Practice · 多読 — tadoku, "reading a lot"

The Reading Plan

Reading speed is not knowledge, it is fitness — built the way fitness is built: many short sessions on material that feels easy. This page is the whole plan in one place: your own reading chapter first, then Tadoku's 76 free graded readers in level order, each one a link away and ticked off here as you finish it. Ten minutes a day; nothing else to decide.

Books read so far: · ticks are saved in your own browser, like the flash-card history — nothing leaves this page · book list snapshot of tadoku.org's free books, 2026-08-23

1.The rules the plan runs on

One idea carries everything below: fluency comes from volume and repetition on easy material, never from struggling through hard material. Struggling is study — useful, but a different activity. If a page feels like work, it is the wrong page; go down a level, not up. The Tadoku organisation, whose books fill most of this plan, states it as four golden rules:

Two house rules on top, from this course:

• Romaji off. Open the kana panel (the tab on the left) and switch the romaji layer off before you read. While Latin letters are visible your eye reads them and the kana never get their practice.
• Read aloud, against the audio. Most books below carry a read-aloud recording on their page. Listen to a page, read it aloud imitating what you heard, then check yourself. Speed lives in the mouth and the ear as much as the eye.

2.The daily ten minutes

Daily matters more than long: ten minutes every day beats an hour on Sunday, because each re-meeting of a word arrives just as the last one is fading. Missing a day is fine; missing a week starts you half a rung lower, which is also fine — the ladder does not care how often you climb it.

3.The ladder

Step 1 — your own 93 lines

Before the books: Reading 1, the course's own chapter, re-read daily until fluent. It is the only material anywhere that is written exactly from words you have been taught, so it is the easiest text you will ever meet — which by the rules above makes it the right place to build speed first. A line is done when you can say it at the audio's pace without stumbling; the chapter is done when that is true of every line. Expect five or six visits, and expect the last ones to feel too easy. That feeling is the point.

Step 2 — Tadoku, Start level

The gentlest books Tadoku publishes — a phrase or a sentence per page, carried by pictures. With your 300-plus words most pages will already be yours. Read them in any order that looks fun (rule 4 is about interest as much as difficulty); finished so far: . 🔊 marks a book whose page carries a read-aloud recording, most with a YouTube video version too.

Step 3 — Tadoku, Level 0

Short sentences now, still picture-carried, still inside the grammar this course has taught — です・ます sentences, questions with か, the particles you know. Move here whenever Start books feel light; move back without shame whenever one of these does not. Finished so far: .

Step 4 — Tadoku, Level 1

The gate: start here when five Level 0 books in a row felt easy. These use grammar the course has not reached yet — past-tense verbs, adjectives — which is fine for reading: rule 3 says skip, and the pictures carry what the grammar does not. It moves nothing in the course's own syllabus. Finished so far: .

Past Level 1 the free shelf thins out — two books at Level 2, one at Level 3 — and by then the course itself will have moved. Cross that bridge from the catalog when you reach it; new free books appear there through the year.

4.When you're stuck

• Your teacher first. A line that stays hard after the audio and the pictures is a question for the next class — that is what a taught course is for, and the teacher knows which grammar is coming next week anyway.
• r/LearnJapanese for everything a class cannot answer — how other learners got through this exact stage. Quick questions go in the pinned Daily Thread rather than a new post; the community wiki is the map of everything else, including its own section on reading practice. Search the sub before posting — this stage has been walked many times, and the answers are already good.