I’ve been slowly grinding through novels over the last 1.5 years and i’m approaching 1.7 million words read in Japanese. Things have definitely got easier but I am still nowhere near where i would like to be. At what point did things start to get easy enough where minimal effort was required? I’m starting to think this is 5 million+ for me but i have no idea.
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Personally, reaching 5 million was at the point that there doesn’t have to be much effort for looking up new words, etc. Rarely but it’s pretty smooth. (Chinese)
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Ah cool, I thought it would roughly be around that, thanks for confirming! Back to the grind!
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I am on the same boat as you guys. I have read about 2 million words in Korean and I feel like the percentage of unknown words takes forever to drop. I can read YA and genre fiction without too much difficulty, but it all depends on the plot and the author’s writing style. I guess I need to at least read double that to consider myself a fluent reader.
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I feel at almost exactly the same level! I’ve spend most of my time reading fiction so this is starting feel more comfortable but yes you’re so right, as soon as you switch to an unfamiliar genre it’s frustratingly difficult. I still have quite a lot of difficulty with news articles and casual internet speech. Improvements in listening and reading ability feel so slow at this point you’ve really got to have a faith in the process haven’t you.
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Im at 3.6million right about now in Japanese as well and all i can really say is that i still look a bunch up but it always just gets a bit easier over time mostly when you look back and realize how far you’ve come. I would imagine somewhere in the 5-10 million range things may start to change even more. Japanese is def not an easy language lol
There are some users on here that have over 30 million words of reading or more so i think most people vastly understatement how much it takes to really takes to get to the higher levels, myself included.
Don’t let it get ya down and just keep going!
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You get good at what you practise. Specifically, you learn the vocabulary related to the content you study. For me, I chose to focus on conversations (podcasts, YouTube videos, and TV series/movies), so I have mainly accumulated this vocabulary. But if you want to be good at reading books from various genres, you have to focus on this, as others have mentioned.
It also depends on which technique you use, as to what words read stat represents. In my stats of 5.0 million words read in Italian, for example, this includes all of the following techniques:
- ~300k words read extensively (paper books with no look-ups)
- ~750k words read extensively while listening to the audiobook (paper books no look-ups)
- 1M+ words read while watching TV series and movies (i.e. Italian movies with Italian subtitles - again no look-ups)
- reading lessons on LingQ and looking up unknown words (or alternatively reading bilingual books outside of LingQ)
- reading while listening to lessons on LingQ (with opportunity of look-ups)
- re-reading while listening lessons on LingQ (with look-ups)
So even though I have 5M words read in Italian, I still cannot read books unaided with much ease, mainly due to the gap in vocabulary. I have no focused on learning book vocabulary and therefore I have not learnt it. Though, I recently changed this to be my goal and have now transititioned my Italian study material from podcasts, YouTube, and Netflix (which I understand quite well) to books.
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I’m nearing 2 million words read in German (I don’t know if that’s considered a lot)
but I still feel like reading is a struggle. granted much easier than it used to be, but I do feel like I got a lot of improvement to make still and German is a much easier language than Japanese. If I had to guess for me 4 million then I will feel very comfortable. For Japanese maybe 6 million words read. (Just a guess of course)
I wish you much success in your Japanese journey! Enjoy the process.
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I have read 8.8 million words on Linq, of which 4.9 million represent a corpus of literary and historical works. I am currently reading a work of history on Holy Roman Emperor Carlo V and the short stories of Italo Calvino, the Cosmicomics. I could read these books in hard copy without a dictionary, though it would take a little more effort than it does with Linq, where I sometimes lazily click on old Lings instead of thinking carefully about what I am reading.
I just looked at my list of books read and I can remember that my 40th book went down pretty easily. At that point the corpus of books read was at 3.7 million words.
My target language is Italian, though, which has a lot of word root overlap with my native language, and I have an above average base of exposure to classical languages, which helps a lot.
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I’ve read 1.4 mil words in French. Hooray! It gets better slowly, though not as fast I would wish. I can read a French crime novel in two weeks.
It’s OK. I have recalibrated my expectations.
However, I would argue that language learning videos tend to oversell their programs.
Learning a language is a long-term game.
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I have read 1 million words in French on LingQ, and listened to quite a bit more than that outside LingQ. I can read French easily, though obviously there are technical terms and subtleties I still come across terms such as La feuille d’impôts which means the tax return, where I understand the individual words but not the composite meaning without looking it up. Obviously you come across more such vocabulary when reading domain specific documents.
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I wish to reach the same level! Despite Chinese characters being extremely difficult to memorize thousands of characters
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Using techniques like “shadowing” greatly accelerated my reading and listening comprehension. It’s helpful especially when you hit a plateau. You’ll find it explained here and also on YT. The idea is to first read in a low voice along with the spoken text, even if you don’t know all the vocabulary, and then study the text. If you don’t have an accompanying audiobook or a native speaker recording, some AI TTS services like ElevenLabs are pretty good.
Apart from this, when starting a new language, I would use the same text that I had already read in other languages. In my case, it’s “À la recherche…” - it never gets boring. This kickstarts the whole thing pretty nicely. I feel like my brain enjoys figuring out the alien syntax rules on its own while “decoding” the sentences. It also facilitates thinking in concepts rather than separate words. It gives you the idea how a particular language creates meaning and how a language works.
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You also need to know what your goal is. Be able to read or to talk?
I assume in many languages the talked and written languages are more or less different. At least it’s so with Finnish, which I study. Finnish spoken language is quite different from the written language (books).
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Hi. I do a lot of reading in Italian, too, almost entirely literature of the second half of the 20th century. I read and discuss it with my teacher, making it a small but wonderful book club. We’ve just finished La Parte di Lei by Alba di Cespedes and are starting Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone. I don’t know how many millions of words I have read but at this point the number of blue words is very small and often just a conjugated form I haven’t encountered or a new form of a known word with a preposition. Like you I can read outside of Lingq if there’s no digital version available, but I prefer Lingq for efficiency. It’s taken a lot of time to get to this point in my reading ability, and my speaking ability is much lower. It would be fun to talk to you about advanced reading in Italian,
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I recently reached 3M words read in Spanish. I also have tracked over 600 hours of listening. At this point I can see significant improvement between now and when I had 2M words read, but I still expect to see more improvement by 4M and 5M. I can read and comprehend smoothly while listening at 1.25X speed, and I can view/adjust lingQs without stopping the audio in most cases. Those few words per page I don’t understand would still slow me down if I wasn’t using lingQ.
In Japanese I would expect to require more words read to reach reading fluency (for lack of a better term), given that there are less free/cognate words for a native English speaker. Depending on how you acquire your kanji, you will be able to deduce more and more meanings for new words through those as you go, and even get better at guessing the proper pronunciations. I learned Japanese with much more weight on conversation and I didn’t track words read, so I can’t say much with respect to numbers, but I think 5M+ words read is a good goal for now, and you can adjust as you go!
I’m currently doing so with Spanish, using each million as a milestone to celebrate some intermediate achievement, reflect, and recalibrate. I think we all get hung up at times because we put in a lot of effort and it still takes so much time to become proficient. Recommending you enjoy the journey is perhaps cliché, but for me having these process oriented goals/milestones help me do so by focusing me on the now, rather than the 5M words read mountain. 
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What type of novel’s in Japanese have you been working through? any recommendations?
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Currently working through ハリーポッターとアズカバンの囚人 and the last book in コーヒーが冷めないうちに series called やさしさを忘れぬうちに.
Depending on your level, if you’re an upper beginner I would highly recommend starting with the magic tree house series. They’re fun, relatively short stories that exposes your to a lot of useful vocab commonly found in fiction.
Here’s my top 5 reads over the past year.
- ノルウェイの森
- コーヒーが冷めないうちに
- 八丈島と、猫と、大人のなつやすみ
- また、同じ夢を見ていた
- コンビニ人間
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I’m at 1.3M in Chinese… I was hoping that at 1M will be better… It was better according my HSK tests that I use for benchmarking, but wasn’t that big of a change… 5M is still a lot of time… 
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