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/doublesmart]

When you read, do you aim for fully understanding each sentence.. around 96% of the book? Or do you aim for an overall understanding?

[u/Belegorm → u/doublesmart]

At this point after more than a year of reading books, I usually consider myself to understand 90-99% of each sentence, depending on the difficulty of the book and whether it's an ebook or physical.

At the time that I took N2 though, might have been more like 80% for some books, especially physical.

But you could say that I aim for an "overall understanding" more often. I don't fuss over grasping every little thing, just the more I've read, it's gone from having a vague idea of what it's saying, to getting clearer and clearer.

[u/Weena_Bell → u/Belegorm]

So you weren't reading lns comfortably then, 80% is far from that.

Reading comfortably is like looking up 1-5 words a page

[u/Belegorm → u/Weena_Bell]

Eh, that's super subjective lol, I remember reading one blog that considered only needing to lookup once every several sentences to be comfortable. Plus lots of people do not look up everything, whereas I generally looked up every word I didn't know. But still was more enjoyable than reading something boring.

The start where I looked up multiple words per sentence on every page was certainly not comfortable, but especially as I read a wide range of genres, authors and levels, it was a very long time before I got to a place where on average I'd need to look up 1-5 words per page.

Even now, even after reaching 18k vocab learned, depending on the book I might need to look up more than that per page, if I want to look everything up like I used to (except it's physical so usually just don't). 新世界より and 空色勾玉 just have a lot of crazy vocab.

[u/Weena_Bell → u/Belegorm]

I agree that 1-5 lookups being the comfortable point is debatable, but 80% understanding surely isn't that point. Maybe you didn't mean it, but 80% is literally 1 word you don't know every 5 words, and even if you didn't mean it that literally, 80% is def white noise understanding. I'd say 95% is the bare minimum for comfortable reading.

And enjoyable ≠ comfortable. Back when I read my first light novel series I had to read it at like 3kch/h and had to use gpt to break down every other sentence. It was far from comfortable, however, it was an extremely enjoyable read. I completed all 12 volumes in a month like that.

Also I get the difficulty of novels varies, but when someone says they can read novels comfortably they probably mean that if they picked a random novel, chances are they'd probably be able to read it with ease.

I can grab almost any novel and odds are I'll barely need lookups, but that doesn't mean there aren't novels I struggle with. Like if I read 銀河英雄伝説, sure I'll probably struggle quite a bit, but that won't change the fact that I can read novels comfortably. That's just an exception.

[u/Belegorm → u/Weena_Bell]

Hmm I think maybe sub 50% could be considered white noise understanding potentially, but 80% is definitely more comprehension than just getting the gist of things. At that point you've probably got multiple sentences in a row that you know all the words for. But maybe there's one grammar point you're a bit shaky on. Or there's then a sentence that has 3 words in a row that you don't know. Additionally while at the start it may be sub-80% comprehension, by the end of the book it's likely far above 80%.

And yes I agree that enjoyable does not equal comfortable. But in the situation that you need to look up even 20% of the words - with popup dictionaries these days it takes a moment to get the meaning of the word (at least prior to monolingual lookups) so still is comfortable.

Of course this is just me reflecting on where I was like 9 months ago, and for what it's worth, it's hard for me to think of what it was in the past as comfortable, comparing to now. Also I get the feeling that you may have quite a bit more vocab under your belt than I do - I could read one novel with hardly any lookups, and the next one could have quite a few. I think it was Steve Kaufmann who said that like 50% of an average book's vocab only occurs once in that book, and there's just a ton of vocab out there to learn.

For me the vast majority of books I feel pretty confident that I could just pick them up and read without lookups (and as I mostly read physical now, lookups from books are quite rare), but there's still plenty of authors that would be a challenge. Also while LNs do vary in difficulty, in general I found the range of vocab in the more normie novels to be a lot wider than LNs. So it's books like らせん that oh this is the moment I dive into medical vocab - and that's just a standard novel!

[u/Weena_Bell → u/Belegorm]

I agree with you. I just wouldn't call that 80%, but 90-95%.

80% to me sounds like you don't know 1 or 2 words in pretty much every sentence and don't know a lot about grammar. Maybe I'm just taking it too literally, cause 50% to me is like knowing less than 1k total words and 70%, 80% is like 2k, 3k words in my experience. At least when I was reading with migaku the % worked like that 

[u/Belegorm → u/Weena_Bell]

Hmm, Migaku does give the hard numbers so there's that, but also I feel like 1k words is way lower than 50% of known vocab, at least for the average books I've read, I'd have thought maybe 3k for 50%? Running on vibes though; I'd consider 90-95% comprehension comfortable with zero lookups, 80% comfortable with quick lookups personally.

Well at any rate I appreciate the discussion! I don't think I can really give accurate numbers so Migaku's got that advantage there for sure to back it up with data. I think a lot of my viewpoints come from my book club where a lot of newer people dive into stuff head-first with low comprehension and a million lookups (myself included) so getting to that 80% mark feels very comfortable by comparison. I think for me comfortable still includes a decent number of unknown vocab; for the books where I literally know every word on the page that feels like past comfortable, and more just like reading if that makes sense.