Recentlty, I have tried reading Japanese articles and I have to say that its harder than I thought it was going to be. I have been using sites like kotaku,famitsu and some other news sites. The hard part is learning the new vocab words. A lot of the words are very abstract and hard memorize.My question is how do you make that transition from textbooks to articles?

I think articles are the wrong place to start. As you say, there's so much abstract vocabulary, and they often depend on context you may not have.

Try reading fiction or personal essays instead.

For me it is always the same:
parallel texts + audio + a mouse-over pop-up dictionary.

You might check this
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=6840&page=1

I've always only used real material so I can't comment on the transition, but I think articles might be the wrong place to start. People's personal blogs (http://ameblo.jp/), famous people's twitters, chatrooms (http://ch1.chaberi.com/) etc would probably be easier places to start. http://www.fnn-news.com/ is also fairly easy to read for real news.

@Ash_S
what material have you been using?

jordan3311 Wrote:@Ash_S
what material have you been using?

I started off with the kinda stuff I mentioned in my post. Nowadays I read a lot of novels, essays, articles, news.

Ash_S Wrote:http://www.fnn-news.com/ is also fairly easy to read for real news.

I find NHK a lot easier, personally. Plus, you can start with the highly useful NHK News Web Easy (http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/), and work your way up to the full versions of the articles.

Additionally, you can join lang-8, and find English blogs by Japanese speakers that include a native language translation. There are many such blog posts written every day. Use Rikaichan/Rikaisama for unknown words.

Well consider if you would be interested reading the Aeticle you are reading if you were fluent in Japanese . If the answer is no then find a more interesting article. There's so much out there and you can read whatever you want to. Like for Japanese books there are some authors that I do not like because of their writing style and there's also authors that really pull me in and makes the reading effortless ( as in its just written well and compatible with me but i will look up whatever words to furher my japanese vocab etc) and enjoyable

I personally don't do Fnn news even though there is audio and a written transcript bc I do not care about news (especially japanese politics) but I still learn lots of vocab and grammar from other sources.

Are you just reading of are you trying to 'mine' articles for new vocabulary?

When I'm reading I'm not trying to memorise anything, unless it comes up several times in quick succession or it's obviously going to show up a lot later. There are easier ways to mass-grow vocabulary than from reading - reading is more for stringing it all together, I feel - unless you're high enough level that you can learn new words from context.