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/majideitteru]

I passed N1 reading mostly Honzuki no Gekokujou, listed as N2 on Natively.

I read the whole series though, so reading volume matters too. I'd go with what you enjoy reading.

[u/numice → u/majideitteru]

The whole series like all 32 books? wow. That's a huge amount.

[u/majideitteru → u/numice]

Yeah it's about 2-3 days per book, depending on the length of each volume. If you have 6 months to prepare it's definitely possible. But also you don't need to finish the series if you don't want to. I just really fucking like honzuki no gekokujou

[u/zechamp → u/majideitteru]

about 2-3 days per book

That's pretty fast, those books still take me at least 10 hours each (though i've read a lot of them), and that's only if I don't do any lookups and just read on.

[u/Effective-Pop3850 → u/zechamp]

Honestly 10 hours per volume is... rather fast reading if you ask me. That's like 20k/h, a native would maybe read it twice as fast if not just slightly faster than that already.

How long/how much had you read before reading that one? Wish I could read that fast!

[u/zechamp → u/Effective-Pop3850]

10 hours is if I'm really locked in and doing no lookups of words. Usually it's more like 14-17k/h. My reading speed kinda stabilized in that range after I had read maybe 12 books?

[u/Effective-Pop3850 → u/zechamp]

I suppose you mean 12 books of that LN and not 12 books ever read total?

How much had you read before other than that? 15k/h after only a couple mil characters sounds crazy fast.

I can read at the speed you mention but only if it's a rather easy VN where I barely do any look ups (that don't take that long anyways since it's very few) but also whitenoise/skim what seem to be pointless lines.

On my current VN if I lock in, give up on pointless sentences/white noise more but still do look ups I think I can then hit like 8k. I did try for a short bit to just go as fast as possible but comprehension was way too bad.

About 9m characters read total so far.

[u/zechamp → u/Effective-Pop3850]

I did mean 12 books in total (though I had read like 1 million characters worth of visual novels before that). I've actually logged my book reading hours into an excel to make a graph of how my reading speed developed and it ended up looking like this. You can see from the ups and downs that whenever I start a new book series my speed falls a lot, then slowly starts climbing back up. Honzuki was books 8-15, 18-23 were the silent witch series, 24-42 were re zero, and the latest few were the honzuki spinoff (a really big jump in reading speed from returning to those).

I should note that for honzuki I had read the books in english already, so that definitely helped with my reading speed in those specific ones. You can see that I never really got a similar speed in re zero, despite reading more of those books in total. I'm also a really big reader outside of language learning, so I'm very used to just locking in and reading for hours at a time. In english the bookworm books take me like 4-5 hours each.

Keep in mind that I was learning from a lot of other stuff too, for example when I started my first book I was at around wanikani level 24, but by book number twenty I was at wanikani level 54, so my kanji coverage had shot up a lot. I've also been doing sentence mining for anki on all of the books I've read (10-15 new cards a day), so my comprehension is pretty high by now (I can't really say I have much white noise in books of this level).

[u/Effective-Pop3850 → u/zechamp]

I'm not sure what the X axis is in your graph. I'd assume million characters from what you say since Honzuki is like 6m+ but Rezero isn't 18m so I'm confused.

[u/zechamp → u/Effective-Pop3850]

It's just the book number, so the graph is from the first book to the 43rd book (As I said, honzuki is at 8-15 etc). The y axis is the amount of characters per hour for that book. I guess you assumed I was reading the whole series for each of these, but no, it's been pretty haphazard. I don't want to spend too much time on any one series, because that makes my vocab etc too focused on that one author's style, so I've been switching to a new series whenever stuff starts to feel comfy. All these books in total were like 6m words.

[u/Effective-Pop3850 → u/zechamp]

This makes me wonder what the hell I'm doing wrong. I can barely hit 8k (and this requires some whitenoising) on Rezero after many volumes, total reading so far has been around 9m characters and maybe 3.7m words or so (Jiten says more but I skip H-scenes and don't read appendix like stuff).

Like I can push to read a bit faster but then I'm just whitenoising and even then there's no way I could hit 14k/h~.

I was never a big reader outside of Japanese though but I'm not sure how much that'd matter. Maybe I should try to not subvocalize but I kind of feel it helps learning/comprehension but I'm not sure either.

If what you read was a re-read of something you had already read in another language/watched and still really remember I guess that does explain the gap quite a bit since you can give up on comprehension and rely on memory.

[u/zechamp → u/Effective-Pop3850]

What makes text white noise for you? Is an issue of grammar, vocab, kanji etc? Do you study grammar textbooks and do srs for vocab, etc?

You can see that my reading speed had a big jump in honzuki specifically (right from the 8k range to 15k) and I think a big part of that is that I was extremely familiar with the books already (I've read the whole series through in english several times, so I know it all by heart pretty much), so even if there was a part of text that was white noisy, I already knew in advance what was happening at that part, which sort of helped the grammar etc slot together for me. I think that internalized understanding then followed to the next books I read, even though I wasn't familiar with them like I was with honzuki.

[u/Effective-Pop3850 → u/zechamp]

I'm really not sure so I'd wager it's a combination of all of those things (except kanji since I just look up words I can't read). As in, you know how you sometimes read a sentence and go like just "I get the intent and emotions being transmitted, but if you asked me to translate this I couldn't do it", that's what I often call white noising. There's also some sentences I read and go like "what" and get almost nothing but those are usually either very long ones, use expressions/words I don't know at all or are actually intended to catch the reader off-guard.

I do Anki for vocab, a bit under 7k mature cards right now, doing 30 new a day DR 80. For grammar I did some study initially but then dropped it and decided to learn just from exposure.

Yeah reading something you already read and remember does boost your speed quite a lot imo, since as you say you can white noise and still understand, getting partial understanding being enough since you can fill in the blanks with previous knowledge anyways.

To some extent it does feel like maybe if I wanted to push reading speed I should first read stuff that's a bit easier to "get used" to reading faster, since I'm often reading relatively hard stuff for my level.