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.

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.

Last edited by Ash_S (2012 September 06, 1:20 pm)

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.

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.

Last edited by howtwosavealif3 (2012 September 06, 5:45 pm)