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they work much better when kept dry.
    Starting to read
Once you have a decent grasp of kanji it's time to go out into the world of real Japanese. As we noted with listening, you want to be reading material that is just about comprehensible or a little beyond your capabilities. Too easy is almost as bad as too hard. Bearing this in mind, there are a lot of ways you can get started.
    The major English newspapers carry regular columns for English speaking students of Japanese. The Japan Times page carries a short article with explanations of the vocabulary and an English translation. The Daily Yomiuri runs fairly easy translation competitions (although some of the winning entries from Japanese people can be a bit suspect). It's well worth taking the time to cut these out and store them in a folder for study. There are several good books on the market for beginner readers.
    Breaking into Japanese Literature is a fantastic book for those who want to improve their reading. It contains short stories from famous literary authors like Natsume Soseki. MP3 files of the stories are even available for free download from the internet here .
Kanji from the Start is another book for those who want to start reading. It provides increasingly more difficult reading passages together with grammar notes and kanji explanations. It seems to be aimed at budding translators rather than novices and becomes hard very quickly.
    I picked up the Harry Potter books in Japanese for around a thousand yen from my local second hand book store (second hand book stores like Book-Off and Geo are a great source of cheap books - often you can find cheap versions of well-known English novels for a couple of hundred yen). Knowing the story in English is a great help. It took me a year to read the first book, six months to read the second and a month to read the third. I feel confident that you can beat my times if you try!
    Bear in mind that by reading Harry Potter you will learn a lot of specialised vocabulary that probably won't be much use to you in everyday life (unless you're a wizard). Harry Potter is not for everyone and I do recommend that you read things you are interested in. If you like sports, read about sports. Reading should be fun and interesting and not a grinding chore. Sadly the reading comprehension passages in Japanese exams are often frightfully dull.
    Two final tips for reading. First, try to set yourself a realistic goal for finishing your book. A 600 page novel will take you a month if you read 20 pages a day. Second, don't be afraid to write on your book in pencil. Doing so will make it easy to review words you looked up earlier.
    Audio Books
Audio books are great for the language learner. I highly recommend the Japanese audio books that accompany the Harry Potter series. There are several audio books available for download on the net.
Free audio book list .
     
I recommend you download these quickly and store them for later even if you feel they are too advanced for you at the moment. Free books and mp3s are not to be passed up!
    More reading on the web
There are plenty of websites out there in Japanese to provide you with reading material. Jim Breen’s Japanese Dictionary is an invaluable resource to any student of Japanese. Just copy and paste words from a website or file into the Translate words from Japanese function and it will provide you with the meanings of all the kanji !
Another site worthy of mention is rikai.com , which provides definitions of words as you move your cursor over them.
     
ALC is another great dictionary for translators and provides lots of example sentences and phrases to help you understand.
     
Armed with these sites, you are ready to tackle Japanese websites! I suggest you start with news sites and topics that interest you. My interest is mixed martial arts so I visit sites related to that topic.
    The Japanese version of Wikipedia has daily news articles. Run them through Jim Breen’s translate words