In two days, I'm off to Japan with my school as part of a "school is over! No more tests! YEAH!" kind of thing. Surrounded by English friends isn't the best way forward for Japanese immersion, but I figure I can at least make the trip useful if I buy some nice useful books, at a fairly low standard.

I don't mean textbooks - I mean actual proper novels / children's books that I can use in the future. (I'm still not quite at the right level to use them, but it'll be years before I get another chance like this!)

So, I'm inexperienced in buying foreign-language books, the Google results are confusing me to hell, and I'm essentially very lost. My initial ideas would be some light novels or translations of easy books I'm familiar with (e.g. Harry Potter, Narnia, etc).

But what would you recommend? Huge props for any ideas

Find a Book-Off and buy your books second-hand. They're only a few hundred yen a volume that way so it's easy to buy lots and it doesn't matter if you buy some stuff you can't read yet or don't like or whatever.

(It can be a bit tricky trying to find things though if you don't have some author names in mind when you go in. The manga section's usually easier to browse :-))

Second book-off.

If you can find Japanese translations of books you've already read, I highly recommend it. Otherwise, I've heard Yoshimoto Banana's books/short-stories are fairly approachable--short sentences and not a whole lot of kanji.

Good luck!

I'd third Book-Off, and highly suggest getting manga.

There's lots of 105 yen manga, most of it is very good, and most manga has furigana to go with the kanji. It's a fun way to learn to words and review old ones.

Of course, some manga like 鋼の錬金術師 (Full Metal Alchemist) is harder than reading a book!

Looks like everyone's already got it right.

1. Go to Book Off
2. Find cool books
3. Get ridiculous amounts of book for next to no money at all.



edit: Unless there's something specific you're looking for that's not at BO, go to some store with a computer search thing. They're around, so I would just suggest going to ones that look "newer" if that's the case.

Find ones your interested, if your still learning the main kanji readings. Get ones with furigana and such. I recent got 5 books in the mail(bought it online). I was quite suprised I could read almost all of it. Some vocab I still don't know but the rest is good.

Initiially I thought I wasn't going to be able to read it due to my vocab deck having a lot of words I don't know/failing. But when I read the novel today, I was like "Yes!!!" This right here tells me I'm going really deep into the language. No point in stopping,keep going!!