A 30-day Japanese reading plan

What does the month look like?

Each week is one series of six chapters, read one chapter a day, plus a seventh day for rereading. The series are ordered so that one thing gets harder at a time: first more kanji, then longer chapters, then plain-form narration.

Every chapter ends on a cliffhanger, which gives you a reason to come back the next day. Grandma's Secret Celebration, about a family secretly planning an 80th birthday party, closes its first chapter on a phone call from the community hall:

What do you do on each day of the plan?

On reading days, follow the four blocks of our 15-minute reading routine: review yesterday's saved words, read the new chapter for the story, reread it slowly and save what stopped you, then reread yesterday's chapter.

Reread days are different. Read the whole week's series again in one go, without tapping wherever you can manage, and keep a tally of the words you still had to look up. That tally is your record for the month. If you can't finish all six chapters in 15 minutes, read the last three and keep the rest for the following Sunday.

Missed a day? Pick up the next chapter the day after. Don't read two to catch up; the plan works because the words come back daily, not because you finish on day 30.

Can you follow the plan on the free chapters?

Yes. Chapters 1–2 of every series are free, so the free version reads the first two chapters of seven series and puts rereading in the gaps. It has fewer new chapters, but every reread brings the same words back, which is how they stick.

The cliffhangers bite harder on the free plan, because chapter 3 is never next. Treat that as a reason to reread: each time through you catch more of what the story is hinting at.

Why these series, in this order?

We measured the free chapters of every A1 and A2 series in the library and picked series whose text reads cleanly, then ordered them by what a learner finds hard: the share of kanji, chapter length and the switch from polite to plain narration.

Two patterns guided the order. The two A2 series in weeks 3 and 4 use fewer kanji than some A1 series, so the step up to A2 is about longer chapters and more complex sentences, not a wall of new characters. And Room Seven, saved for the end, is the densest: more than a third of its characters are kanji, and its chapter 2 is told in the plain past, the way Japanese fiction is normally narrated. That makes it a fair test of the month.

Six or seven words in every ten in these chapters are on our list of the first 100 Japanese words, so learning that list before day 1 pays off from the first page.

How will you know the month worked?

Day 30 has a built-in test: reread chapter 1 of Grandma's Secret Celebration, the chapter you started with, and compare. Look for three changes:

• Fewer taps. Count the words you still need to look up and compare them with day 1.
• A faster first read. You follow the story on the first pass instead of the second.
• Kana you no longer think about. The particles and verb endings read themselves, leaving your attention for the kanji.

A level change isn't the goal of the month: Contos moves you to A2 at 500 known words, whenever you reach them. The goal is the habit. The vocabulary researcher Paul Nation suggests that learners below the 2,000-word level read about a graded reader a week, and a series a week is that pace. A second month of the same rhythm, with new A2 series, is the right next step. Browse the A2 Japanese stories to choose them.