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(very) easy books to practice kana and immerse in kanji

#1
I am quite new to learning Japanese. I started with Pimsleur, but by the time I reached lesson 15 I got irritated by the reliance on speech and the absence of any transcripts. Not too long after that, I switched to RTK ed. 6 and Genki. I am about halfway through RTK. Genki is going a lot slower, mainly because I cannot find enough time to go through the exercises. I am currently done with the vocabulary of chapter 3 (Genki 1) and the grammar and exercises of chapter 2.

To make it more fun and to be able to study Japanese while I am commuting, I have been looking at children books such as いっすんぼうし, but I have not yet found any good resource that also provides these books accompanied with a good vocabulary list (which lists the words and their translation, but preferably also gives the corresponding kanji) and some grammar explanation. In an ideal world, I would also love to see these books written as they would in regular Japanese, thus using Kanji whenever appropriate. Or, even better, written in regular Japanese with the pronunciation on top of the Kanji.

So far I have found these books with vocabulary lists, yet lacking any kanji. I found them accompanied by an English translation, yet a translation that is overly loose. And I have some of the original books, but these are all just plain kana, which is okay to read but I cannot understand what the words mean. Does anyone know of a good resource to use these books as study material or maybe of some other, easy books that do offer exactly what I want?
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#2
song lyrics + rikaichan = probably more fun
Edited: 2012-02-02, 7:24 am
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#3
Try a grammar book like dictionary of basic japanese grammar? examples are pretty easy, translation is provided and you learn grammar plus some vocab.
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#4
Thanks for the suggestions. I never though about looking at song lyrics, let alone grammar books Smile. But indeed, these both look like good options.
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#5
howtwosavealif3 Wrote:song lyrics + rikaichan = probably more fun
second this. I learned the majority of my first basic vocabulary looking at song lyrics.
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#6
There's actually an online tool that you can use to generate a vocab list for any article. It's called the Japanese Reading Tutor.

For beginner level content, scroll down to the "reading practice" section in the following discussion. The link to the Reading Tutor is also here:
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=4133
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