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Reading Japanese

Improve Your Reading Comprehension

To facilitate better reading and fluency, this page will help you create a custom flashcard deck for a Japanese text you would like to read. The premise is that learning new words in isolation is not as effective as seeing them in context. However, in order to enjoy a piece of Japanese writing without needing to stop a look up every word, preparing ahead with some vocabulary lists will give you the chance to properly develop your reading comprehension skills and engage with the text at a "sentence by sentence" or even "paragraph by paragraph" level of understanding.

This page does not emphasize learning individual Kanji, and will not help you create an Anki deck for Kanji in any text you would like to read.

Introduction to Creating Flashcard Decks with Anki

Anki is a free and opensource program you can use to create custom flashcard decks. Before continuing, make sure you've made an account on AnkiWeb and have downloaded the desktop app to your PC / Mac. You will sync your deck with the web account and in turn can then sync your phone app.

In the context of this guide for reading Japanese, the focus will be on helping advanced learners create custom flashcard decks to prepare for reading native level texts. Anki uses the spaced repetition technique to help you focus on difficult to master words. The software is quite robust and has many other potential uses. You can read Anki's documentation if you want to learn more on how to use it effectively.

Find a Text You would Like to Read and Copy It

Paste your Text into NihongDera's Japanese word Parser

Copy all the Text on the NihongoDera page and Paste in the Text box Below

After NihongoDera has analyzed your text and loaded the results:

  1. Press ctrl+a to select all text on the results page of NihongoDera's analyzer.
  2. Press ctrl+c to copy all text
  3. Paste the text in the box below with ctrl+v
  4. Press "Parse This Text" to reformat the text so it can be used by Anki to create a flashcard deck.
  5. Press "Save to TSV" to save the text as a file you will upload to Anki.

*To see some advanced tips on preparing your file, jump to "Cleaning up your Anki Flashcard File"

Text Parsing and File Saving

Uploading Your New File to Anki

  1. Before you upload your plain text file. Open Anki on your desktop and create a deck for the file to be uploaded to. Name your deck after the the piece you are going to read to make it easy to find.
  2. After you've created a new deck. In the upper left of the menu bar choose File >> Import.
  3. An "Import File" window will appear. Under Import Options, make sure the deck you want to upload the file to is chosen.
  4. Click Import in the upper right, and and Close in the next window.

You now have a deck unique to the text you'd like to read.

Advanced - Cleaning up your flashcards before uploading them to Anki

NihongoDera's Text Analyzer will provide a definition for every word it detects in a text. This means that simple words, and even particles like は and が will have their own index card when you upload it to Anki. After you've uploaded your deck to Anki, you can edit the deck to remove cards for the words you don't need to study.

With Anki open go to:

  1. Browse
  2. In the new window, choose the deck you wanted to edit in the left pane under "Decks"
    1. Cards for the deck will appear on the right.
  3. Look for the grid near the top with headings like Sort Field, Card etc.
  4. Highlight a row. You can use arrow keys to move up and down to browse the cards.
  5. Press Ctrl+Delete to remove cards. Press Ctrl+z to undo if you made a mistake.

Some notes on the NihongoDera Text Analyzer

NihongoDera's Text Analyzer has a few quirks to be aware of:

  • Even if a word is written in kana in the text, you will often get the kanji for that word. This includes obscure kanji rarely used today, such as 此処 for ここ (here). This can be useful for older texts that use such kanji frequently.
  • For some words will have many definitions. For example: 上がる/agaru will have nearly 43 definitions! The analyzer can't tell by context which definition it is, so provides all of them.
  • For some words in kanji, you will get multiple readings. For example: 漁る/asaru (rummage, scrounge, etc.) will show あさる, すなどる, and いさる as readings. すなどる and いさる are no longer in use. In general you can assume the first suggested reading is appropriate.