Fantajikan is amazingly high-quality stuff, but it is still far above my comprehension abilities.

Does anyone know of online audio or video in Japanese designed form very young children (younger than ~5). Thanks!

~K

OK, maybe there are none online. How about for purchase? Any recommendations?

IME, audio for children usually involves people talking like children and is VERY hard to understand. The whiney voice, the changed sounds... I really wish people would stop talking to children like they have a speech impediment.

Try finding some graded readers. I know The Japan Shop has some.

Chi's Sweet Home is the only anime I can think of for that age group.

wccrawford Wrote:IME, audio for children usually involves people talking like children and is VERY hard to understand. The whiney voice, the changed sounds... I really wish people would stop talking to children like they have a speech impediment.

Don't knock it! According to what I've read on the subject, the "baby talk" that adults use when speaking to children actually helps children learn the language. The slow and exaggerated intonation and facial expressions, the simplified diction and syntax ("baby want water?"), etc. it all helps infants learn to interpret what would otherwise be basically noise. I think of it as the speech equivalent of bright, primary colors.

In the case of Japanese I think it would be particularly useful for foreign adult learners to be exposed to the language that Japanese adults use to speak to children, because the syntactic and morphological differences between this "child Japanese" and regular adult Japanese are so much greater than those between, say, "child English" and adult English. Adult Japanese has layer upon layer of polite language added to it which obscures the underlying structure of the language. At any rate, this is Tae Kim's contention (in the opening section of "A Japanese guide to Japanese grammar"), and I find it very plausible. (Also, and this is a wild guess on my part, I would expect that "child Japanese" uses a smaller proportion of 漢語 words, which tend to be more learned and more plagued by homonyms.)

Quote:Chi's Sweet Home is the only anime I can think of for that age group.

Thanks!