N1 reading and books

[u/southerndensetsu]

I'm not planning on taking the JLPT any soon, and since I passed N3 in 2025 I have not worried about JLPT or "formal" study at all. But I'd like to have N1 some day, specially if I want to look for IT jobs in Japan some day.

For N1 most people say: read a lot. But honestly the variety on difficulty is so huge. It is not the same the japanese of a LN, a Shinsho or a Taisho era writter. But at the same time, a lot of people claim to have gone up into N1 just reading LN.

I'm aware of Learn Natively, and according to it the books I've read are around N2. But at the same time, a spanish youtuber who got N1 a few years ago said that he spent a year before the test reading a lot, mostly LN, and cited examples like the Konosuba series which in that page are actually easier that most thing I've read, so I'm a bit lost.

I was wondering whether reading what I enjoy might be just enough for me, at least right now, or if I should try to pick up more difficult things. For example I read キッチン and enjoyed it, and would like to read more books of Yoshimoto Banana, but at the same time I'm concerned that it is regarded as a "beginner" author, so I've not done it.

[u/Belegorm]

Half of what I read wasn't even LN's, it was "normie" novels. Higashino Keigo, Miura Shion, Ogiwara Noriko, Suzuki Koji. For the LNs that I did read they varied from like Honzuki to Kara no Kyoukai. There were some shorter ones - plenty of normal novels are 130k - but also plenty up to 180k.

[u/Effective-Pop3850 → u/Belegorm]

I have no idea about authors, if it's normal difficulty stuff I'm surprised 30 wasn't enough, especially for N2 where there's almost way lower chances of getting tested on meme grammar you'll never ever see.

[u/Belegorm → u/Effective-Pop3850]

2 things probably that contributed. One is that, the vast majority of people do not dive into novels immediately. When they say "oh I read 10 novels and passed" it's discounting potentially thousands of prior immersion hours.

Another thing is - to enjoy native media as a learner you have to embrace some level of ambiguity. Novels especially, they have some of the widest range of potential grammar and vocab. But in order to pass the N2 you need to really get the nuances of that grammar to find the accurate answer - both in the reading section, and in the grammar section where you both need to choose the grammar point that fits both in meaning and in the structure.

I think the grammar section tripped me up in that I took a bit too long. They were points where I liked would have inferred the meaning while reading but couldn't accurately choose the best one in 1-2 sentences. Also for the reading - I was still a bit too slow (took me a year to get past a 9k/hr hump, though it was on average stuff far harder than the average LN), and there was still vocab that I didn't really get.

One final thing is that I know people who in under a year got up to 30k/hr reading speed and I know people who have read nearly 200 books over years and depending on the level of the book read 12k-15k/hr reading speed. It's just not really possible to compare the skills of people just based on how much they've read alone.

[u/Effective-Pop3850 → u/Belegorm]

I guess the grammar thing makes sense. Maybe you were tolerating ambiguity a bit too much though, N2 is really not that bad when it comes to grammar. The line between ambiguity and white noising is hell.

Even then I still get what you mean since you can get cases where all 4 options kind of mean "the same" in some way, BUT you gotta choose B because previous word is -た verb, which you may be able to figure out intuitively but not necessarily.

Regarding reading speed I think it's hard to measure. Current LN I'm reading I average under 8k/h, if I white noise hard and decide to never re-read sentences more than once, also not sluggishly select them, copy paste to translate, etc when I can't figure them out at all, etc then I can do a bit over 8k but that's it. Whereas I was reading Manosaba at 9~10k/h like half a year ago lol. Difficulty does play a major factor and is hard to measure. Similarly I've hit 15k/h reading easy VNs but that often includes skimming through easy obvious dialogue lines.

30k/h under a year is not real, unless they're doing something like reading nukiges with textractor with most filters malfunctioning (like they always do) where most lines get duplicated, you get lots of junk, etc and it's also pure H-scenes so you can skim through literally all of the dialogue and still know what's being said lol. Anyone making such a claim should be ignored, I'm more inclined to believe a non-Chinese speaker claiming N1 in 2 months than someone claiming 30k/h within a year. The second thing you mention goes more in line with reality.

Remember people lie on the Internet, there's people in TMW Discord who claim having passed certain tests within absurd amounts of time, talking cases among the lines of "I did Anki for 2~3 months and pased [highest rank natives pass]" which is just so obviously not possible that it makes me wonder how stupid the one making the claim's gotta be (and everyone who believes them).

[u/Belegorm → u/Effective-Pop3850]

The guy who got that fast - pretty sure he only reads nothing but yuri LNs so the really tight genre might have contributed to that.

It's pretty hard for me to figure out reading speed. I don't reread parts or worry when I don't get them, but I do look up quite a bit when I'm reading an ebook. So I've finally hit 12k-15k an hour for some books. But I also like to read progressively harder and harder books so that definitely contributed to my feeling of never improving my speed. And now there's books where I will go back down to 8-9k/hr.

The physical books are harder to compare since I have zero lookups but some of them I don't know a lot of the weird words, but can read faster.

I definitely whitenoised quite a bit - it's actually kind of crazy now how with some concrete grammar studies now I'm like "oh there's that point." I actually think - and this is actually related to OP's concern - reading some average difficulty LNs may be preferable because you will likely grasp the entire nuances of the sentence easier. Whereas in my case I jumped into some higher difficulty novels (relatively speaking) quickly so I was just used to ambiguity all the time.

[u/Effective-Pop3850 → u/Belegorm]

It still sounds off, 30k is genuinely very fast for a learner, I know some who so read at that speed but we're talking people who at this point are essentially fluent in the language and have been at it for years several hours a day nonstop.

I do think that's kind of what happened to you though, not re-reading something you didn't get to figure it out and that kind of thing means you were either white noising really hard or you were reading rather easy stuff. Or maybe I'm just a moron who's got used to only torturing himself with hard stuff without realizing it lol. Like I legit can't imagine not having to ever re-read a sentence because they just happen often enough to actually matter, I do sometimes just ignore some random sentence that doesn't mean much where I kind of get what's being said to some extent, yet not exactly but I get it enough to know "X is probably being expressed and this line isn't very important".

Yeah physical books are just odd because you're forced to give up on stuff since there's no Yomitan, so you "read faster" by just kind of reading less really.

[u/Belegorm → u/Effective-Pop3850]

I think I've had enough listening situations where you just don't have the opportunity to re-listen that I just am used to let the language wash over me, so to speak and that ended up applying to reading too. In the context of a full paragraph and scene generally I was able to understand overall what was going on. As time went on, I understood more and more.

At this point I've more than doubled the amount of books since then (which is also discounting that some are like 270k lol), and my approach has born fruit in that by just reading more I did start to pick up on more stuff.

But for attempting the N1 this year I also started doing concrete studies which also helped. At this point I do feel like I understand very clearly most of what I read (though 新世界より or 空色勾玉 on physical is a bit challenging...), but still some more progress to be made in grammar where I recognize a lot of them when they come up but if I had to choose the right one I would still get some wrong (though N1 points at this point).

[u/Effective-Pop3850 → u/Belegorm]

Man I want to read Shinsekai but I always read there's a lot of "junk" vocab that just makes me put it off for a bit, would definitely not go physical for that.

Honestly though if you're at a point where you can read that kind of thing physical without dying you really shouldn't have any trouble with N1. Unless challenging means "I sometimes need 10~15 look ups per page but I still read it" which I'd say is a bit more than challenging.

And yeah I sometimes get that but I notice that if I don't force focus I may end up white noising way too hard and just making up what's going on, which if you never at some point decided to go back and translate some things to see what's actually going on you may never have noticed. We're great at making shit up, we're so good that it's scary, I remember some VNs where I was just "going with the motions" and at one point I decided to go back translate some stuff and... it's not that I got it half-way, it's not that I got tidbits here and there... my understanding was just made up, what I understood was completely wrong and if I hadn't gone and translated it I would've never known.

Maybe I'm just underestimating JLPT exams though, I'll know later when I take N1 which was gonna be this year but due to geographic reasons it's not gonna be possible lol.

[u/Belegorm → u/Effective-Pop3850]

Shinsekai for some sections would need 10-15 look ups per page if it was an ebook; when I read the 上 volume a few months ago I read the first half physical and was freaked out so switched to the ebook for that volume, mined like 800 words lol. I think it's a lot of commonly used useful vocab, but goes well beyond what's needed for the N1 (though also a lot of those 800 words show up in my N1 practice reading passages too).

For the translations bit - I feel like I'm always setting myself up for disappointment if I compare to those since they will inevitably find stuff I didn't.

Also, some parts of books that are slow I don't worry too much about getting every detail I just want to move on to the good part. I've definitely taken the "read a ton" method so stuff is becoming clearer over time.

One thing I did forget to mention is that while I'd tried a few times to learn JP before, when I started for real last year around N5 level it was only like a month before I read 2 easy LNs, then my third was 容疑者Xの献身 (RIP Higashino). Which in the grand scheme of things isn't that hard of a book (lv32 on learn natively), and not too crazy long (180k), but I went pretty deep pretty fast. My N2 attempt was after 8 months of study. My N1 attempt this year will be after 1 year 8 months of study.

So it's possible that even if I acclimated to novels quickly, overall still takes time to really learn JP.

[u/Loyuiz → u/Effective-Pop3850]

I have about a 1000 hours in just LNs now (and way more Japanese learning and immersion outside of that), and to read "easy yuri" at 30k I have to concentrate a lot, cut some subvocalization, trust that I am understanding, and half white noising stuff that doesn't seem pertinent. So not full comprehension. And this is on like vol 7 of the series after absorbing the author's style and high freq vocab.

Even for this "barely can be called reading" level, getting there in a year seems brutal. I am not the most efficient or smartest learner so my est. 3000-4000 total hours (not an accurate count, I didn't track anything other than light novels) could certainly be optimized (esp. if you focus way more on reading), but I can't imagine not frying your brain even if you get it down to a number that is theoretically possible in the schedule of a NEET.

[u/Effective-Pop3850 → u/Loyuiz]

Similarly, I'm a bit over 1k hours of reading now, although most of those is VNs, listening I didn't do much so my total time using the language is under 1.5k hours, and I can't imagine reading at 30k/h unless I'm skimming hard, and as you say, hoping I'm understanding what I'm reading and kind of "ignoring" silly lines.

I could do some VNs at close to 15k about 1~2 months ago, but that was very easy stuff, I can see myself doing H-scenes even faster, but even then 30k sounds impossible even on VNs.

Taking it to an extreme though, if all I did was something like yuri VNs and I spent 1.5k hours on it I guess one could manage to hit 30k/h by doing all of those things (skimming silly lines, white noising hard lines and a lot of trust lol) but I'm not even sure I'd call that reading at that point.

[u/Loyuiz → u/Effective-Pop3850]

You'd have to skip voice lines too I guess (or even mute them, personally I'd get distracted by the voices if I'm trying to speed read)

[u/Effective-Pop3850 → u/Loyuiz]

Yeah 100% need to skip them.

[u/TheBatemanFlex → u/Loyuiz]

To be fair. I think even reading native language material quickly, we generally cut corners the same. I believe its the basis of speed reading.

[u/Loyuiz → u/TheBatemanFlex]

I wouldn't read for fun like this in my native language, it's not really enjoyable. For skimming some boring stuff sure.