KitBar

I am going through the "learning to read" Japanese journey myself and it is hilarious reading how many opinions people have about language acquisition (not on here per se, but on other areas). I think people want to understand content to their native level at the get-go, but that takes a LONG time to achieve. Reading a dictionary seems (to me) to be enough to get a general idea of what the word in context means, and once you hit the same word (such as 掛かる from your example enough) you can interpret which "flavor" is being used. Even if you don't understand 100% of the sentence, once you run into it in a ton of situations, you will eventually know which 掛かる is being used via context. If you don't understand it 100% and its not critical to the story... move on. If you really started learning Japanese as a life-long hobby, its impossible to NOT understand a word eventually via context and exposure. I think people just need to understand that you will be looking in a dictionary a ton for a while (with reading). There's a lot of leg work required outside of "dictionary lookups" and there's lots of slang, grammar or usage of words that requires googling outside of standard Nx levels... and people want a "quick and dirty way" to understand the language... when the "quick and dirty" method does not exist. It requires a ton of work to get to any level of proficiency, as with many other things in life (sports, profession, etc.) which many people are unwilling to do. I think there's also this "leap of faith" thing that people have trouble taking when it comes to language learning, and people seem to be more obsessed with the "optimal way to learn Japanese" when none exist, yet they bash established methods because they are "not great"... but they are established for a reason. I feel like if people put in the time they spend trying to pick and choose methods or discuss problems with one method prior to giving it a real go, they would reach some level of proficiency already. I love using Visual Novels to learn to read Japanese. To be honest, I never even knew about Visual Novels until 3 months ago, and I am already on my second one (I am reading ones recommended by Clephas, seriously man your guides are amazing). While I do not understand the content to the level of my native language, I have made some massive improvements just reading and throwing vocab into Anki cards. I have no idea what level I will be in 1, 3, 6... months, but 3 months ago I could barely read and now I am breezing through native content. I don't think this is that hard. It just requires time and some commitment. I can only assume the former is what people have, the latter is what people lack.