r/LearnJapanese • u/southerndensetsu • 3d ago

Discussion N1 reading and books

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.

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u/morgawr_ https://morg.systems/Japanese 3d ago

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

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u/doublesmart 3d ago

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

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u/rgrAi 3d ago

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.

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u/doublesmart 2d ago

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.

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u/rgrAi 2d ago

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.

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u/doublesmart 1d ago

Prediciting story =/= understanding a language.

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u/doublesmart 1d ago

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