Light Novel, or ライトノベル (raito noberu), often shortened to ラノベ (ranobe), are Japanese short novels. These novels are often the basis for Anime or Manga (sometime the other way round too). So if you want to get more of your Otaku fix what better option than reading the light novels that spawned your passion?
First you should read http://japaneseruleof7.com/why-you-shouldnt-learn-japanese/.
After you have meditated on the question of whether you want to expend that amount of effort learning Japanese and have decided that the answer will be yes, then this project can help you.
You will have to look elsewhere for illegal material. Only people who own the original material can access the electronic version provided here to learn Japanese from.
You will be expected know all the Hiragana and Katakana before you start. This is the easy part and there are plenty of resources on the internet to help you do that.
Other resources:
- http://www.tofugu.com/guides/learn-hiragana/
- Anki Deck - Hiragana with Audio (https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/3000799930)
- Anki Deck - Katakana With Audio (https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1386189716)
Like Hiragana and Katana, you won't be taught grammar here. But you will pick stuff up since the words will be in context with the sentences from the book.
Other resources:
Since this app takes the Japanese from the book and gives you a translation it will only cover Kanji and vocabulary in the book. You will need to go elsewhere to learn more Japanese.
Other resources:
- https://www.wanikani.com/
- Anki Deck - Core 2000 Step 1 (https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/4271439873)
- Anki Deck - Core 2000 Step 2 (https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/3168472038)
You will learn how to read Japanese through a light novel; all the Kanji, all the words, all the sentences. But if you are completely new to Japanese this will take a long time, expect at least 12 months or longer. If you do stick with it then you will have all those Japanese light novels you want to buy available for reading.
Use the catalogue to browse and search for available titles.
The only active title under work is Accel World (アクセル・ワールド) by Reki Kawahara (川原 礫).
It takes effort to create this resource so the number of available titles is limited by the people who are willing to transcribe, validate, and translate the text. The best way to help speed that process up is to volunteer some of your time in any task that you can do.
Ranobe Gaku by https://github.com/baerrach/ranobe-gaku is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
