Reading & Mining

Why even read? Why not just listen? Don’t get me wrong: you can still become plenty fluent with nothing but variety shows as your immersion material. Especially if you watch them 24/7 for 5 years straight. However, you need a way of encountering rarer words: spoken vocabulary of any language is fairly limited compared to written. If you do nothing but listen to the “everyday language“, you’ll be learning 5-10 new Japanese words pretty much every day for the rest of your life (or, if you are a professional polyglot, ignoring yourself not understanding 50% of the language while claiming to be native-level fluent for the rest of your life).

Find something to read in Japanese. It should be original (not translated/localized) content intended for native speakers (i.e. not for learners of the language). It can be virtually anything, but I strongly recommend manga, preferably with full furigana (or at least something with full furigana). Please don’t start with (light) novels: even video games with furigana would be a better starting point.

Most likely you are going to have to torrent… pretty much everything. So execute a certain degree of caution. For all internet heroes out there: it is not stealing because the content you are getting is not available in your country anyway (or even if it is — not in the format you need). Plus, in 99% of cases even if you knew Japanese well enough to navigate through Japanese digital storefronts, they wouldn’t accept your payment method anyway. Even digital (🤦‍♂️) commerce is all regionally locked these days. Have you ever tried registering a Japanese PSN account and buying something with your credit card? Yeah. So calm your tits, pirate hunters. You may not realize it, but due to regional locking of content and bs politics of international distribution, most of all media content ever made can only be acquired by torrenting.

The only tracker you are going to need for Japanese is called Nyaa. Just google it and the wikipedia page should tell you its current domain. Actually, don’t google anything: switch to DuckDuckGo if you would like a smaller and potentially slightly less evil company to pretend not to track you. If you are worried about your ISP spying on you, consider using a VPN. Free or paid — doesn’t really make much difference in terms of security (at the end of the day the paid ones can’t be trusted any more than the free ones, which is to say none of them can be trusted), but utilization will be slightly different. A paid VPN is likely to be as fast as your “open” connection, plus you can just leave it on forever. A free VPN is likely to be noticeably slower than your “open” connection, and (with a very few exceptions) you are going to be dealing with monthly data caps (still, should be more than enough if you use it just for exploring places with the good stuff).

ThePiratebay is garbage fire: there is pretty much nothing there but porn ads and one billion dead listings.

If you don’t know what torrenting is, I don’t think I can help you here any better than literally the entire rest of the internet at your disposal. The only recommendation I can give you is that client-wise you should probably go with qBitttorrent, and if somehow it slows down your computer to the point of it not even being operational anymore, go with uTorrent (its whole thing is that it’s supposed to be light, but the client itself has ads and the installer comes with optional bloatware disguised as non-optional. disgusting. but the client itself ain’t bad).

Manga and comic books are often distributed in the CBZ/CBR archives, but even when it’s a simple ZIP/7z/RAR archive I still recommend using a dedicated reader for nerds — it’ll make the reading experience a lot better and easier. On PC and Mac I recommend taking a look at YACReader. On iOS the best free reader is iComix. I just checked and there is also a reader called iComics now — that’s not the one I’m talking about.
update: I have several gripes with iComix now (still the best free reader on iOS tho).

1. 🖕 (probably fixed in later versions but since my iPad is pretty old I cannot update the app) Occasionally ZIP archives just don’t import correctly. iComix will unpack it, but for each page it will create an empty one and put it at the start. So if there is 200 pages in the archive, in iComix it becomes 400, with first 200 containing nothing (which may trick you into thinking that the whole thing is broken, but it is not: the actual pages just start at 201). Not the end of the world, but the annoying part is that I have absolutely no idea what’s causing it. At first I thought it was the macOS’s hidden “dot” files. No. Then I thought I traced it down to pages being in sRGB. But no, that too got disproved eventually. Absolutely freakish bug. If it annoys you too much, there is another reader called ComicFlow that doesn’t have it (also free but a bit more jenky and significantly less slick, but totally usable and also without ads). In my experience hidden macOS’s files are not confusing iComix at all, so don’t waste your time trying to clean up archives of stuff that you can’t see.
2. 🖕 If some ZIP archives unpack for you with random gibberish symbols in the file names where kanji and kana should — you need a better unarchiver. The thing, however, is that iComix needs one as well. Those archives will never import into iComix correctly (random pages will be missing, out of order, and they can even corrupt other perfectly fine archives importing with them in the same batch). Solution: unpack all archives on your computer first and re-pack them yourself before sending to iComix.
3. 🖕 Same thing goes for archives that contain any files that iComix cannot read (safe for the hidden macOS files, and maybe even any hidden files period). If you didn’t compress the ZIP file yourself, definitely check it for garbage if you’re encountering problems: there is probably some txt or html file there with the releaser’s credentials.
4. 🖕 Not being able to turn pages from right to left is more annoying than I initially thought. What’s even more annoying is that if you are in the 2-page landscape mode, since pages go from left to right — 2-page spreads are always ruined (the right page is always on the left, the left one is always on the right).
5. 🖕 Not being able to rename “folders” is pretty stupid. Altho the app sorta automatically fixes this problem by allowing creation of new “folders” you can name… and yeah, you cannot rename those either. That’s first-party Apple app territory of having a jenky, unintentional, borderline lucky workaround to an extremely basic oversight.

If you are looking for light novels, always prioritize text-based formats (as opposed to blurry scanned image file-based formats) like EPUB and 青空文庫. EPUB is a pretty universal formal for ebooks, and 青空文庫 is a format invented by a Japanese preservation library website of the same name (due to how easy it is to work with, it is used by other people as well now). Feel free to check out said library, by the way: it’s free, but it’s mostly pretty old stuff that went public domain. However, it obviously goes without saying, but: most books don’t have furigana, and older books are no exception.

EPUB is very easy to open: most systems come with tools for that (example: iBooks for macOS and iOS), for any other system there are dozens of reader apps out there. If you have a hardware reader — EPUB is literally its main thing. Unless you are rocking a Kindle: I think without some hackage they only read the amazon’s proprietary format in which come the books you buy off the kindle store. What a great consumer-friendly piece of technology, can’t wait to buy the biggest, most expensive one.

For 青空文庫 you are definitely going to have to find a reader app, and it’s even possible that it’ll come with Japanese-only interface. I don’t have a recommendation for you on this one: I only read on my iPad, which is pretty old and I actually can’t install new-ish apps on it (except for the ones I already have in “purchased”, in which case I’ll be allowed to download older versions). So the only old-ish 青空文庫 reader I could install is pretty old and a bit buggy: it doesn’t recognize the entire “package” of an 青空文庫 “file” — it only reads the text file portion of it — so you end up without images.

You may occasionally find some books in just pure TXT format: an ebook reader will make sense of it, but you won’t get any furigana or even formatting (or images, obviously).
You may find some older books in PDF (especially for children): those are usually pretty low-quality scans (partially due to being old — no one really does books in PDF these days), so unless it’s a book you are specifically looking for I don’t recommend bothering with anything in PDF.

Also get Documents by Readdle if you are on iOS.

OK, where was I? Oh, yeah. So… Read the piece of media you chose to the best of your ability: one word at a time, one sentence at time. This process is often referred to as “intensive reading”. I prefer calling it reading, because that’s how people read. The opposite, passive way of reading is called diagonal reading by normal people and “extensive reading” by ajatt&friends. Reading is going to be your main way of mining, which is probably the most important part of acquiring vocab and grammar, which is kinda the whole point of immersion. Technically you can immerse without mining, but it doesn’t work very well for languages like Japanese and Chinese, where reading and speaking are absolutely separate skills. So how does reading in a language you don’t speak look?

• Use a dictionary to look up words that you don’t know. You could either take notes on the meanings and reading (for many-many words there could be dozens of meanings — try to condense your understanding of them to their essence), or just leave tabs open with all the words you are looking up and later add them to your SRS to learn and remember (you may think you’ve already just learned the word, but trust me — you haven’t, unless we are talking about something extremely basic, common (tree, dog, day, etc), or containing kanji/portions you know already). Also, since over time (a rather short time, to be honest) you are going to forget almost everything that is not in your SRS library (except for super basic/common things), you might as well don’t bother with the whole note taking and just add words to SRS. You ain’t going to take and review notes on 20000 words anyway, trust me. And also once you realize that you’ve forgotten pretty much all that is in your notes, you will probably want to add them all to SRS anyway. The hell is SRS? On that later, let’s finish reading first. For now let’s assume all your new words are sitting in open browser tabs.

• Use the power of the internet to look up grammar that you don’t know or that doesn’t make much (or any) sense to you. Just type the whatever grammar you want to learn about + the word “grammar”. I recommend having a notebook just for writing short lesson-like grammar explanations for yourself. Maybe bookmark the grammar explanation webpages that you had to look up more than once.

• To save yourself some sanity points, speed up the process, and start making your brain work in the essential for immersion way, once you’ve acquired a bit of vocabulary — start trying to figure out meanings of the words you don’t understand based on the context and surrounding words that you do understand. Half of the time — simply assume the meaning, or just say “eh, screw it”, flat out skip the word or even the sentence and move on to figuring out or mining the next thing. As long you can still follow the plot, occasional skip is not only acceptable but even recommended (even though I think you should only “skip” the words that you can figure on the fly). Otherwise the slow pace of reading like that will get rather demotivating and annoying. Also, when it is clear that you are looking at an expression I still recommend looking it up even if you know all the words in it (the whole thing is probably in the dictionary, and probably doesn’t mean what it looks like it means).