Hello everyone,
I am looking for Bilingual books, a book written in two languages within the same book & kid books. The reason I ask is because manga is hard even with furigana, my basic japanese is terrible, and bilingual books might be really interesting and helpful at the same time.

I can't find any information on any of these bilingual books, perhaps the type of books are incorrectly. A book's story written in the two languages with the passage translated into the other language. IE: A Japanese book written in japanese and in english.

My basic japanese is terrible, I have the hardest time trying to speak to others about every simple ideas. I guess reading kid books should reinforce basic Japanese. Is this good idea?

I am currently trying to read あそびにいくヨ！and h系b型, but it's really hard and I am not understanding much or really enjoying myself. On top of that, I am trying to find FF12 manga and I can't find the raw anywhere. If anyone could help me find places to get pdf or jpegs or some file container with these books/manga, it would be highly appreciated. I think, PMing me the links would be best.

Please advise me if any of these methods were helpful or interesting to you, I would really enjoy reading your personal views on them.

[Thank you so much for reading this crazy long post.]

How much time have you spent with textbooks and grammar guides? If reading children's books is still too difficult, it might be better to spend more time with textbooks until you get more comfortable.

As for easy or bilingual stuff you can read, よつばと！seems to be the popular choice for people wanting to begin reading Japanese. There are also books like "Read Japanese With a Smile", "Read Real Japanese Fiction" or "Breaking into Japanese Literature". These books provide translations, highlight new vocab, and explain some grammar points. However, these books are more for intermediate learners.
http://hukumusume.com/douwa/ is a website that has short fairy tales that you can read, and some of the stories come with an audio recording of the story, as well as an English translation of the story. There's no fuigana, but Rikai-chan/kun/sama solves that problem easily.

There are some actual bilingual manga that you can buy. A search on google or amazon should turn some up.
Also its usually not too hard to find translated manga scans online. You can use those to follow along with a Japanese version.
Also if you are looking for something that is particularly easy, I've found the manga "Chi's Sweet Home" to be one of the easiest I have come across. Much easier than even Yotsubato.

you can find english translations for all the popular mangas here: http://www.goodmanga.net/

for japanese manga, search raw books here:
http://www.nyaa.eu/

quark, the website is actually really nice. There are some parts I am not understanding, which is preventing me from understanding the over all picture of the stories. I have never used Rikai before, but I have heard a lot about it. I have added the plugin, thanks.

Zarxrax, I have not heard of either of these. Thanks I will look into them.

Hashiriya, Raw context is really hard to find good seeds, although I have heard / used nyaa before. Thanks!

Hyperborea, These seem really nice and the graded version seem like a great fit.

Thank you everyone!

make sure to look up manga in both english AND japanese you'll be surprised what you can that way.

If you're looking for a place to download raw manga this is a good site, though it doesn't have FF12.

You can buy a number of Japanese novels in translation once you get that far. That opens up a lot of territory, if you don't mind looking back and forth between two books.

[Zgarbas]

I liked http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Short-St...0143118336
Some of the stories are harder than the others and there's a bit of variety within. The translation is quite literal and they make sure to keep it parallel (as in, a sentence in Japanese=a sentence in English, no mixing) since it's made to help beginners. Can't say they're the most entertaining stories out there, they're pretty average in entertainment value with only one or two really sticking out...which might be good since you can focus on the language more .

Hashiriya, I only read manga that I have already read in english or seen the anime with subs, just to make sure I get the idea of what's going on. Though, I think it's better idea to have both versions in front of you. There are many times I am looking up word by word, sometimes I like it and other times, it's quite annoying.

Splatted, Thank you for the resource, I'll check it out right now. There was another website that was a huge forum that had a lot of good materials on it, but I can't remember it.

bertoni, I would really like to get into Japanese novels as I have never been a big reader of anything. Maybe these kind of novels will open that up for me.

Zgarbas, I really like the concept of this book, hopefully I can find it somewhere!

Thanks all!

thanks Splatted, that's an awesome resource

Manga, even bilingual, is not something I would recommend to make progress in Japanese.
Sure it's fun to read but you'll pick up strange expressions that people don't actually use in everyday's life.

Bilingual novels or articles on the other hand are great.
For online bilingual materials check out Hiragana Times or http://www.nippontalk.com.

You can start here: http://chokochoko.wordpress.com/the-great-library/
Not a lot of content, but they make for nice short reads.

There is a line of Kodansha bilingual comics, I know they had stuff like Love Hina and Card Captor Sakura back in the day, no idea what they have now.

You can watch anime or drama with Japanese subs, this can help your reading compression a lot. Subs2Srs & the Anki Morphology plugin can help you review vocab from what you have watched.

MidoriHappy Wrote:Manga, even bilingual, is not something I would recommend to make progress in Japanese.
Sure it's fun to read but you'll pick up strange expressions that people don't actually use in everyday's life.

Bilingual novels or articles on the other hand are great.
For online bilingual materials check out Hiragana Times or http://www.nippontalk.com.

Depends on the manga. Otherwise, this is pretty much a boring old strawman argument. The fact that the dialogue is aimed at natives, by natives, means that the patterns themselves are completely comprehensible and, even if there may be a lot of highly informal dialogue or hyperbola, you have to understand the context of what you are reading (that is to say, you'd be more or less a fool to read a comic in English and expect that a story revolving around action hero fights and such is an accurate portrayal of day-to-day English conversational dialogue).

There are a massive amount of manga out there focused around the daily lives of teenagers (hence the intended reading buying audience) which contain a large amount of common expression and daily vocabulary.


Honestly, this argument is an insult to the intelligence of language learners, as it basically assumes the learner cannot discern the context of ordinary lives and the related speech, to that or fantasy or obviously hyperbolic situations. And even if, for some strange and outlandish series of events, one manages to reach a high standard of Japanese language proficiency in comprehension and usage, while under the understanding that comic type responses to situations are the norm, it wouldn't take very long in an authentic native language spoken environment to bring to light these issues.

Essentially, it's an argument which attempts to disparage the self-learning audience from an auxiliary input which utilizes patterns and vocabulary actually uses by natives and understood by natives, on the off-chance that the reader isn't able to separate reality from fantasy contexts.

Sure, shouting something about a magical blast beam while flying in the air, fighting some other magical enemy, would be strange in daily conversation- but when it that context ever going to arise in order for the reader to get confused between that and reality? If Japanese children are able to do it, when are not able to write even half the kanji which people are able to while using RtK, when why on earth would an adult, with an adult's brain and experience with reading, not be able to?

It's not like every Japanese learner is an American, and an American home-schooled as a Young-Earth Creationist. Which is pretty much the same level of grasping reality as you are suggesting when telling people not to use manga as one of their learning sources because they will end up talking like Cell from Dragon Ball Z, or something.

There are very few bilingual novels. Instead, buy the original book in Japanese, buy the translation in English and read one on the top of the other (looks ridiculous, but works). Plus, you end up owning actual Japanese books, yay! And in my experience, novels are translated close enough to go sentence by sentence.

Manga are a great way to learn, for everyone not yet able to read novels. It is better than short stories, news sites, etc., for a couple of reasons: the pictures, and the length (pick a long one, with many volumes). Both aid comprehension, especially the length (for reasons explained in the stickied "buonaparte's resources" thread).

Recently, I've switched to a method where I try to read the Japanese version, but if the page contains anything that isn't clear to me, I immediately switch to the English version, read the full page, and then come back and carefully read the Japanese page.

Before, I used to struggle to read the Japanese version, and only switched to the English version on rare occasion, when I couldn't follow the story. This caused me to skip some Japanese sentences without ever understanding them - and did so without actually speeding up my reading to make it more enjoyable (reading a page of manga in English takes no more than a few quick glances).

By knowing what a difficult sentence is supposed to mean ahead of time, it is much easier to pay careful attention to the vocab and structure, without gliding over the details for the sake of progressing with the story. It of course requires some discipline, but nowhere near the kind of discipline it takes to do Anki reviews for instance.

This also means that I'm not just stuck reading Yotsubato!, I can read more adult oriented manga as well. It takes more effort, but the benefits are greater too (and the story is more interesting, so the extra effort doesn't make it less enjoyable).

Ehonnavi has loads of books for kids and quite a few are bilingual.

MidoriHappy Wrote:For online bilingual materials check out Hiragana Times or http://www.nippontalk.com.

Daichi Wrote:You can start here: http://chokochoko.wordpress.com/the-great-library/
Not a lot of content, but they make for nice short reads.

Wow! Thanks! This is what I was looking for!