I am pleased to announce that I have finally been able to release Volume 6 of the KLC Graded Reading Sets, which is the longest single volume to date (754 pages by Kindle’s calculation). This latest volume, covering kanji 1001-1300, consists of 4,060 exercises containing over 32,000 kanji. Thank you very much for your patience while we were preparing this volume.
Please take advantage of this Opening Weekend 30% discount:
The discount will expire at the end of Monday, Feb 17 2020, Hawaii time.
Since the last GRS release, all 17,500+ of the remaining exercises have been re-edited. While it will never be possible to attain perfection with this gargantuan and extremely diverse corpus of parallel texts, I believe we have added enormous value to it and created something truly unique.
A fresh look
Coming back to this material after a long time away, I was reminded of three things: (a) what a joy it is to learn Japanese through real reading instead of rote memorization; (b) how much better the series gets in the second half, with the benefit of a wider range of kanji and vocabulary; and (c) just how much effort I had invested in selecting and editing the reading examples!
Scrolling View now available in Kindle app
I would like to thank the anonymous community member who pointed out that the Kindle apps for Android and iOS now offer continuous scrolling. This feature is particularly useful for the GRS series, because it allows you to display each exercise without displaying its phonetic and English glosses.
Just look for “Continuous scrolling” inside the “Aa” menu (if you don’t see it, try updating the app). The same menu also allows you to control line spacing, in case you would like to add more space between the sentence and the “answers”.
Peeking ahead at the English
I personally found some of the higher-level GRS exercises quite challenging, to the point that I sometimes found it practical to peek ahead at the English. Besides one’s own limitations, there are three reasons why understanding a Japanese item can be difficult: (a) Japanese is notoriously vague, (b) the examples are taken out of context, and (c) the examples are mostly translated from English, which sometimes complicates their structure.
Given these factors, I would not suggest that you try to completely understand every Japanese example before checking the English equivalent. For the purposes of this series, I think the reading practice is still quite helpful even if you already know what the sentence is going to say. I would suggest that you read the Japanese first as a general rule, but feel free to check the English if you get bogged down. The best thing you can do for your Japanese learning is to keep it enjoyable.
Tailor each volume to your own needs
Speaking of keeping things enjoyable, I would encourage you not to pressure yourself to read every exercise, especially for entries that have lots of them. My intention in including a large volume of material was to give you the opportunity to determine what amount is optimal for you. Like the earlier volumes, Vol. 6 arranges the exercises by length, to make it easy for you to customize your “workout” for each kanji.
Remaining volumes
Volumes 7-9 are in the final proofreading phase and will be released over the next three months.