Common Challenges Faced By Learners When Reading Japanese and How To Overcome Them

When you start reading in Japanese you are going to find it very hard, and you will come across a lot of common challenges.

These are totally normally and faced by most people, so I will go through some of the main ones you are likely to face so that you can be prepared for them and know how to overcome them when they do inevitability happen.

Not Knowing The Japanese Letters Well Enough

Probably the first issue you will come across when reading is just not knowing the Japanese letters well enough.

I think we forget just how comfortable we are at reading in English until we are forced not to and reading in Japanese will really show this up.

You have probably learned hiragana and katakana and while a lot of it is straight forward, it is still new to you and your brain will occasionally get confused. Some letters look similar, such as めor  ぬ and you will mix these up from time to time or just generally forget what a letter is or get it complexly confused with another one.

You are going to read a word and it just won’t sound right in your head, or you will be like “I don’t know this word” but really you have just read a letter wrong and it’s thrown you off.

Eventually this problem will fade, but it can certainly happen a lot in the early days.

Or You Will Mistake The Sentence Particles For Part Of A Word

Sentence particles are also going to throw you off and cause you problems too. This can happen by just thinking the particle is part of a word, and then you read it wrong and it might take you a few seconds to realise what is happening.

However, probably a bigger issue is the fact that some particles are pronounced differently when they are used as a particle.

The most common is は which is pronounced “ha” when it’s a letter in a word, but as a sentence particle it is pronounced “wa” …I will often see this as a particle and say it wrong as “ha” …or see it in a word and pronounce it wrong as “wa”.

It’s annoying, but it happens, especially as a beginner.  

Not Knowing Enough Kanji

Kanji …or should I say the lack of Kanji knowledge is going to be your biggest challenge when reading in Japanese. It will not take you long to see kanji when you are reading and it can make life extremely difficult.

At least in languages like English, if you don’t know a word, you can still read it and move on, which won’t be the case with kanji. You will probably not know the meaning of the kanji, and you certainly won’t know how to pronounce which is really going to stop you in your tracks.

Some reading materials will add the hiragana above the kanji, so you can at least know how to read the character (this is called furigana) and while this is helpful, you still do need to learn the kanji.

Learning kanji isn’t hard, but it does take effort. There are around 2000 core ones that you need to know …so it’s going to be tough, but you can do it.

Really you just need to grind through learning the kanji and the more effort you put into this, the easier you will start to find reading.

You Will Get Kanji Wrong

While knowing more kanji is better …it can lead to mistakes. The more kanji you see, the more you will start to notice a lot of similarities between them and this can cause you to recognise them incorrectly. You will see a kanji and mistakenly think is a different one and now what you are reading makes no sense.

You will also find kanji are paired together to form new words, so you may recognise one of the kanji, or maybe both, but you will not know there meaning when they are paired together and this can cause all sorts of little mistakes.

This isn’t really anything to worry about, but you will notice it does happen and the more experience you get with each kanji, the less likely this is to happen.  

(You can read more about – How Do You Actually Read Japanese Kanji?)

Generally Not Knowing Enough Vocabulary

Knowing the letters and kanji are great, but really you need to know actual words and a lack of vocabulary will cause you to struggle with reading.

If you are reading something and you don’t know most of the words then you are not really going to understand what you are looking at.

This is of course inevitable as a beginner and your goal should be to increase your vocabulary as quickly as you can. It is really as simple as the more words you know, the easier you will find reading.

(You can read more about – The Role Of Reading In Expanding Vocabulary In Japanese)

Vertical Reading Is Hard

Traditional Japanese is actually written vertically, which is confusing.

Everything is a bit backwards and this simple shift in perspective seems to make things really hard. You have probably spent all your life reading rows of text from left to right (which you are doing now when reading this) so when you have to change this, it can seem very jarring.

Japanese is written up and down the page in columns. You start in the top right hand corner and work your way down, then you move on to the next column to the left and repeat.  

Luckily most modern text is written in the left to right style we are used to in English, but you will come across this vertical style from time to time and it does feel strange. I would imagine its gets easier with practice, but I still struggle with this a lot.  

The Lack Of Spaces In Between Words Can Be Overwhelming

Japanese also lacks a space bar …so all the words are just mashed into each other in one big long string.

When you first start out this is a nightmare. You have no real idea when one words end and the next begins and it can be quite overwhelming.

Luckily, you will quickly notice that the three writing systems do kind of help you with this, you will find that one word will be in hiragana for example, and you can tell the next word has started as it will now use kanji. It takes a little time to adjust your eyes to this, but it will happen.

You will also start to get use to how sentence particles break things up and soon you won’t really be bothered by the lack of spaces.

Some Fonts Can Be Difficult To Read

This will sound strange, but the Japanese fonts can be drastically different and some of them will make reading quite difficult.

This is especially true for the more handwritten looking fonts, they just make everything harder to recognise.

I personally really struggle with this. I look at some letters and can’t work out what letter it actually is. It’s very annoying.

I also find it hard to read the text when it is small and not is not because of my eyesight. It is just hard to see the different lines of kanji and it feels like a few different ones are kind of melted into one when I look at them. I generally find the bigger the text the easier it is to read.

Although, when you think of kids books in English, it’s always a larger font, so maybe this is a universal thing and the better you get, the smaller and uglier fonts you can handle.  

You Will Be Painfully Slow At Reading

I think one of the biggest challenges you will face is just coming to terms with your complete inability to read efficiently.

Reading in English is so easy for us, we don’t even realise we are doing it most of the time. You just look at a page and scan it and you get the message …this doesn’t happen with Japanese when you are a beginner.

You have to take your time and look at every word, slowly and try to understand and move on. Reading a simple sentence takes conscious effort and it is slow …painfully slow.

Of course you will speed up with practice but there is going to be a period of time where you suck, and you kind of need to accept that and work through it. 

How Do You Overcome This? – Practice More

If you look at any of the challenges I have discussed above they can all be solved with one simple solution …practice more.

You lack experience when it comes to reading in Japanese …so do more. The more you practice the better you will get and these problems I have discussed will start to fade.

I have written about this in more detail in this article – How To Improve Reading In Japanese

Don’t Give Up

The last challenge I will talk about is staying consistent. I have already mentioned how you are going to suck for a while, let alone the other issues on top …this is all a recipe for wanting to quit.

It’s understandable, it’s hard and you are going to struggle, but it’s super important that you do not give up.

If you keep going and struggle with the silly mistakes, you will slowly make progress. Staying consistent and continually trying to make progress will work and you will get better.

Everything I have discussed here can be overcome, you just need to stick at it and don’t give up.

Conclusion  

As you can see, there are a lot of different little challenges you will face when reading in Japanese, but you can overcome all of these and hopefully you can see that while it may be hard, it is something you can achieve.

It really is worth the effort to get better at reading in Japanese, it will help your overall language skills and just feel good knowing you struggled through and made progress.