Not the OP, but the reality is that you can read anything that interests you. Especially when you are starting, the first few thousand common words are incredibly common. So you'll get those over and over and over again. The main problem is that depending on what grammar is present, you may have difficulties.
There is something called the "natural order hypothesis" that states that the order in which people acquire the grammatical structures of a language is roughly the same, no matter what order the grammar is introduced. This is one of Stephen Krashen's hypotheses that has some good evidence in trials.
So the problem is that if you pick a piece that has a lot of grammar that you haven't acquired yet, you'll be spinning your wheels for a long time. The solution to this is simply to move on and find something else to read.
As for tools, the rikaichan plug in in Firefox and the Chromium port (rikaikun) are the main ones. There are lots of children's stories on the internet. Search for 昔話. You'll find lots to read :-) If you're a bit more advanced, then news is always good. TBS news is nice because they always give you both the video and audio along with the text (which is invariably exactly the same as what's in the video): http://news.tbs.co.jp/
But you can even read Twitter or and other social medium. I spent a long time reading the Ruby dev list in Japanese to learn computer terms. Good luck on your studies!
There is something called the "natural order hypothesis" that states that the order in which people acquire the grammatical structures of a language is roughly the same, no matter what order the grammar is introduced. This is one of Stephen Krashen's hypotheses that has some good evidence in trials.
So the problem is that if you pick a piece that has a lot of grammar that you haven't acquired yet, you'll be spinning your wheels for a long time. The solution to this is simply to move on and find something else to read.
As for tools, the rikaichan plug in in Firefox and the Chromium port (rikaikun) are the main ones. There are lots of children's stories on the internet. Search for 昔話. You'll find lots to read :-) If you're a bit more advanced, then news is always good. TBS news is nice because they always give you both the video and audio along with the text (which is invariably exactly the same as what's in the video): http://news.tbs.co.jp/
But you can even read Twitter or and other social medium. I spent a long time reading the Ruby dev list in Japanese to learn computer terms. Good luck on your studies!