For some background, I have been studying Japanese off and on for seven years. I started by taking a class the first semester of my freshman year, and continued to take all eight classes to the highest level my college offered. In that course, we finished the Genki series, the Tobira intermediate book, and the last 3 semesters, we focused on reading short articles and watching clips to discuss as a class, along with writing reports and group projects. After college, I took about a 1.5-2 year break from studying but continued to listen to Japanese music and read along to the lyrics, which I credit as the main reason I didn’t lose much, if any, of the Japanese I learned.
I came back from my first trip to Japan in summer of 2024 and it brought back my passion for the language. I decided to take the JLPT N2 in December and passed with a good score I’m proud of.
Despite all of this, I have always struggled to read books. I tried to pick up physical books but it was so difficult to look at the page, find a word I don’t know, look that word up on my phone or computer, then go back to the book. I got discouraged pretty quickly. Same thing with Kindle, I download a Japanese e-book, but the Kindle dictionary is ridiculously slow and doesn’t work for various forms of words. Got discouraged again and stopped reading.
That’s when I came across a post about a month ago, talking about the ttsu e-reader. I looked into it, set it up, and downloaded a few books that I thought were interesting to me. I started with 「推し、燃ゆ」 by 宇佐見りん, and began using ttsu on my iPhone with the 10ten plug in (like a mobile Yomitan). I had picked up this physical book a few years ago and tried to read it, and ever since I put it down it’s been glaring at me to finish reading it. So I chose this book to read first. I limited myself to only reading on my commutes to and from work, as it was a typical 25-30 minutes on the train where I could just read. And over the course of a few weeks, I finished the book, cover to cover. Of course it was difficult, and there were many parts where I struggled to parse sentences and understand exactly what was happening. But I got through it, able to understand the events of the book and the characters. My reading speed increased drastically from when I started to when I finished. I can recognize a good number of new words and kanji now from the process of reading the book. Just to note, I did not sentence mine or add every new word I found into Anki, I just read to read, which is what I personally find fun about reading. I didn’t want to turn every moment of reading into an exercise of vocab as I knew I would burn out pretty quickly, and I think that’s a big factor of what got me through the book.
I’m posting this as I’m sure other people have felt similar, tried to pick up a book and got discouraged by the sheer amount of vocab/kanji they don’t know. But with the right materials, it is definitely possible, and I hope that this post pushes some people to keep reading in Japanese. That in itself is a learning experience. If anyone has questions about how I set up ttsu, or even any particular questions about how I got to this level or made it to N2, please feel free to comment or reach out.
by RedHawkSky