How to Learn to Read Japanese (Without Waiting for Kanji to Be Finished)
The short answer
Start reading real Japanese the week you finish hiragana, and accept that you will understand very little of it. Reading is not a reward for finishing kanji; it is the activity that makes kanji stick, because a character met inside a sentence you wanted to understand is remembered and a character met on a flashcard often is not.
The mistake that costs the most time is the sequencing one: study kanji for a year, then begin reading. The learners who read badly from month one arrive at the same point sooner and enjoy the trip more.
Why Japanese reading stalls where other languages do not
In a European language you can read badly from the start because the alphabet is free. In Japanese there are three scripts in one sentence, and the hardest of them carries most of the meaning, so a beginner meeting ordinary text faces a wall that Spanish never puts up.
Two specific frictions cause the stall. Japanese does not put spaces between words, so finding where one word ends is itself a skill — and that skill is built largely by knowing which characters tend to start and end words. And a character's reading depends on the word it is in, so you cannot look up a kanji and pronounce the sentence; you have to identify the word first.
Both of those improve only through reading. Neither improves through more flashcards.
The three things a beginner can actually read
The material that works at the start is narrow, and knowing what it is saves months of frustration.
Anything with furigana. Furigana are the small kana printed beside kanji to give the reading, and they change the maths entirely: with them you can read at your grammar level instead of at your kanji level. Material aimed at Japanese children, and a good deal of manga, carries them.
Graded material written for learners. Text where the vocabulary and grammar are deliberately controlled lets you read at speed rather than decoding word by word, and speed is what turns reading into comprehension. NHK WORLD-JAPAN publishes free Japanese learning material, and free graded material of this kind is one of the few places where free genuinely beats paid.
Simplified news. Short, factual, repetitive vocabulary, and written for people whose Japanese is a work in progress. Its subject matter is the same every week, which sounds dull and is actually the point: repeated vocabulary is how reading speed is built.
What does not work at the start is a novel, a news site written for adults, or a video game with no furigana. Those are not harder versions of the same task; they are a different task.
How to read when you cannot read
The technique that separates people who progress from people who quit is narrow, repeated reading rather than broad, single-pass reading.
- Pick something short. A page, not a chapter.
- Read it once without looking anything up, and accept the fog.
- Read it again, looking up only the words that appear more than once.
- Read it a third time at whatever speed you can manage.
- Come back to the same page two days later.
The third and fifth steps are the ones that do the work, and they are the ones everybody skips. A page read four times over a week teaches more than four pages read once each, because the second reading is where the sentence structure becomes visible and the fourth is where it becomes fast.
What to do about lookup
Look words up, not characters. A dictionary that lets you search by drawing or by pasting text is a legitimate part of reading, and the purists who insist on suffering are optimising for a virtue nobody is measuring.
Where it goes wrong is when lookup replaces reading. If you are looking up more than roughly one word in ten, the text is too hard and you are doing vocabulary practice with extra steps — drop to something easier rather than grinding.
Keep a small note of words you met twice and had to look up both times. Those are the ones worth putting into spaced repetition; the rest will either recur naturally or do not matter yet.
Where kanji study fits alongside this
Spaced repetition and reading do different jobs and neither replaces the other. Review gives you the first hook — a rough meaning and one reading — and reading turns that hook into knowledge by showing the character in context, in a word, with a reason to care.
The practical arrangement: twenty minutes of review daily, whatever reading you can manage on top, and new characters coming from what you actually meet rather than from a list. The official reference point for "which characters are everyday" is the jōyō list, notified by the Japanese Cabinet on 30 November 2010 as a guide for kanji use in writing modern Japanese in general social life — but note that it is a guide rather than a curriculum, and real text will hand you characters outside it regularly.
How long before it feels like reading
Long, and the change is sudden rather than gradual. Most people describe a period of grinding decoding followed by a fairly abrupt shift where sentences arrive as units — and that shift is a function of volume read, not of months elapsed.
This is why the advice above is about quantity and repetition rather than method. There is no technique that gets you there without the pages, and there is no product that sells the pages. What products can do is sequence the grammar and the characters, which is the subject of which Japanese tool does which job.
A reading plan that survives contact with real life
Fifteen minutes a day, on the same short text, for a week, then a new short text. That is it, and it beats every elaborate schedule because it is small enough to do on a bad day.
Put it alongside daily kanji review and the grammar reading that the best way to learn Japanese sets out, and reading stops being the skill you are postponing and becomes the one that pulls the others along. Start this week, at a page a week, badly.