Have you ever seen a Japanese textbook? I don't mean those which teach Japanese for foreigners, but the ones Japanese kids are using in school. What do you think about using them to learn the language?

For example, 小学校 books. They use pretty simple kanji, that's all I know about them. But how about the language as a whole? Stuff for young kids tends to have shorter sentences and simpler concepts. It sounds good but who knows, maybe adult learners benefit from different kind of simplification than kids. Or maybe not, I'm not sure but I think they say on the NHK easy website that it is aimed for Japanese kids as well as for foreign adults and it seems to be good material. So maybe the same kind of simplification is just as beneficial for everyone.

But the most important thing is that those textbooks would probably be really interesting. Think about how different everything is even if you compare the U.S. to Europe. All subjects, especially history and geography are always taught from a local point of view and I'd really like to see what that means for the Japanese.

The biggest problem I can think of now is the price. That kind of stuff is usually pretty expensive if you don't buy it in bulk like schools do.

Well, I've used some 国語 textbooks clearly meant for Japanese schoolchildren, and while it's certainly not a textbook in the strictest sense, 攻略本 would fall under the category of "reference book," I suppose. Personally, I'm a big fan of the latter, partially because you can observe the way directions are given for complex processes.

I've got ニューコース中学国文法 and ニューコース中学歴史 on my reading list.

They are well within reach difficulty-wise now, but they represented a serious challenge until quite recently. Anyone below a strong N2 would struggle badly with them.

I tried to find stuff like this before online but couldn't. Wikipedia is written in a non-learning way and much more difficult, there is a wikibooks things as well but a lot of it is incomplete. Anyone know where to find Japanese learning resources online?

anotherjohn Wrote:They are well within reach difficulty-wise now, but they represented a serious challenge until quite recently. Anyone below a strong N2 would struggle badly with them.

Thanks for the estimate on JLPT level. I'll consider buying something like that when I get that far in my studies.

By the way, I spent a minute on amazon.co.jp to get an idea of the price range of that kind of stuff. There's some really cheap books available there. I was expecting every book to be at least 4000円.

I've heard people say that books are cheap in Japan, but I'm still surprised.

I have a friend who is currently reading early learning books on biography and science in Japanese and finds them very useful.

Here is a site aimed at young children answering science questions like "Why do we yawn":

http://kids.gakken.co.jp/kagaku/110ban/

It might be the kind of thing you were wanting.

There are also two switches at the very top of the page, one which toggles text enlargement and the other which toggles furigana.

The furigana are the bracketed-after-the-word kind which I always find somehow a bit confusing to the eye and yominikui, so you might prefer to use rikaichan with the definitions turned off (toggle D) or Rikaisama in Sanseido mode (simple Japanese definitions).

Or you may prefer seeing exactly what a Japanese child sees.

vtx4848 Wrote:I tried to find stuff like this before online but couldn't. Wikipedia is written in a non-learning way and much more difficult, there is a wikibooks things as well but a lot of it is incomplete. Anyone know where to find Japanese learning resources online?

Did you try searching on amazon.co.jp etc under something like "kagaku kyoukasho" (in kanji)?

Try the non-fiction section in 青い鳥文庫 (aoi tori bunko): http://aoitori.kodansha.co.jp/search/gen...7%E3%83%B3

you can read quite a few of these on-line, for free (any with the ためし読みする button).

last time I looked, they seemed at nice level (you can choose by school grade), and reasonably interesting.

thanks for reminding me about this, I must go back and take another look.