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Recommendations for a first light novel? - Printable Version

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Recommendations for a first light novel? - Zgarbas - 2013-10-23

I actually found Welcome to be NHK to be pretty damn difficult to read, partially because I hate having to look up unknown vocab.

Kitchen, by Banana Yoshimoto is the easiest book I've ever read (also one of my favourite books ever; it's like a tanka in novel form), and it's not even a light novel.

Recommendations for a first light novel? - RawToast - 2013-10-23

Quote:Welcome to be NHK
Do you mean Nhk news easy? Or is this some other resource they offer?

You could have a quick look at the "6th grade" reading thread. There are some nice reading materials available cheaply ~£5/$7 on Amazon.jp, which you could add to an order. Picking a single one might be a nice bridge between NHK news and novels.

I don't know what school grade NHK news targets, I imagine it is similar? Even if it is higher there will be style and grammatical differences between a novel and the news.

Edit: The book series I am referring to is called: 10分で読める

Recommendations for a first light novel? - undead_saif - 2013-10-23

I started reading "夜中の汽笛について" by Murakami Haruki yesterday as part of Short Stories in Japanese: New Penguin Parallel Text, it's a-page-and-a-half short story. I was able to read the first three sentences with less than 1K of Core6K done, back when I bought it. It's very easy. Hint: Search Google with the title of the story and you'll find something helpful in the first link. Wink

Recommendations for a first light novel? - uisukii - 2013-10-23

RawToast Wrote:
Quote:Welcome to be NHK
Do you mean Nhk news easy? Or is this some other resource they offer?
Very, very different. Welcome to the NHK was recently-ish made into an anime.

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHK%E3%81%AB%E3%82%88%E3%81%86%E3%81%93%E3%81%9D!

Recommendations for a first light novel? - quark - 2013-10-23

rich_f Wrote:Some of the novels aimed at Elementary School kids have a lot of furigana, and are pretty easy reads. The plots aren't necessarily the greatest ever, but good enough.

The only publisher I can think of off-hand is Aoi Tori Bunko （青い鳥文庫　あおいとりぶんこ）, but I know that there are others. Amazon.co.jp is your friend for that bit, if not necessarily for ordering.
Tsubasa Bunko is another publisher that releases novels with full furigana. I actually prefer their books to Aoi Tori Bunko, as they've released some light novels (Kino no Tabi, Haruhi Suzumiya), and also have a pretty good selection of horror novels, adventure books and some sci-fi.
Aoi Tori Bunko tends to focus on serial stories for kids and translations of Western classics, like Little Women, or Anne of Green Gables.

Recommendations for a first light novel? - Bokusenou - 2013-10-25

ktcgx Wrote:
Bokusenou Wrote:
ktcgx Wrote:Hmmm, the fist link doesn't work, it just sends me to a page saying "your search returned no hits"

I looked at the second link, and would you believe it's taken how many years since I read the first book way back when I was 11 to realise that "Erised" is desire spelt backwards.... omfg fail...
Ah, sorry. Just search the forum for harry potter and choose to only search in thread titles to narrow the results down, and you should see the HP threads.

Yeah, I wouldn't have known about the wordplay with Erised or Knockturn Alley if I hadn't read it somewhere around the sametime I read the first book. XD
I think I like the idea it's based around "ley lines" (lines of magic or power) better, diagonal ley, nocturnal ley Wink

EDIT: I think the normal pun is "diagonally, nocturnally", but I like the more obscure possibility better. I am not really having much luck at getting my thoughts out properly today T_T

The search function is kinda hard to find, would be good if Fabrice put a search box on the main page, but never mind, will try that instead.
Woah, I didn't even think of that...the ley line meaning possibility is even cooler!

Recommendations for a first light novel? - Xanpakuto - 2014-01-12

I know it's been awhile, but I have some news. I went to my nearest kinokuniya and bought my first novel! I've spent a really long time in there trying to find a novel that was right for me. I finally found a section where the books are made mostly for a younger audience.

Anyway, I got 獣の奏者 by Aoitori Bunko.

So far everything is going well, seems really interesting!

Recommendations for a first light novel? - Aikynaro - 2014-01-12

Oh hey, that's a novel? There's a really long NHK anime version of it too (which I haven't actually gotten around to watching past the first episode, but it looks interesting).

Do you have a 読書メーター?


Edit: My profile here.

Recommendations for a first light novel? - gaiaslastlaugh - 2014-01-12

Aikynaro Wrote:Do you have a 読書メーター?
Hey, who else on here is on that site? Here's my profile: GLLの読書メーター

Recommendations for a first light novel? - s0apgun - 2014-01-12

I just made one after much procrastination.

s0apgunの読書メーター

Finishing volume 12 of 進撃の巨人 tomorrow sadly. I want more and I want it now!

Been reading 1Q84 but still at the beginning. Progress is going slow on this one but its like 900 pages or something? So by the time I finish (3~ months) hopefully I'll be much faster at reading novels like this.

Planning to start 宇宙兄弟 in the next couple days!

Recommendations for a first light novel? - Bokusenou - 2014-01-13

Since people are posting there's, I might as well post My 読書メーター link. There's also a dokusho meter thread here, if people want to follow more koohii members.

Recommendations for a first light novel? - Aikynaro - 2014-01-13

Lots of abandoned looking accounts from that thread though...

Seeing this is meant to be a recommendation thread though - I read a book called ナディヤと灰色おおかみ recently and would highly recommend it. If you need something good to put the magic and romance into the misery that is Winter, this is it. It's fairly easy and has decent (though far from complete) furigana coverage.

I'm reading ハンカチの上の花畑 at the moment - about 45 pages in. It certainly has an funky premise, and is about the same difficulty. Would provisionally recommend.

(I wish there was a meaningful standard to which difficulty could be compared. What was difficult for me six months ago isn't difficult now, so it's hard to say whether something is 'difficult' or not)

Recommendations for a first light novel? - martinjapan - 2014-01-13

I would recommend The Hunger Games.

(Like Harry Potter) it is aimed at teens, so the kanji is pretty easy, and furigana for the harder ones. Also if you know and like the story it goes a bit easier.
Sadly Katniss is annoying in the Japanese version too!

You can probably download the first chapter for free from amazon.

I find that translations of English books are a little easier than Japanese books. So it might be a good one to start with.

Recommendations for a first light novel? - Bokusenou - 2014-01-13

@Aikynaro
Ah, true. Didn't think of that.

Difficulty standard huh? Well, the amount of furigana a book has tells a lot about its difficulty. I remember seeing the paperback version of a children's fantasy series (Kemono no Souja) and seeing that most of the furigana from the hardcover version was gone. This one was aimed at adults. Of course if a book is aimed at adults and has lots of furigana, it's usually because it's using obscure, non-jouyou kanji, or pre-WWII spellings to give off an old style felling. Maybe the best way to show someone the difficulty level of a book is to just write down the first paragraph or so and let them decide for themselves...

Recommendations for a first light novel? - sholum - 2014-01-13

Bokusenou Wrote:@Aikynaro
Ah, true. Didn't think of that.

Difficulty standard huh? Well, the amount of furigana a book has tells a lot about its difficulty. I remember seeing the paperback version of a children's fantasy series (Kemono no Souja) and seeing that most of the furigana from the hardcover version was gone. This one was aimed at adults. Of course if a book is aimed at adults and has lots of furigana, it's usually because it's using obscure, non-jouyou kanji, or pre-WWII spellings to give off an old style felling. Maybe the best way to show someone the difficulty level of a book is to just write down the first paragraph or so and let them decide for themselves...
Of course, I've noticed that some manga that use all furigana (進撃の巨人 for instance) take great liberty in the range of vocabulary they use, but other manga (コイネコ for instance) don't use any furigana, but use very easy vocabulary most of the time. This initially led me to mistake the actual difficulty of each series; on some thread or another, I rated 進撃の巨人 with a difficulty of two out of five and I was scared away from コイネコ originally, due to it's lack of furigana. After spending some time reading each, I concluded that the former is far more difficult than the latter, simply from the amount of vocabulary and its use.
While my examples are both manga, I imagine this might be the case for some novels as well, though probably not as much, since novels and light novels probably assume a greater vocabulary than manga.

As for reading suggestions, I don't really have any, since I just recently started reading ゼロの使い魔 (at someone's suggestion) and have yet to get used to the format. It's not too difficult though, so if you're interested in it at all, you might take a look.