんか？
今ちゃんと言うたら怒らへんけど。

"Anzu, is there something you did that you're hiding from me? If you tell me properly now I won't get angry though."

Simple, right? But to make sense of even these simple lines, you need to understand:

* ~te form
* plain past
* plain negative
* subordinate clauses (隠してやったこと)
* ~tara conditional

Also, this guy is speaking in Kyoto-ben (~nai becomes ~hen), so maybe this wasn't a good example...

The first time I read a manga and really understood enough to make it an enjoyable experience was after about 3 years of studying. I had tried some manga before that and was able to make it through, but I was missing big chunks of the story and relying a lot more on the pictures than the text.

I started reading VNs at two weeks. I still can't read sideways text comfortably, and definitely not at such a zoom level that a page would fit my 1366x768 screen... so 2+ years and N1 isn't enough. Maybe it would have been different if I had started with manga instead. Or with a desktop computer instead of a laptop, or even dead tree format...

@fzort: Those were all first-month stuff for me (with the exception of Kyoto-ben, beyond knowing that such things exist). http://amaterasu.tindabox.net/guide

Vempele Wrote:Those were all first-month stuff for me

You must be some kind of savant, then

I started reading manga in Japanese at about the 3000 word mark. I don't remember if I had gone all the way through Tae Kim's Guide or not, at that point.

At that time, I had difficulty with things aimed at young men (upper middle-school or high-school), but could get through things meant for younger audiences (maybe average 5th or 6th grade? Maybe lower, though). I don't know what exactly you want to read, but many people who read translated manga are surprised at the intended demographic in Japan (much younger than they expect), and the language tends to reflect that.

A couple of things I've noticed though:
If you take two manga, one with furigana and one without, intended for similarly young people, the one with furigana will probably have more difficult words in it. Obviously this trend doesn't apply to works meant for older individuals, but it's good to remember if or when you get a manga that you think should be easy because of the furigana, only to struggle with it (I had that happen with 進撃の巨人; full furigana, but the vocabulary and word usage was far more complex than other manga I read that were meant for a similar age, but without furigana (however, this might be due to the genre and not the presence or lack of furigana; though either cause gives the same result, since they would expect you to know the readings of easier words and thus save on ink by only using furigana for words you aren't expected to know)).

Most series tend to use the same kind of vocabulary throughout; once you get through the first volume or so (depending on the word density), you'll have seen most of the words used in the series.

Don't expect to know all the words before you read something for a long time. There are two ways to deal with unknown words: stop reading and look them up, or skip them. Personally, I only look up words that greatly impede my understanding of what I'm reading, simply because I read for fun, not to study.

Anyway, don't let these large numbers or time-frames scare you away; attempting to read something you're interested in (easier if you know the story already) is good to do no matter how much you've studied; by doing so, you can better gauge your progress (really helpful for that plateau), which can inspire you to continue studying.

I guess I still haven't really answered your actual question though... I really can't say. I started reading things frequently about two years ago. I've been studying for four years (in real time, a lot of that time had no studying in it), so I guess it took me two years to be able to struggle through easy manga and NHK EASY articles. However, after I started, I quickly got better at it. So if you're one of those people that doesn't mind constantly looking things up, you should be able to read whatever you want, whenever you want, it just might take a few weeks to get anywhere in it...

It's all relative I think. I started with Doraemon after a few months and was able to follow the stories well enough to enjoy them. Of course, it took a long time and involved using a dictionary often and looking up grammar where I could. It was more of a study thing than pure leisure, and I remember learning a lot from reading them.

A few months later I moved onto Death Note, which was at times impossibly difficult, but still enjoyable. Sometimes I just had to give up trying to understand sentences, and I remember making a 500-word vocab list from the first volume. It took a long time, but I was still able to follow the plot and get a lot out of it. I'd definitely recommend more of an i+1 approach in levelling up from Doraemon though.

It probably took a few years before I could read manga at a reasonable pace and stop hugging a dictionary, but I really found it fun and rewarding to study them before that was possible, and I don't think there's much stopping you from doing the same.

Zarxrax Wrote:Probably knowing all N4 grammar and Core2k vocabulary are what I would say are "prerequisites" to start into the easy manga. And then from there you keep reading, keep learning, keep building a larger vocabulary, and the more standard manga slowly start to become accessible.

This is accurate for a solid enough base to put your foot into easy manga. OP depending on what you already know now you could achieve this in 1-2 months. Not 5 years.

Took me about 6 months before I managed to struggle through my first full volume of manga. I knew maybe 1000 words at the time and most N5 grammar. After that first one the next couple ones got much easier. I ankied all the words I came across (80% of which reoccured in the next manga I read in the same genre) and would read up on grammar whenever I could.

Another 6 months later of reading on a daily basis and most manga were no longer too much of a challenge, although I still relied on EDICT and kanjitomo to fill in the gaps. I finished my first novel around this time.

Yet another 6 months later I had read some 75+ volumes of manga and 4 novels and only find around 10-20 new words with each volume I read in familiar genres (and I like variety, so there are quite a couple).

Basically, if you dilligently read, do your Anki reps and study for a couple hours every day, reading manga with ease is achieveable within 1-2 years. But then again, I was not burdened by having a job while doing this, enjoy reading and I have lots of discipline and patience for tedium so my particular circumstances were perhaps not very typical.

I agree though that knowing up to N4 grammar and about 2k words are reasonable prerequisitives, but starting earlier is very beneficial to your progress if you can stomach it and find easy enough manga to work it.

I'd say about 2-4 years for most people who keep studying regularly. If you lapse in your studies a lot it could take even longer.

Geez. There is such a polarisation of people. Some people be like "It is a long and treacherous journey with decades ahead. No man has yet survived" and the rest be like "I was reading Japanese in the womb". Jokes, jokes. But really, people need to stop saying it takes like 5 years to read manga. That scares people. Just because you were too scared to tackle a bit of difficulty and start reading for 5 years doesn't mean you need to instill that fear into others.

Me? Am at a sort of low N3 level and can read Doraemon and other such simple manga I find in my half-Japanese friend's house (including a scary one about evil middle school bullies who set their victims up with rapists... I think it's supposed to be cautionary but WTF). And I read Naruto 1 once through immediately after learnt kana, and again after 200 kanji. Having a knowledge of the plot and some grammar, it was surprisingly comprehensible. I can't read novels or news though, but the guy asked about manga. Most poplar manga is for kids and the only thing that makes one harder than another is specialist language (Naruto - Ninja language, One Peice - Pirate language, Death Note - probably the sort of stuff you'd get in the news), which is more efficiently learnt by actually reading them than grinding general vocab.

I'd say with a basis of basic grammar (like, everything that would be covered in something like Genki 1 and 2, and a little bit of understanding of slang) and at least 2k as many have said, you just need to start reading manga. Getting to that stage could take just under a year to 2 years. It depends on the person and their situation. However, it's extremely unlikely it will take 5. Choose more everyday ones to start with and move up. I'm at the point of doing this. If you've seen my other thread I'm starting a reading rampage. That thread is asking for kids novel recommendation but I'll also be reading manga in the rampage.

thanks for the great replies guys,

blackbrich, well no I didn't start completely from scratch, I learned some basics years before that. By intense learning I mean RTK1 (past 1500 now), Core2k, JLPT vocab deck, and Jpod101 every day for about 3-4 hours, on some days I learned as much as 7 or 8 hours.
When I say I understand nothing, I don't mean I don't understand a single word, but rather that I don't understand the gist of what's being said at all.

Vix86, that sounds like a reasonable estimate. I just wished I could learn faster, but that's how it is. It just takes time.
Core6k I'm doing already, but I'm only at 500 words in that particular deck because I focussed on Kanji so much up until now.

JKS87, well I suppose grammar is definitely one of the points. besides the obvious barrier of limited vocabulary this is also something I'll have to put more time into I guess. Even though I'd rather learn other things. Assimil sounds good I'll look into it, thanks.

ariariari, yeah that might be one problem. I'm starting to learn N4 vocab right now, but at this time I'm still at N5. However I've invested lots of time into Kanji that's not even yet required for N4, so I hope I can catch up with other things once I'm done with RTK.

Zarxrax, thanks yeah N4 grammar and core2k is what others said too. I've only done 500 of the latter. I understand most of those sentences though. Not sure what you mean when you say measuring progress in time means nothing. Of course saying "I learned for x years" doesn't matter much, IMO what matters is how much hours you have invested in learning the language during that. I'd say that having something like 2000 or 5000 hours under ones belt definitely means something if it was focussed study time.

fzort, absolutely I agree with you. the many conjugations of verbs definitely confused the hell out of me. So like I said to JKS87, grammar is certainly something I have to put more attention to.

yudantaiteki, 3 years... I have to make haste.

Vempele, I guess reading vertically is the least of my problems even though it's interesting that you find reading horizontally much harder because you focussed so much on that.

sholum, thanks for mentioning what you did about manga with furigana. I'll keep it in mind. In fact, the one I have is probably not quite that easy, despite the fact that it has furigana. Don't know if you or anyone knows "Getsu Sei Ki". Also what you say about most series making use of the same vocabulary throughout is a good point.
As for your last comment, well yeah of course you could read anything if you just look up every word. However it's probably better to find something suitable for ones current level, because that kind of endlessly looking up words at every new page is tiresome.

jimeux, good point and I already tried Death Note (well I could understand 死神 because I had already seen the anime and recognized those Kanji lol). I suppose I'll focus on core2k and grammar for a few more months until I give my next manga a try, whilst hugging the dictionary.

ryuudou, thanks for seconding that. I hope you're right.

Tzadeck, thanks for your comment, I hope you're not right I hope it won't take me that long to at least make it through the first manga and I understand a reasonable amount.

Helena4, thanks that's motivational to say the least. Well I've only done a quarter of 2k like I said and haven't finished TaeKim or the Genki series yet. so maybe I should at finish those like some others recommended as well, before giving it another try. I'll check out the rampage thread, I'm looking forward to reading light novels as well!

Death note is not a particularly easy manga to start with. There's a ton of text (compared to other manga), and the pictures aren't as much help to figuring out what's going on as in other manga.

Yeah, just to clear up, although I mentioned Death Note doesn't mean I can read it or any lower level reader could. As I said, start from the more everyday stuff and move up. You shouldn't be at all put off by not being able to read Death Note. Even in English that is not something youd consider to be low reading level.

[RawToast]

Helena4 Wrote:Geez. There is such a polarisation of people. Some people be like "It is a long and treacherous journey with decades ahead. No man has yet survived" and the rest be like "I was reading Japanese in the womb". Jokes, jokes. But really, people need to stop saying it takes like 5 years to read manga. That scares people. Just because you were too scared to tackle a bit of difficulty and start reading for 5 years doesn't mean you need to instill that fear into others.

I'd say with a basis of basic grammar (like, everything that would be covered in something like Genki 1 and 2, and a little bit of understanding of slang) and at least 2k as many have said, you just need to start reading manga. Getting to that stage could take just under a year to 2 years.

Like you said, it all makes sense if you believe that manga requires somewhere around the Genki 1&2 level. Some people study a chapter per month and take 2 years, whilst others may complete a chapter every week or 2 chapters a week. It all depends on how much free time you have.

[Zgarbas]

Manga can mean a lot of things. If it's slice of life, low on dialect, and dealing with everyday things, you can read it easily after a few months (Start with Yotsubato). If it's full of made-up fantasy and sci-fi terms, complicated ideas, and dialect, then good luck with that. If you've seen the anime and already know what it's about, it gets considerably easier (it's what I did with my first manga, Space Brothers... it has a lot of technical terms, but as I'd seen the anime fairly recently I got to learn them rather than hate them, and frankly you can easily enjoy it without understanding the technical jargon, I have no idea how accurate to real life it is anyway).

Make sure you have a good foundation in Japanese. Not knowing a couple thousand words and basic grammar will make reading anything very slow and painful.

Read this: http://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/co...n_without/

A lot of it comes down to what kind of learner you are, and you're going to receive advice based in people's own learning preferences.

Some people hate ambiguity, and find sludging through texts with lots of unknown grammar and vocab, or listening to programs where they miss chunks of text, to be a real trial. If you're such a person, you may be better off taking a more textbook-based approach, using SRS to build vocab and grammar, and possibly creating sentence decks based off of simple reading material.

Myself, I find SRS as enjoyable as licking dry paint off of a splintered fence. So my approach has been to use texts as study materials, looking up words and understanding grammar in context. I started out with things like reading primers, samples from textbooks, and then slowly graduated to 昔話 and NHK News Easy. Within my first year, I was working through simple manga like 謎の彼女X. In the second year, I started to tackle fairly straightforward ライノベ, eventually working up to things like Death Note. I used Rikaisama (a lot) to understand online articles until I got to the point where using it became less and less necessary. I'm now at the point where i can read Murakami and most online articles without too much difficulty. I do use SRS for grammar, but beyond that, my approach is completely reading- and listening-based.

Using this process, I've found that I'm able to decide for myself whether I'm "ready" to tackle a particular manga or article. If the work is so hard that I dread returning to it, and I don't feel like I'm enjoying it at all, I judge it as too hard for my current level, and I set it aside for later reading. (A number of Wikipedia articles, particularly history-related articles, still fall into this category for me.) I buy a lot of reading and listening material, and work through it item by item, depending on my current Japanese abilities and personal interests. It's actually very satisfying to return to an article about an anime I love that I couldn't read two years ago, and realize that it's become 朝飯前.

But, that's me. I'd encourage you to take the various divergent advice offered here, try the different methods, and decide for yourself which one is both most enjoyable and most effective for you.

Now that you've posted how you've studied I'm gonna pipe up and say ... well of course you can't read manga yet. You only have ~500 words. How much can be expressed in that many words and what are the odds that they'll all come together into the thing you're trying to read?

You can probably see pretty well how soon you'll be able to read manga just by looking at how many words you're learning a day.

And don't want to diss the advice of the guy saying that grammar is important, but, well - I'm gonna say that chances are you already know a much greater percentage of the grammar of Japanese than you do the percentage of vocabulary. There's a mind bogglingly huge amount of words out there, while the amount of grammar understanding you need to fumble through manga text is relatively small. Vocabulary is almost certainly your main roadblock here.
(I mean - ideally you'll get to pick up vocab and grammar together - but if for some reason you're forced to choose between one or the other - vocabulary is going to take vastly longer to learn so it really needs priority)

Keep calm and learn more words