Reading material for total beginner

[Dumax]

Hi.
I already know pretty much hiragana. But it's not perfect and I read very slowly. Should I read any materials in hirgana to improve my reading skills? If so, please give recommendations on what to read.

P.S. I only know Hiragana. No Kanji or Katakana. And I can't understand anything from reading..

 

[Mike Cash]

Since you can't understand what you're reading, it is essentially just a string of hiragana put together. You might do just as well to practice speed drills with a deck of hiragana flash cards to improve your recognition speed and accuracy. Give that a try and see if it helps.

 

[nekojita]

Try Erin's Challenge, it's intended for beginners and you can have the subtitles for the skits, etc, in kana only if you want.

 

[Dumax]

Okay. So is it even worth reading at this point, since I don't understand what I read? It would be basically to improve my reading speed. I'm pretty much familiar with hiragana. So should I stick to other stuff (katakana, grammar, vocab etc.) or should I start reading a little? Thanks.

 

[nekojita]

Without grammar and vocab, there's really nothing you can read in a sensible way. You should get a beginner textbook (or the website I linked above is an option if you have issues acquiring one for some reason) that uses hiragana for example sentences and so on, so you will get plenty of practice.

You should also work on your katakana in parallel with picking up some vocab and grammar. Don't worry about being a little slow right now - you'll get better.

 

[mesolithic]

Okay. So is it even worth reading at this point, since I don't understand what I read? It would be basically to improve my reading speed. I'm pretty much familiar with hiragana. So should I stick to other stuff (katakana, grammar, vocab etc.) or should I start reading a little? Thanks.

If you read in your native language... you will realise that you can "speed read" because you recognise word and sentence patterns quickly and stop analysing every single character once you have a good guess. That pretty much works the same for Japanese.

If you read a sentence that starts with something like "気（き）を" you might not know what to expect if you don't understand the meaning but someone who knows intermediate Japanese would already guess that "つけて" is very likely to follow that. Essentially, that allows you to skip over "expected" words while you are reading.

It is possible to increase your character recognition by repeatedly reading hiragana characters that make no sense to you... but the surefire way to increase your reading speed by leaps and bounds is to increase your vocabulary and exposure to sentences that you understand.