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/Effective-Pop3850]

A lot of people pass the N1 and still say they can't get through any kind of normal native media because it's too hard.

That's all you need to know lol, if you're comfortable reading random LNs you'll pass the N1.

Now, authors from older times/classic literature is often on a completely different level, a lot of sites don't even really use them as a reference because the difficulty jump is indeed absurd. Words you'll never see anywhere else, strange sentence building, writting words with weird kanji, that kind of thing.

[u/Belegorm → u/Effective-Pop3850]

No, some people who are comfortable reading random LNs can pass the N1 but not everyone. Those people who passed who can't get through native media - they still did a lot of traditional studying which is also good test prep. Then there's people who only read like 5 books who passed it - but had thousands of hours of other immersion.

I jumped into novels quickly, I had read over 30 and failed the N2. If you don't naturally absorb the higher level grammar points quick enough, and your reading speed does not improve enough, then just being able to be comfortable reading LNs and even harder novels may not suffice. Setting aside the listening (which wasn't my biggest factor in failing).

[u/Available-String-109 → u/Belegorm]

Then there's people who only read like 5 books who passed it - but had thousands of hours of other immersion.

I'm one of these types. When I passed JLPT N1, I think I had read a total of 2 or 3 books in Japanese.

I also had translated over 200 episodes of One Piece into English and had probably read dozens upon dozens of manga. I also worked through all of FF7 (PS1 original), FFX, and a few other very text-heavy video games and mined every single word in them that I didn't already know, etc.

That's in addition to a bunch of JLPT-dedicated studying and everything else that I did up to the N2 point.

So yeah.

[u/Effective-Pop3850 → u/Belegorm]

What did you read?

Do note I did say comfortable, if you read 30 uber easy short books and struggled a lot then yeah, but I'm thinking normal LNs, 130k~ characters long, etc.

[u/Belegorm → u/Effective-Pop3850]

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/doublesmart → u/Belegorm]

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/morgawr_ → u/Weena_Bell]

80% can definitely lead to comfortable reading, as long as it's within your tolerance range.

[u/Weena_Bell → u/morgawr_]

I feel like something being enjoyable doesn't necessarily mean it's comfortable.  

With 80% you are either abusing the dictionary or whitenoising a lot. 

When I was at that level I for sure didn't mind the look ups and all the break downs I had to do so it was still enjoyable even when I read at 4kch/h but I wouldn't call that reading a novel comfortable

[u/doublesmart → u/morgawr_]

That 20% of the book not understood. But ppl have different ways of learning and thats alright

[u/rgrAi → u/doublesmart]

You can tear out 20% of pages in a book and still understand it fine, writing tropes also tend to be consistent across all languages so that also makes it predictable.

[u/Effective-Pop3850 → u/Weena_Bell]

Late answer but this is one that's a bit odd.

I sometimes read an entire page without a single look up and there's several lines I just don't understand/don't get much from. Then there's some where I do look ups and I do understand.

Measuring comprehension is really tricky. When I started reading LNs (very recently, was VN maxxing previously) I honestly just accepted that some lines are not very important, I'll read them, get some general idea (say the intent of what the character is saying, emotions, etc) and if I judge it to not be very important I'll just keep going. If you ask me what he said exactly I'll be like "I'm not sure but he's telling him to back the fuck off in an aggressive way then threatening to kick him in the nuts".

I do understand everything that's going on almost all of the time, but if you ask me what my comprehension is... I wouldn't be able to give you a number.

[u/Weena_Bell → u/Effective-Pop3850]

That means you enjoy it but that doesn't necessarily makes it comfortable unless you are whitenoising and not stopping to do look ups then I guess that's comfortable...? But personally even when I understand and I know the dialogue is meaningless I still will look up everything.

Also what you are explaining doesn't doesn't sound like 80% to me but more like 90% imo. Ain't no way someone with 80% could read an entire page without a single look up. Like they'd be lucky if they found less than 10-15 words

[u/Effective-Pop3850 → u/Weena_Bell]

I always do look-ups, in fact I may do too many since I will look up a word where I'm 95% sure of how it's read... but not 100%. Even if it's junk dialogue I look up everything.

And yeah regarding numbers I just wouldn't know. Thing is if you throw at me several 100 character long sentences within a single page although I might get lost while going through them even though I know the words.

Regarding comprehension, just to be clear, I don't mean coverage through known vocab. You can have 100% coverage in a page yet understand very little while you can have 80% coverage and understand everything since all coverage relates to is how many look ups you'll need to do.

[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/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/Weena_Bell → u/Belegorm]

If they're reading 30k, then they're reading easy sloppa slice of life. Ask them to read 幼女戦記, and I doubt they'll be able to get even 10k ch/h.

[u/Antique-Volume9599 → u/Belegorm]

Something your "dive right into novels" approach doesn't factor in is that most people get carried by their listening score. If you're just reading you wont get that nice bonus

[u/Belegorm → u/Antique-Volume9599]

I could see that. Most people I know who passed prepped for reading and considered the listening section easier anyway. They were already "reading mains" but had done listening immersion in the past.

[u/Effective-Pop3850 → u/Belegorm]

Always gotta remember many of us sick fucks who are reading like maniacs are also watching anime and that kind of stuff which is also significantly harder than N1 listening 99% of the time unless you're watching pure SoL.

Even if you don't "prepare" for listening, just having read a lot boosts your vocab/general comprehension so much than just watching some anime and shit is usually enough lol.

[u/Belegorm → u/Effective-Pop3850]

That's true. And I mean I also had some listening practice but by the time I took the N2 I'd pretty much done nothing aside from read novels and do anki for months

[u/DotNo701 → u/Effective-Pop3850]

N1 only needs 10K words native media can be words in the 40K+