I can see for a complete beginner this would be a bit hard to read. But after a few beginner textbooks and learning some of the basic characters, one should be able to attack the level 0 and 1 books.

I read a few level one books on the bus ride home from the bookstore. They are so cool! I really like reading these! It’s so enjoyable it’s embarrassing! The “女の子”　book is pretty creepy and sad, but it has a happy ending.

I was skimming through one of the level three books and level 4 books and was pleasantly surprised I could understand a lot. Not everything, and not at a fluent pace. But still. I have more confidence now than before.

That’s all for now. Time for a bit more reading before bed.

Thanks for the input. I will concentrate on finishing heisig and building up some vocabulary before I dive in to tadoku.

I also think that just a little context helps you retain a word and remember how it’s used, too, so even just putting a word in a super simple sentence in a super simple story is probably better than having it alone on the page, scattered among a bunch of other single words. Dictionaries or illustrated encyclopedias often seem to me to have a sort of information overload problem, and of course it would be likely be a pretty specialized kind of information. At that level, you could probably re-read the book multiple times, kind of like what a kid might do, but it seems to me like a more structured vocabulary study would be more efficient for a learner at that level.

With that said, I haven’t read very many books that are that basic — maybe about a dozen. I’d like to spend time looking at more, maybe there are some good ones that would be worth the money (and there might be some on EhonNavi for free?)

I think tadoku with authentic materials is, unfortunately, not accessible if you don’t already have a fairly wide base of vocabulary; most of the Japanese tadokists I know or read about have had a fair amount of exposure to English through their education (although many if not most of them report that they disliked English and weren’t good at it before tadoku, they still did probably have some latent vocabulary). They also have the benefit of access to a lot of graded readers, many even simpler than the level 0 Japanese graded readers linked to here; those things just simply don’t exist in English yet. If they did, it’d be a different story. As it is, I’d say that if you’re interested in tadoku, start with the kind of basic vocabulary you’d need if you wanted to study for the lowest JLPT level.

Good luck! I will keep thinking about it, too.