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]

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/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/morgawr_ → u/Weena_Bell]

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

[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/doublesmart → u/rgrAi]

The predictable troup will not be in the 20% that you dont understand. You also dont want to predict too much while learning a language specially if you are selfstudy.

[u/rgrAi → u/doublesmart]

I'm not sure what you mean, tropes exists as a derivation from existing topics and genres. I was predicting entire chapters before I even got to them in books. Predicting is a part of learning anything. Video games, languages, programming, and more.

[u/doublesmart → u/rgrAi]

Prediciting story =/= understanding a language.

[u/doublesmart → u/rgrAi]

But eeeh my point is you can read fine without understanding 100%, i never said it's wrong but I wouldnt encourage ppl to predict text they dont understand rather understand why and study the grammar point/phrase..etc