I didn’t know about the kanji restriction but that makes sense.

As far as readings, yeah, you’ll definitely see some wacky ones. There’s also a lot names that use ateji and spell things phonetically with kanji like 真理亜 (Maria).

Yeah, it’s uncommon, but I’ve seen that そら reading used in other places too, but it’s mainly been in manga, anime, videogames, like in your example.

I wonder if it was a relatively recent fad to read it that way (like in the past 20 years or so?)

In the visual novel 9-episode, there’s a kind of a meta comment about that unusual reading.

One of the characters in the visual novel is a teenage girl who was born with the 天 name and そら reading. She intensely hates this name because because everyone usually just calls her てん instead of そら. She describes her name as a 厨二ネーム and she blames her parents for trying to be too edgy, like a 厨二病 teenager edge-lord who has read too much manga and comes up with cringe-worthy names thinking they are cool-sounding but they are not.

Because of that 厨二ネーム, she thinks that’s the reason why she’s grown up with an eccentric personality, and does strange goofy things, all because of the edge-lord-sounding name. She vows that when she becomes an adult, she’ll change her name to something more conventional.

The 9-episode visual novel came out a few years ago, so the girl’s parents might have grown up reading manga like Bleach. so I wondered if this was a kind of meta-joke on chuuni-souding names with weird readings.

I laughed when I read the teenage girl’s rant about her name because 厨二病 is something you usually attach to teenagers, but here, the teenager is criticizing her adult parents for being like that, so it’s a kind of role-reversal.

I read on a Kindle Paperwhite with these custom third-party dictionaries installed.

I also read on my iPhone and iPad using Immersion Reader with Yomichan-formatted dictionaries installed (I use a ton of dictionaries for better word coverage, both J-E and monolingual dictionaries.

The advantage of using Immersion Reader is that you just simply touch the word, instead of selecting and highlighting it, so look-ups are quicker. Also in addition to installing multiple dictionaries, you can install frequency lists, pitch accent info, grammar guides, etc. When you look up a word, it’ll search through everything you’ve install, so if you have pitch accent info and frequency lists installed, you can see the pitch accent of the word you touched, including the frequency number to help determine if it’s a word you want to learn.

Then you can save the word to your word list (along with the definition and the sentence containing the word) and later export to Anki.

There also also third party tools that let you export your words from Kindle devices to Anki as well.

Note: some words with furigana may still be difficult to look up correctly on the Kindle and also Immersion Reader, if the formatting of the furigana is weird (a combination of the HTML code and the CSS styling). Sometimes the furigana isn’t clearly separated from the word, but instead jumbled together, so the dictionary may not be able to find the word.

To get around this, Immersion Reader has a search function that let you paste in the word (provided you copied it first), so you can fix the spelling (usually it means removing the furigana from the word) and it’ll search through all the dictionaries so you can add it to your word list.

Usually kanji-compound words are fine, but some words with kunyomi reading with a single furigana over it may cause some issues, but it depends on the book, and also it may depend on the particular word you are trying to look up.

I read on a Kindle Paperwhite with these custom third-party dictionaries installed.

I also read on my iPhone and iPad using Immersion Reader with Yomichan-formatted dictionaries installed (I use a ton of dictionaries for better word coverage, both J-E and J-J monolingual dictionaries).

The advantage of using Immersion Reader is that you just simply touch the word, instead of selecting and highlighting it, so look-ups are quicker. Also in addition to installing multiple dictionaries, you can install frequency lists, pitch accent info, grammar guides, etc. When you look up a word, it’ll search through everything you’ve installed, so if you have pitch accent info and frequency lists installed, you can see the pitch accent of the word you touched, including the frequency number to help determine if it’s a word you want to learn.

Then you can save the word to your word list (it’ll also automatically save the definition and the sentence containing the word) so you can later export to Anki.

There also also third party tools that let you export your words from Kindle devices to Anki as well.

Note: some words with furigana may still be difficult to look up correctly on the Kindle and also Immersion Reader, if the formatting of the furigana is weird (a combination of the HTML code and the CSS styling). Sometimes the furigana isn’t clearly separated from the word, but instead jumbled together, so the dictionary may not be able to find the word.

Usually kanji-compound words are fine, but some words with kunyomi reading with a single furigana over it may cause some issues, but it depends on the book, and also it may depend on the particular word you are trying to look up.

To get around this, Immersion Reader has a search function that let you paste in the word (provided you copied it first), so you can fix the spelling (usually it means removing the furigana from the word) and it’ll search through all the dictionaries so you can add it to your word list. You can also edit each entry in your word list in order to manually add the example sentence, or to remove any unwanted dictionary entries.

If you’re at an intermediate or higher level, I really like listening to NHK radio dramas, like ＦＭシアター for slice-of-life dramas and 青春アドベンチャー for more genre-based stories so the stories and settings are way more varied.

What’s nice is if one drama is too hard to follow, you can just try another. The difficulty varies widely, as some are just set in everyday settings and usual casual language, while others can have more anime-type language, and others are set in the past so can use more formal or pseudo-archaic Japanese. You can usually find one that’s appropriate to your current level.

I used VPN to listen to them but I haven’t tried recently but I assume it still works. I found a huge archive of them on YouTube and downloaded them before the channel got deleted so I’ve just been going through those. People will still often upload them to YouTube but they’ll eventually get copyright stricken and taken down, but you can usually find some. You just have to keep checking every week as people will just post them to new accounts. Or just google. You can find links to other sources.

TBS’s ラジオ図書館 series is also one of my favorites, but it is no longer being made. They are older radio dramas from the 80s and 90s. I really like old-school vibe, often dealing with mysteries or sci-fi. If you google ラジオ図書館, you should be able to find some video uploads of the radio dramas.

For audiobooks, 鳥さん学級 has a playlist of 朗読 (read aloud) short stories. Unlike other 朗読 channels, he posts the text on the screen so you can read as listen to him narrate it. It’s a good way to expose yourself to older authors.

フリーアナウンサーしまえりこの朗読読み聞かせ is also good. She’s a former NHK announcer and she’ll also include the text in her videos as she reads.

What a coincidence. I also came across that alternative reading for 忠実 as まめ while reading something recently too.

It makes me wonder if I’ve ever heard it before but my ears mistakenly assumed まめ was some form of まじめ (真面目).

I knew those two readings of 最中 as I came across both, but the みなも reading for 水面 was new to me. Thanks for that.

(lemmy.world seemed to be struggling yesterday as my reply didn’t seem to show up here, only on the lemmyworld instance, so I’m trying again with another account on another server, and deleting my old post)

I totally know how you feel. I was stuck in intermediate purgatory hell for a very long time. I could speak somewhat decently and travel on my own in Japan, but conversations remained fairly superficial. My vocab was still limited because I couldn’t consume Japanese media, mainly because I couldn’t read well so I couldn’t read books and manga, and couldn’t use JP subtitle to better understand what I was watching.

Trying to improve also I tried many of the methods you mentioned but it didn’t seem to work.

Revisiting my old college Japanese textbooks would bore me. I got Tobira but I had forgotten most of my kanji I had learned in college, so it was too hard for me to read.

Immersion helped the most, but like you said, I’d forget words too quickly, so I would get demotivated to continue.

I finally had a hallelujah moment when I discovered these three things:

• Discovering mnemonic-based kanji learning systems like Wanikani or RTK (Remembering the Kanji by James Heisig) so I could learn a method to quickly learn any kanji I encountered. Kanji was no longer my mortal enemy.
• Subscribing to Satori Reader so I could improve my reading ability from low-intermediate to a more advanced level, and finally make the transition to reading native materials.
• Using Anki 3rd-party sentence mining tools so I could instantly make cards from my immersion material, so I no longer forgot the words I was learning. Because the words were from things I was interested in, it made the words easier to learn. These tools also added audio and images from the TV show, anime, video, etc, to add context to the word so I was more likely to remember it.

That was it. Basically the key was learning how to read proficiently, so I could easily read novels and newspapers, play videogames and visual novels, and read JP subtitles as I watched TV shows, read transcripts as I listened to podcasts, in order to improve my listening ability.

Also because I could read quickly, I could start shadowing TV shows, YouTube videos, podcasts, repeated what I had heard, which improve my speaking ability.

But I’m not going to lie. It requires a lot of pain at first. It was really really really tough, especially for the first six months, because reading Japanese felt like a billion brain cells exploding over and over, but it slowly became better day by day. Just read everyday and stay consistent. Satori Reader was invaluable in the beginning, and it made the transition to reading native materials much smoother, but my first few novels were still a really big challenge at first.

Once you can use Japanese dictionaries and resources to look up Japanese words and grammar, you’ll improve a lot too. I eventually tried to do everything in Japanese, even when looking things up regarding my own hobbies.

TIP: To find suitable reading material, you can go through learnnatively.com to find books and manga appropriate to your current level. Also try to put a priority on increasing your vocab to get it to around N2 level (around 6k words), when you can start reading non-children books, but at 4k to 6k words, which is N3-ish level, you could still try to read N2 stuff if you don’t mind the challenge.

You mentioned it takes too long to make cards in Anki but only if you do it manually. By using tools like Migaku Tools, Memento, ASBplayer, Yomichan, Language Reactor, I could study and sentence mine from Japanese TV shows on Netflix YouTube videos, downloaded anime, etc.

I know you said it takes too long to make cards, but only if you do it manually. With using these various, I could quickly make multimedia Anki cards with a few button presses so it literally took seconds to make.

For reading Japanese books. I used ttsu-ttsu reader and Yomichan via my web browser, which also let me quickly make Anki cards. On my iOS devices, I used Immersion Reader to do the same thing. If reading manga on my computer, I used Mokuro with Yomichan.

I learned around 10 to 30 new cards per day, depending on my schedule, but my yearly average was around 15 new cards per day.

While reviewing my my cards, whenever I didn’t understand something in the sentence on my card, I’d look it up. If it was a new grammar point, I’d make another card for it. If I had to ask someone else for help, like a native, or in a Japanese language forum, I’d add some notes to my card explaining the difficult section for me.

Since these were sentences taken from my immersion material, it helped me to further enjoy my immersion material so it never felt like work to me.

I think I already knew around 3k-ish words when I started? So after a year and a half I knew around 10k to 12k words and around 2.5k to 2.8k kanji (I think N1 level is around 10k words and 2k kanji), and I could read fairly decently by then but still nowhere as fast as I could read in English. A lot of manga and videogames were easy to read though, as well as slice-of-life TV shows and slice-of-life light novels. A lot of mystery and cop shows were easy to understand as well, but some variety shows could be hard still.

I could read typical adult novels fairly well, like horror, mystery, fantasy, self-help books. I but still needed to keep a dictionary around since a lot of writers like to use a diverse vocab, so I could still get tripped up. I could also listen to audiobooks without reading the the book first, but even now it still depends on the topic and the author.

It was around year three when it became everything became much smoother, once my vocab started going beyond 16k words and over 3k kanji, but I still have room for lots of improvement.

I didn’t speak much during that time, aside from some shadowing practice, so I’m trying to improve my conversational skills now. My writing skills remain really bad though so I’m trying to keep a journal now, and I’ve been trying to email and text more in Japanese now.

I skipped over a lot of stuff, especially on details with learning kanji, or how I looked for sentences to mine, but I hope that gives you an idea of what worked for me.

If you have further questions, feel free to ask!