Reading Japanese With a Dictionary, or Without

Two coherent methods

Intensive reading takes a short passage and works through it completely: every unknown word looked up, every structure understood, often with the passage reread afterwards. It builds precision and vocabulary.

Extensive reading takes a large amount of easier material and covers it without stopping. It builds speed, consolidates what is already known, and develops tolerance for not understanding everything.

Both are legitimate and they build different things, which is why the question is not which is better.

Every row differs, which is why material chosen for one purpose usually does not serve the other.

The failure in between

The common pattern is neither: material chosen because it is interesting, which is too hard to read fluently, read with occasional lookups, which is too few to understand it properly.

The result is slow, unsatisfying and builds little of either quality. Recognising it is the main value of separating the two methods.

• Reading too hard for fluency and looking up too little for comprehension.
• Stopping often enough to break the flow, not often enough to understand.
• Finishing a passage with a vague sense of what it said.
• Sessions that feel like work and produce little.
• The fix is choosing a method first, then the material.

Doing intensive reading well

Intensive reading works when the passage is short enough to finish properly. A page is usually plenty, and the value comes from completeness rather than from volume.

Rereading after the lookups is the step that converts the work into fluency, and it is the step most often skipped.

• Choose a short passage, a page or less.
• Read once without stopping, to get the shape.
• Read again, looking up everything that blocks understanding.
• Note the words that seem likely to recur, not all of them.
• Read a final time at speed, with no support.

Doing extensive reading well

Extensive reading requires easier material than most learners will willingly choose, because easy material feels unproductive. It is the harder discipline of the two for that reason.

The test is whether you can follow without stopping. If you cannot, the material is not serving this purpose, however interesting it is.

• Choose material you can follow without stopping.
• Do not look up words unless the passage becomes incomprehensible.
• Read for a set time rather than a set amount.
• Abandon a text that is too hard rather than fighting it.
• Expect to miss things; that is the method working, not failing.

Which most learners need more of

Almost all learners do too little extensive reading, because it feels less productive: nothing is being looked up, nothing is being added to a deck, and the material is easy.

What it produces is reading speed, which is what the JLPT rewards, what makes native material accessible, and what turns reading from an exercise into something you do for its own reasons.

• If reading is slow, do more extensive reading.
• If comprehension is patchy, do more intensive reading.
• If you avoid reading entirely, the material is too hard.
• If you never learn new words from reading, add intensive sessions.
• Most learners need the first of these.

Choosing before you start

The practical discipline is to decide which kind of session this is before opening the text, and to choose material accordingly.

That single decision prevents the in-between failure, and it makes both kinds of session more satisfying: an intensive session that ends in understanding, and an extensive session that ends in having read something.

Over time the two feed each other, since intensive reading supplies the vocabulary that makes extensive reading possible, and extensive reading supplies the speed that makes intensive reading less necessary.

Decide the method, then the material. Choosing the material first is what produces the compromise that serves neither purpose.