This summer once I've finished srsing my textbook, finished all the kanji and kept on learning even more vocab using subs2srs and Tanuki-Ultima, I want to start trying to read. My reading is pretty sucky because I neglect it, mostly focusing on listening, but I need to be able to read 星新一 stories in the book ボッコちゃん and 江國香織 short stories in the book つめたいよるに with no furigana for next years course. And well enough to write about them in the exam next summer. But at the moment, the most I can do is ドラえもん, and in the no-furi department, the short blog entries of my favourite band (http://ameblo.jp/scandalblog-4/) is the only thing I regularly read. I can sort of manage the first つめたいよるに story, デューク, but the second had me lost. So, I want to ask for recommendations of super super easy kids books to get me started.

I know about the ease of よつばと! so I plan by starting with reading my half-Japanese friend's entire ドラえもん collection and buying a few volumes よつばと! and reading them. And a book I really want to read that I've seen recommended as easy on other sites is 魔女の宅急便, and looking at an amazon preview, I feel like that would be a good last step before finally reading the books I'm supposed to be reading. But I really need help stepping from simple manga to novels. I want to gradually rise up levels of difficulty, and hopefully by looking up words I don't know, progress my reading.

To try and describe my level... I don't have a firm count on my known words, but I'd estimate maybe 3,000, but this should have risen by at least 1000 by the holidays. I have 750 kanji approx but as I said, I will finish all 2000 before I start this. Genki 1-2 type grammar pretty much down just srsing it, which will be finished by then, and a decent grasp of slang from a lot of native material. I watch a lot of dramas and they aren't hard for me to understand, though Hanazawa Naoki went right over my head talking about bank stuff when I started watching it a few months ago. Reading, as I said, is at a ドラえもん sort of level. The test I am taking this summer is at a similar level to N3, so I can read N3-type material well enough to answer questions, but it's actually a bit of a struggle and outside those premade little texts I can't rise to that level.

P.S. I do know about the White Rabbit Press graded readers and I sort of want some but they're really expensive and weighing up buying a load of those against buying a load of manga and kids books, it just doesn't seem financially sound, and I'd probably need to buy some kids books to finish my training anyway.

Yay, someone I can help.

My strategy was basically to read children's books forcefully and I think it was a good one. Children's books can be pretty cool.

I strongly recommend you start with the ふたごの魔法つかい series. They are both super easy and actually good fantasy stories. There are 13 of them, so you get used to the writing style and they get easier as you go. If you want one to check with - 風と火の国 is the best, I think. There's no need to read them in any particular order.

きまぐれロボット　by 星新一 is one of the easiest books I've read, though I wasn't that big a fan of it.

ハンカチの上の花畑 is a really good book that you should be able to read early on.

Anyway, here is a list of everything I've read in Japanese. If anything catches your eye I can tell you whether it would work for you or not.

Do you live in Japan, or do you have to import all this stuff?

It's not a print book, but Hukumusume is pretty good. They have audio to accompany all of the texts, and aren't overly difficult. I personally recommend the 百物語.

@Aikynaro
I have to import to the UK unless I get to go on the trip I'm trying to plan to Japan this summer, but that's completely reliant on a school travel funding competition I entered and they keep pushing back when they'll announce the winner so I'm not confident about that, even though I feel I'm one of the stronger candidates.

I usually buy from CDjapan.co.jp because it's a simple pay pal system but ふたごの魔法つかい and many other easy books I hear about aren't on there... may have to venture into buying through amazon.co.jp... It wouldn't be a problem if it was just me but since I'm still only 16, I have to make my mum do these things and she doesn't want to do anything I ask her to, and is resistant to importing anything so I don't want to start asking her to do more complex stuff or she may just stop halfway through like she did when we were setting up a Tenso forwarding service account. One thing I need to do is visit a bookshop in London I once went to that sells Japanese books, but I'm always scared I'll spend over an hour and over £20 getting there and buy nothing because they don't have good stuff for my level. If I can compile a list first at least I can phone them I guess.

I'm not sure what's more expensive, shipping or trips to London. I guess a trip to London doesn't get more expensive the more I buy, but relying on a couple small bookshops makes me think I won't get the oppurtunity to take advantage of that. Hopefully I have an excuse to be in London soon so that this is just a side trip.

@RandomQuotes

Wow I, think I saw some of their fairytale before and it didn't entertain me that much, but I love this picture book thing: http://hukumusume.com/douwa/book/world/wm02.html http://hukumusume.com/douwa/book/oshigoto/372.html Will try the 百物語

However, I don't enjoy reading on the computer for a long time and I think the idea of finishing a novel would keep me coming back to it more than short stories. But I do like being able to read and listen on this site.... I will probably use this a bit while waiting for books and stuff.

[RawToast]

Quote:One thing I need to do is visit a bookshop in London I once went to that sells Japanese books, but I'm always scared I'll spend over an hour and over £20 getting there and buy nothing because they don't have good stuff for my level. If I can compile a list first at least I can phone them I guess.

There are two decent bookshops next to each other, and only 2 minutes from a tube station. I believe they are "The Japan Centre" and Mitsukoshi(large book range on the bottom floor). The prices are similar in both shops, I don't think there's much point in comparing the two!

Plus you can grab all sorts of goodies at the Japan Centre (food, tea, sweets )

Pretty easy to get to -- I don't live in London, but it took me less than 5 minutes to find both stores. The tube is rather handy

I tend to order from either White Rabbit or Amazon.jp (using Tenso). Amazon's delivery prices are reasonable if you buy a lot of items. It's like a 15-20 quid flat charge, then additional items add small amounts (~20-50p). It only takes 2-3 days, which is better than Amazon UK

On hukumusume the イソップ童話 are by far the easiest to start with imo.

RawToast Wrote:There are two decent bookshops next to each other, and only 2 minutes from a tube station. I believe they are "The Japan Centre" and Mitsukoshi(large book range on the bottom floor). The prices are similar in both shops, I don't think there's much point in comparing the two!

Plus you can grab all sorts of goodies at the Japan Centre (food, tea, sweets )

Pretty easy to get to -- I don't live in London, but it took me less than 5 minutes to find both stores. The tube is rather handy

I tend to order from either White Rabbit or Amazon.jp (using Tenso). Amazon's delivery prices are reasonable if you buy a lot of items. It's like a 15-20 quid flat charge, then additional items add small amounts (~20-50p). It only takes 2-3 days, which is better than Amazon UK

I was thinking of the shop jpbooks, which is near the Japan center, I just sort of forgot about the Japan Centre while I was writing that. I didn't know about Mitsukoshi... When did you last go to London, because I read an article saying the Mitsukoshi that used to be next to the Japan Centre's old location was closing for good, meanwhile the Japan Centre was relocating, which I know it did.

Jpbooks and the Japan centre are just round the corner from Piccadily Circus tube station, yeah. I wouldn't mind getting some green tea...

I have Prime for Amazon UK so it's always one day for me! But I'm impressed that it takes such a short amount of time from Japan. I guess I'll look into it, but I should probably reconnoitre the London stores first, but as I said, I think I need to wait for a reason to be there, cos it's expensive to get to. I'm also impressed at the value of the shipping!

Anyway, let's not get caught up in a conversation about buying books here. I need to work out what books I'm going to try and buy first. Even though Hukumusume is quite good, it does not inspire me to want to read on my computer when I want to be lying in my garden/on the beach reading over the summer.

Ganbatte on your reading rampage! I too am trying to read more and more. Here are a few threads I've bookmarked from the past that might help you in your quest to find appropriate books:

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid125337

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=10719

Aoi Tori Bunko is something to look into. They make fiction series for elementary school kids. I read a lot of テレパシー少女蘭 when I was working my way up to novels. It's about two psychic girls who solve crimes.

Don't go to London for books. The prices are ludicrous in some of the shops there. I remember seeing a single Detroit Metal City volume for £12. The pound is pretty strong against the yen right now, and if you need to spend £20 to get to London, you've already covered enough shipping for a couple of kilograms of books online.

I remember Amazon only offered express delivery that was really expensive, but I ordered from a site called BK1 when I was in England and the shipping was cheap. It looks like BK1 is now http://honto.jp/netstore.html I'm sure there are other online book stores that offer international shipping though.

Another option is to find a way to use the Amazon.jp Kindle store. There are book samples, and often entire free manga, as well as promotional sales.

Edit: If you do go to London, you should check out the used book shop on Brewer Street in Piccadilly Circus (see this street view here: https://goo.gl/maps/PYpsj). There's a nice Japanese grocery shop called Rice Wine a bit further up too. The sushi is pretty decent there for London standards. There's another Japanese shop somewhere in the middle as well, but I think it's more expensive.

The Mitsukoshi in London is long gone I'm afraid. The best place to get Japanese books in London now is JP books in Piccadilly, imho. That is where I bought 容疑者Xの献身 recently.

They have some in the Japan Centre too but the selection is not so good. There is also the second hand Japanese book shop in Soho but its not as cheap as you would think, and although they have a lot of books they might not have what you actually want. It is interesting to browse, though, and of course they do karaoke and DVD rental which is a plus.

rich_f Wrote:Aoi Tori Bunko is something to look into. They make fiction series for elementary school kids. I read a lot of テレパシー少女蘭 when I was working my way up to novels. It's about two psychic girls who solve crimes.

I like the look of those. They look pretty dynamic and fun. This is the sort of book I would have been reading when I was younger. Though I wish there was an Amazon preview of them just so I could place them in a stage in my rampage. Any chance you could take a picture of the first page of one?

Also, I don't remember the jpbooks store seeming too expensive, but the possiblity of high prices is another reason why I'm not going to go to London just to go to these shops. And when I said £20 to get there, I was exagerating a bit... maybe £17? I don't think I've bought my own ticket up there since I came off child fare. And yeah, I've heard of the De-Luxe Cleaning shop, and was planning to stop by there too if I could find it.


I really like the suggestions of テレパシー少女蘭 and ふたごの魔法つかい because I quite like the idea of reading a few books in a series because it will probably help me get used to the language. As I mentioned in another thread, when I mined vocab from a drama for the first time, I got almost 400 unknowns in the first episode, and it went down to around 100 by the third because the words were repeated so much. I'm hoping to get a similar effect with books. Any other good series?

If you're looking for series I'll very carefully throw らくだい魔女 out there. But I'll warn you - the variety in vocabulary there is quite a lot higher than normal. It's simple language, but manages to throw in strange words all over the place.

There's a really cool but short series called 青き戦記 - it's only three books, but it's relatively easy. It's not really suitable as a first series though.

パセリ伝説 might be a good choice easiness-wise and there's ten million books, and it's probably not all that bad - but I didn't like it much as a story. Everything happens so slowly, which is a pain when reading speed is also slow. After two books the plot didn't feel like it had gone anywhere. Again, not really something you should tackle as your first novel, but it might be an option fairly soon if glacial plot doesn't bother you.

I've read the first テレパシー少女蘭 book and think it's a good idea, but not for the first thing you try and read with your level of vocabulary.

So yeah, none of those above are really good first-novel material, imo. ふたごの魔法つかい is the easiest thing I've read that's good, but I've read plenty of easy things that are bad too. They usually come in series. All of these would be suitable as a first book, but...

魔女じゃないもん (rubbish)
ナイトメア戦記 (not so bad, relatively speaking)
みならい妖精モモ (incredibly dull)
光の戦士ミド (uninspiring)
魔女官へようこそ (absolutely awful)
はんぴらり (boring!)

I have all of these on-hand, so if you're considering them I could scan the first page or so if you want to see when I have time.

I think I'm starting to get an image of how I'm going to progress through this. I'm mostly just overwhelmed by how not to spend a fortune, there are so many series now I want full sets of.

Thanks to ashman63 btw, sort of missed your links earlier, but once I read the one that talked about the 10分読めるお話 and なぜ？どうして？graded readers for Japanese kids I investigated and now I really want to buy a load of なぜ？どうして？ and 10分で読める伝記 because I love History and so reading all those short biographies really interests me. I wonder which grade I can start with... if I can convince myself I'm better than some of the lower grades I can stop myself buying all of them. What sort of Japanese elementary school grade is like a weak N3, do you think?

Definitely won't buy all of ふたごの魔法つかい because there are quite a lot, but may get lot of テレパシー少女蘭 just because I really want to read it. But I can't quite decide whether wanting to jump to テレパシー少女蘭 is a stupid move since I don't know what it's like.... Cannot decide how much よつばと！to buy and keep wanting to fit more manga in, but keep telling myself I still have a lot of ドラえもん to borrow from my friend. Then there's 魔女の宅急便... I guess I'll leave that out of this purchase and buy it when I get to the end of some of these. I'm gonna really rampage, reading one book a week or 2, so, but still my basket is still like I'm buying for the year (52 weeks...). It's sort of because of wanting to build speed that I'm so indecisive though; I want to make sure I give myself enough practice in each arbitrary level of the rampage so that the next one is a ridiculous step up that breaks my speed (obviously as, I said, not scared of dictionaries though).

Has anyone read 魔女の宅急便 btw? Is it significantly harder than these others?

If you are concerned about wasting money, my advice would be not to buy too many things in one go. My experience is that every time I buy multiple books at once, I pick one to read first, and by the time I've finished it something else has popped up that has captured my interest and I end up reading that next instead. For a while you keep meaning to come back to it, but eventually you find that either your tastes have changed permanently, or your level has advanced sufficiently that you no longer have any desire to go back and read it. I have dozens of unread books lying around, both in English and Japanese, that have fallen into this trap.

Having said that I think reading books in Japanese is a very cheap hobby, if you look at the amount of time it will take you to read each one compared to the amount of money you spent on it. I spend far more money on the coffee I drink while reading than I spend on the books themselves.

In fact, reading is so cheap that I consider it saves me money - If I wasn't reading, I would be doing something else that cost more money instead.

If you don't mind reading digital books instead of physical ones, I highly recommend ehonnavi.net as a source of free reading materials. There are thousands of picture books available to read on there, it should be pretty easy to find something at the right level (you can filter the books by target age which is pretty helpful). Best of all, a huge number of the books have a trial read whereby you can read the entire book for free (only once though, after that it will be locked out). You have to register first, but it's free.

I first came across this via a great (sadly now dormant) extensive reading (多読) blog here. There's info on ehonnavi here, and loads of other interesting suff on books + reading.

I occasionally have issues with books not loading fully, but generally the site works really well, and there really is a huge selection. I'm trying to read as much as possible without a dictionary, which sadly at my level means very basic books, which come with their own difficulties (lack of kanji, babyish language, tons of onomatopoeia), but can be surprisingly fun. My favourite so far is うんこしりとり, which won't do much to help your reading, but did appeal to my puerile sense of humour...

andye Wrote:I first came across this via a great (sadly now dormant) extensive reading (多読) blog here.

Took a quick look at this blog. On her blog she states:

"1. Don’t look up words in the dictionary while reading.
2. Skip over parts you don’t understand.
3. If you aren’t enjoying one book, toss it aside and get another."

I would ask Liana...how are you supposed to learn anything using this methodology?

john555 Wrote:

andye Wrote:I first came across this via a great (sadly now dormant) extensive reading (多読) blog here.

Took a quick look at this blog. On her blog she states:

"1. Don’t look up words in the dictionary while reading.
2. Skip over parts you don’t understand.
3. If you aren’t enjoying one book, toss it aside and get another."

I would ask Liana...how are you supposed to learn anything using this methodology?

I take it that you don't understand the difference between extensive and intensive reading.

Those 3 rules are actually taken directly from the principles of 多読 (extensive reading), a method of language learning (originally for English) developed by Professor Kunihide Sakai many years ago (see todaku.org).

It's not an uncontroversial method, and I'm certainly not completely sold on it, but it does have its merits. I would definitely use it more as a path to reading fluency rather than vocab acquisition. The problem is, to do it effectively, you need to understand the vast majority of words in any given text (I seem to remember studies showing you need to know about 98% for fluent reading), and it's very hard to find Japanese texts at this level unless you already have a large vocabulary. (There is a far better selection of easy English readers). The Japanese Graded Readers are good for this (in fact were developed specifically for 多読) - they are a little expensive compared with native texts, but do come with great audio.

john555 Wrote:

andye Wrote:I first came across this via a great (sadly now dormant) extensive reading (多読) blog here.

Took a quick look at this blog. On her blog she states:

"1. Don’t look up words in the dictionary while reading.
2. Skip over parts you don’t understand.
3. If you aren’t enjoying one book, toss it aside and get another."

I would ask Liana...how are you supposed to learn anything using this methodology?

Your skepticism is justified, but IMO, #3 is absolutely vital. Specifically if something is too difficult to enjoy it needs chucking aside. Plenty of fish in the sea - why struggle?
I did pure extensive reading for a long time and it was well worth doing. If you have some other source to learn vocabulary from there's no real necessity to look up words from what you're reading, so if you were, say, studying core and learning 20 words a day that's just as good as if you looked up and studied 20 words of your book a day, so why make the reading less enjoyable by stopping to look things up? Just read and enjoy.
These days I mark things to look up later because I've stopped studying vocabulary from other sources. For someone just starting to read though, the other way is better, I think - the idea is to get used to reading and recognising words and understanding sentences, not to learn the meaning of every individual word you come across. And, more importantly, to enjoy something in Japanese.