You can learn Japanese by reading — but Japanese changes the order of operations. In Spanish or French, the alphabet lets you sound out a page on day one and the only wall is vocabulary. In Japanese, the page itself is part of the lesson: three scripts mixed together, no spaces between words, and kanji whose readings you may not know yet.
The good news is that Japanese also ships with built-in help that most languages do not have. Furigana — small kana printed above kanji — can carry you over characters you have not learned. A mature graded-reader system, tadoku, starts below the first textbook level. And the national broadcaster publishes real news rewritten in easy Japanese, free, every day.
This is the method post for the Japanese line. For choosing specific graded-reader series and packs, see our companion guide to Japanese graded readers; this page is about how to read, in what order, and what to do when a page fights back.
What makes Japanese reading different
Three differences decide everything else.
First, the scripts. A normal sentence mixes hiragana (grammar and native words), katakana (loanwords and emphasis) and kanji (meaning-carrying characters borrowed from Chinese). You do not need all three at once: hiragana comes first, katakana alongside it, and kanji can arrive gradually because beginner texts print furigana over them.
Second, there are no spaces. Word boundaries are something you learn to see — the script changes themselves are the first clue, because a kanji starting after hiragana usually starts a new word. This is a skill reading builds faster than any drill: after a few hundred pages, your eyes chunk sentences on their own.
Third, kanji readings are contextual. The same character is read differently in different words, which is why memorising isolated readings before reading tends to disappoint. Reading shows you the character inside real words, repeatedly, which is the form in which you will actually meet it.
What you need before page one
Less than you think, but not nothing.
Learn hiragana until you can read it slowly without a chart. Level Start and Level 0 tadoku books assume exactly that — nothing more. Add katakana in the following weeks; loanwords are everywhere, and guessing them is free vocabulary.
Pick up the most basic grammar as you go: the polite desu/masu style that graded readers use, and the common particles は, が, を, に, へ, と, の, も. You do not need a course first. Ten minutes with a reference when a pattern keeps appearing beats a month of preparation, because the pattern is already in front of you in real sentences.
Do not wait until you "know enough kanji". With furigana texts, kanji knowledge is an output of reading, not an entry ticket. Waiting reverses the causality and is the most common reason learners postpone reading for a year.
Start with tadoku, not with a novel
Tadoku （多読， "read a lot") is the method built for exactly this starting point, stewarded by the NPO Tadoku Supporters. Its four rules: start at a level you can enjoy; do not use a dictionary while reading; skip what you cannot guess; and if a book stops being fun, drop it and choose another.
The ladder runs from Level Start — stories of roughly 200 words or fewer — through Levels 0 to 5. The NPO publishes a shelf of these books free on its Free Tadoku Books page: read them online, download the PDFs, and in many cases listen to audio or watch a YouTube reading. Filters let you choose hiragana-only books or books with furigana.
When you are ready to spend, the supervised series are still the backbone — ASK's packs cover Levels 0–4 at ¥2,300 per pack, Taishukan continues to Level 5 at ¥2,400–2,500 per pack, and the NPO's own Nihongo Tadoku Books sell individually at ¥450–600 (prices and ranges checked against tadoku.org on 12 October 2026). Our Japanese graded readers guide compares them properly.
Resist the jump to a native novel at this stage. A novel assumes thousands of words and hundreds of kanji; a Level 1 reader assumes a few hundred words and carries you with pictures and furigana. Both are "real Japanese" — only one of them is readable this month.
A ladder you can actually climb
Step 1 — Free tadoku (weeks 1–4). Read Level Start and Level 0 free books until finishing one feels easy. Rereading a favourite is progress, not cheating.
Step 2 — Graded readers (months 2–6). Climb one level at a time. Move up when a book at your level feels boring in the good way — you are following the story, not decoding it.
Step 3 — NHK News Web Easy. NHK, Japan's public broadcaster, rewrites the day's news in simpler Japanese at NHK News Web Easy: shorter sentences, furigana on kanji, explanations of hard words, and audio read aloud. It is the first "real world" text most learners can genuinely finish, and a natural daily habit once graded readers feel small.
Step 4 — Manga and familiar stories. Manga with furigana, or a novel you have already read in translation, bridges to native material: the plot you know carries the language you do not.
Step 5 — Free classics, when you are ready. Aozora Bunko (青空文庫） is Japan's public-domain library — more than 17,700 works as of January 2026, per its catalogue summary — free to read and download. Its classics are a destination, not a starting point: older language makes them harder than modern graded texts.
How to run a reading session
Keep it short and finishable: 10 to 20 minutes, one short book or one NHK article.
Read for the story first, with the dictionary closed — that is tadoku's rule, and it matches what we advise for any language in should you look up every word when reading. Afterwards, if a word appeared three times and blocked you each time, look that one up and save it. Recurrence is the filter: a word the text itself repeats is a word your next book will repeat too.
If you read digitally, Lucerna imports EPUB, PDF and TXT files you are authorised to use — check that a PDF's text is selectable, since image-only scans cannot be looked up. Lucerna supplies no books. In a session you can look up a word, ask for a sentence analysis, and save recurring words; its AI features use your own API key, so provider charges may apply, and the desktop version also supports local models. A free guest can use 1 book and save 5 words; a free account allows 5 books and 200 saved words.
Your first week
- Day 1: Finish the hiragana chart test — read a Level Start sample aloud, slowly.
- Day 2: Read one free tadoku book end to end, dictionary closed.
- Day 3: Reread it, then read a second book at the same level.
- Day 4: Add katakana practice; read a hiragana-only or furigana book.
- Day 5: Read two short books; note any word you met three times.
- Day 6: Try one NHK News Web Easy headline story with its audio.
- Day 7: Reread the week's favourite. If it felt easy, start the next level.
Questions learners ask
Do I need to learn kanji before I start reading Japanese?
No. Start with hiragana and furigana texts; kanji readings are learned most durably inside words you meet while reading.
Are tadoku levels the same as JLPT levels?
No. Levels Start and 0–5 are the NPO's own scale. Distributors publish rough crosswalks to JLPT, but they are approximations, not official equivalences.
Is NHK News Web Easy suitable for complete beginners?
It is a step-3 text, not a step-1 text: try it once you read kana comfortably and have finished some graded readers. Its furigana and audio make it the gentlest real news available.
When can I read a real novel?
After the top graded levels, bridge with manga or a familiar novel in translation before attempting an unfamiliar native novel — and expect Aozora Bunko classics to feel harder than modern fiction.
Levels, series prices and the free-books shelf checked against tadoku.org, and the Aozora Bunko size against its catalogue summary, on 12 October 2026. The routine and ladder are our suggestions, not the NPO's or NHK's guarantees.