You're only supposed to start reading when you have finished the whole book. You can try  before, but since the last Grade 1 kanji is frame 1885, you might be missing some important kanjis. As to what to start reading, I would start with textbooks until you get to a certain level of comfort with the grammar and vocab.

I'm wondering myself when I should start reading "real" material. I'm using intermediate level textbooks for now. I find that the real stuff has just too much unknown vocab which makes it slower and less fun.

Where would any self respecting thread on reading be without a cheeky 名探偵コナン recommendation? I haven't been reading any manga of late to be honest but I found Conan to be easy enough to follow even if you skip out all the bits you don't know.

Also certain 'high value' compounds come up over and over e.g. 解決、推理 so if one can't glean the meaning from RTK1 keywords and context, you could always look them up.

As people have already mentioned there is plenty that you can get from textbooks too. If you've got the motivation that's also a good way to go.

EDIT: Conan has furigana over each and every kanji which is good or bad depending on what way you look at it.

Last edited by synewave (2007 October 29, 6:25 pm)

Hi dwhitman.  I don't want to discourage you from putting your new learned kanji to some reading use, but in my experience that doesn't really help for improving RTK recall, at least not in the long term.  Its really the visual stories that will do most of memory the work.

What's your recall rate?  Is it dropping across the board or just the last few lessons studied?

I struggled around 700 too... that was the hardest part for me thus far but I just ploughed on and after 700 I found it much easier.  My goal was to do about 30 a day but I had a few days when I didn't have time to study any, so I averaged only 21/day in the past two weeks but it got me onto lesson 28, past the halfway point.  Woohoo!

I wouldn't worry too much about 'reading' per se, but it gave me a huge boost just to pick up random books (I have a bunch of novels from Book-Off, all heavyweights way beyond my skills like Abe & Mishima) and figure out all the stories/keywords I could recall for any given page.

Magazines more than manga I think are really good for 'reading' at this level, too, because you can figure out what a photo spread's about and breeze on to the next one, plus you have ads too.  I always find myself reading just the pictures when I do manga.

dwhitman wrote:

I've almost hit 700 kanji, but my recall rate is starting to drop upon review.  I'm thinking that adding additional reinforcement of the kanji (beyond flashcards) would help on recall.  I tend to learn best by doing, and was hoping that looking at actual Japanese text could help at this point.

I've started looking at untranslated manga, pictures with kanji in them, etc, and I do recognize LOTs of kanji.  But with only 700 kanji (and obviously, no compounds) text almost never gels into a cohesive sentence or narrative for me.

So, to all my sensei here: Am I trying to jump the gun?  I'd love to find some texts that I could read that contained lots of the kanji I'm trying to reinforce.  But I'm beginning to think that 700 Heisig-order kanji just aren't sufficiently interconnected to allow reading even relatively low level text. 

Does anyone have any texts they could recommend that might be accessible at my level?

First of all, you need to remember that RTK is a means to an ends. It helps you recognize and remember the stroke order of kanji. Sometimes it helps with meanings. But don't forget that it's a tool. The goal isn't learning RTK. It's learning Japanese. RTK is just another useful textbook along the way.

If you learn best by doing, then start doing. Get yourself a text, review the grammar, and dive into some easy books. I mentioned the Graded Reader series to someone else. You should check it out. Low-level stories with basic grammer. Perfect for anyone starting out with Japanese. If you google Japanese Graded Reader you'll find it.

Don't get stuck thinking that you need to complete RTK before you can read something. In fact, if you read something with furigana you don't need to know a single kanji.

Simply put: If you want to start reading, start reading. Or, put another way, "If you're gonna shoot, shoot. Don't talk."

Wow, broad range of opinions here. 

I'll check out Conan; heard of this one, but never looked at it.  Magazines, too.  Any specific recommendations there?

I also love the idea of googling for specific kanji.  It often seems like I live in google, but it just hadn't occurred to me that I could search for non-Western text.  Duh.

One point of clarification: I'm not so much asking about reading, as "reading".   I really don't have an expectation of comprehending grammatically correct sentences yet.  But I'd like to find texts richer in kanji I know, to reinforce learning, and come away with a general idea of what's being talked about.

Side observation: I think the most frustrating thing about looking at random texts right now is that I frequently encounter kanji where I know all the primitives used to make it, and sit there racking my brain: "I know this one.  I KNOW THIS ONE...if I can just pull up the story I've got it..."...but then look it up at WWWJDIC and and find it's Heisig number n, where n is an integer higher than 671, maybe with a one little one-pixel drop my aging vision hadn't even resolved, changing a primitive I know into something else.

If you want to see how much Detective Conan you can read go to

http://conan.wagnergrp.com/

where you can find some of the latest chapters untranslated. My guess is that you won't be able to understand much if anything.

I think the problem with kanji rich texts is that they tend to be rich in non-joyo kanji as well ^_^;; I imagine that would be more frustrating if you didn't know they weren't joyo kanji.