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From: Europe Registered: 2011-04-17 Posts: 799

By "readers" I mean those books that are aimed at helping intermediate learners transition into reading Japanese literature, by walking you through increasingly difficult short stories (they usually provide an English translation of each page, or a sentence by sentence breakdown + and a dictionary of all words used + audio - some of them also provide context for the stories, like info about the author, historical context, etc.).

I was curious how they worked for other people (if anyone used them), and which you would recommend.

I'm also curious if you know of any that are also available in electronic format (I don't mean pirated scans, but actually published as e-books, to make it easy to input sentences into Anki).

Norman Member

From: Japan Registered: 2012-02-19 Posts: 146

Somewhat related, but most certainly helpful...eBook Readers have a 'touch' function that will allow you to instantly retrieve the dictionary meaning of words/kanji. I have a Sony eReader and it does this with both English and Japanese. Purchasing an eReader might also be more valuable in the long run.

Shadeless Member

Registered: 2010-05-25 Posts: 39

I think the term is "Graded Readers", maybe try changing topic name to that - this is too broad. (Good question though!)

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Fillanzea Member

From: New York, NY Registered: 2009-10-02 Posts: 534 Website

I think the Yomu yomu bunko readers are really good -- I was already past the level where they would've been useful to me when they came out (they go up to about N2 level), but I think they fill a real hole at the beginning-to-early-intermediate level.

I did use Read Real Japanese as study material back in the late 90s -- I know the edition that's out now is different, but the basic concept of short essays and short stories plus furigana plus glosses is solid. There's a lot of good stuff in there.

Of the readers I've seen, the only ones I wouldn't recommend are "Breaking Into Japanese Literature" and "Exploring Japanese Literature," because I feel that early 20th century and late 19th century literature pose some issues -- in terms of grammar, vocabulary, and kanji usage -- that are over the heads of most late-intermediate learners, and not really relevant for reading contemporary prose.

Edit: There's also "A Japanese Reader" by Roy Andrew Miller, which is at this point quite old (1962) and way too fast-paced -- "The Makioka Sisters" and essays on economic policy don't really belong in a book that starts out with hiragana!

Last edited by Fillanzea (2013 February 23, 10:34 pm)

uisukii Guest

I've found that at least for myself that I get more out of something depending on related interest. I've glanced over a bit of graded material but a lot of it bores me, whereas without setting out to actively "read this and increase my Japanese comprehension", I find myself reading a lot of the text in hentai manga.

*shrugs* some people are more comfortable taking larger mouthfuls than others.

It is purely opinion, but you'd get more bang for your buck by just focusing on vocab sentences like Core6K, or something like that, and reading whatever interests you as not something to study, but something you enjoy reading, in your free time. There are heaps of free grammar guides online, and shared decks in Anki, for close-deletion exercises, etc. You are more likely to have certain patterns and phrases stuck in your head which you will either remember, come across a lot, or feel compelled to plug them in Anki, if it comes from something you enjoy.

They are essentially memes.

tashippy Member

From: New York Registered: 2011-06-18 Posts: 566

i really enjoyed (enjoyed!) !! Read Real Japanese vol 1 by Janet Ashby. I was so excited when i finished that book that i think i bought too many 'readers'. nothing grabbed me like that book, until i got vol 2 from Ashby. i think she picks engaging essays by authors who you might be interested in, but whose literature might be out of reach just yet. the editing is good, too, so you don't have to skip around the book too much, especially in vol. 1.
Emmerich just doesn't do it for me. his book should be similar to Ashby; same publisher and series and layout in the recent editions, but it the structure and the explanations of odd expressions feel cumbersome, the introduction...it's all bleh
i enjoyed Breaking into Japanese Literature by Giles Murray with some of soseki's ten nights of dreams and rashomon.
i think Rapid Reading Japanese (probably out of print) is a cool book to skim through, and it encourages skimming
the male reader of botchan floating around here is quite emphatic if you're looking to follow along a whole novel to an audio track, the female one is not bad either.
if anyone recalls some 文芸 with excellent readers (performers/reciters) please recommend.

Stansfield123 Member

From: Europe Registered: 2011-04-17 Posts: 799

Thanks everyone, great suggestions so far. Never encountered YomuYomu Bunko before. I will get a volume of Level 2 YomuYomu Bunko, for starters (looks like that's the highest level I'm comfortable with, judging from the free samples I found).

Then I'll go with one of the essay books (because they're real literature, so I think I'll enjoy it more, even if they're more cumbersome to work through), the Janet Ashby one looks like it has interesting essays for instance (although the KamiSama story in the Emmerich version also piqued my interest, so did the first Soseki essay in the Giles Murray one. I have a feeling Sosekisan and I will be spending quite a bit of time together in the future).

Please, keep the suggestions coming.

uisukii wrote:
It is purely opinion, but you'd get more bang for your buck by just focusing on vocab sentences like Core6K, or something like that, and reading whatever interests you as not something to study, but something you enjoy reading, in your free time.

I don't really enjoy reading anything in Japanese. The stuff I can actually read is silly nonsense (i.e. I'm currently immersed in a blog post about what some chick had for lunch), and the stuff I would enjoy I can't read yet.

That's why I'm exploring the concept of reading actual literature that's packed with various helpful additions, like readings of kanji words, literal translation, explanations of common expressions, etc.

And yeah, I am doing vocab sentences. But I plan on moving on to learning by reading as the main method of continuing my studies, ASAP. I'm not a fan of unnecessary toil when it comes to language learning, and reviewing boring sentences when you're already able to read literature (even if only assisted by a dictionary or a reader like these), would be unnecessary toil.

P.S. This whole learning Japanese business does not get much "bang for my buck" to being with. While I will be able to use it professionally, sometime in the future, there are plenty of more profitable things I could be doing with the 2000 hours or so it supposedly takes to become fluent in Japanese.

I'm doing this because it's fun. So while I do agree that the most efficient thing I could do to learn Japanese is to continue doing pre-made sentences for a while, I'm not motivated by "efficiency". If I was, I would forget about Japanese altogether, and put in more hours at work or something. I'm motivated to learn Japanese by my love of culture. While literature (fiction) is only a part of that and not really my main interest, I found a long time ago that literature is a fairly efficient, and by far the most enjoyable, path to language fluency. That is the ultimate reason why I'm making this switch, not considerations of efficiency.

Last edited by Stansfield123 (2013 February 24, 11:13 pm)

Aspiring Member

From: San Diego Registered: 2012-08-13 Posts: 307

^Learning kanji improves your visual-spatial memory, according to research. Learning Japanese makes you smarter, in general. That may be worth it in the long run.

&of course the time you enjoy wasting is never time wasted.

Last edited by Aspiring (2013 February 25, 12:03 am)

RawToast お巡りさん

From: UK Registered: 2012-09-03 Posts: 431 Website

Somewhat related, but most certainly helpful...eBook Readers have a 'touch' function that will allow you to instantly retrieve the dictionary meaning of words/kanji. I have a Sony eReader and it does this with both English and Japanese. Purchasing an eReader might also be more valuable in the long run.

I think this is the best way to go if you can get the readers in the right format for less money.

uisukii Guest

Stansfield123 wrote:
P.S. This whole learning Japanese business does not get much "bang for my buck" to being with. While I will be able to use it professionally, sometime in the future, there are plenty of more profitable things I could be doing with the 2000 hours or so it supposedly takes to become fluent in Japanese.

You learning Japanese for fun, because you enjoy it, I gather from your post. I don't really care much for economics, but I'll give it a go:-

Spending 2000 hours on something you enjoy and find fun, which will provide you with a base to be able to enjoy further things, as opposed to spending

Vs.

Spending an average 5 days a week working to be able to enjoy between 20-24 hours over a two day period; rinse, repeat.

I'm not really much when it comes to these things, but it seems as though within your post is presented a somewhat distorted meaning of the word "profitable". Isn't money, after all, used to buy things we enjoy?

RawToast wrote:
Somewhat related, but most certainly helpful...eBook Readers have a 'touch' function that will allow you to instantly retrieve the dictionary meaning of words/kanji. I have a Sony eReader and it does this with both English and Japanese. Purchasing an eReader might also be more valuable in the long run.
I think this is the best way to go if you can get the readers in the right format for less money.

I've recently bought a Nook Simple Touch. Including express shipping (from within Australia) it cost a total of $90. Based on what I've read, the e-reader is capable of being "rooted" and being used to read many formats of e-books, manga, etc. as well as install Ankidroid. Within the next few days I will attempt to "root" it and see how effective it is.

From my understanding, if it works, one should be able to buy an e-reader which is a lot cheaper than other e-readers, without sacrificing useability. Also, for those living within America, I've read online that people have been able to buy these Barnes and Noble brand e-readers for between 40 and 60 dollars from places such as Target/K-mart.

Last edited by uisukii (2013 February 25, 6:11 am)

Stansfield123 Member

From: Europe Registered: 2011-04-17 Posts: 799

Yay, a very nice person put together a vocab list for Kawakami Hiromi's "Kamisama" (one of the stories in the above mentioned books). It's on Renshuu http://www.renshuu.org/index.php?page=c … _id=31477, so it comes with example sentences. I'll definitely Anki most of the ones I don't already know, before reading the story. That should make it a little more manageable.

uisukii wrote:
You learning Japanese for fun, because you enjoy it, I gather from your post. I don't really care much for economics, but I'll give it a go:-

Spending 2000 hours on something you enjoy and find fun, which will provide you with a base to be able to enjoy further things, as opposed to spending

Vs.

Spending an average 5 days a week working to be able to enjoy between 20-24 hours over a two day period; rinse, repeat.

I'm not really much when it comes to these things, but it seems as though within your post is presented a somewhat distorted meaning of the word "profitable". Isn't money, after all, used to buy things we enjoy?

Money is used to buy things that help us achieve our goals. If you're a hedonist, then your only goal is to enjoy yourself. These days, that's fairly easy to manage (at least in the West), all you need is a basic job for it. But people have other goals than just "enjoy yourself". Bill Gates for instance wants to improve living conditions through Africa, it seems. He's the richest man in the world (or used to be), and he still isn't even close to having enough money to achieve his goal (he is however a lot closer than the millions who drone on about the state of Africa but do nothing about it). Someone else might want to cure cancer, or go to Mars, etc.

I prefer to keep my goals off the Internet, but, please, take my word for it that spending 2000 hours on learning Japanese is not the best use of my time, towards achieving them.

But, of course, I don't spend all my time on working to achieve my ultimate goals in life. That would be stupid and counter-productive, because we're not robots capable of working towards a distant goal without rest and short term gratification. The reason why learning new languages makes sense for me is because it's easy to do and, if done the right way, the gratification can in fact be near-instant. Japanese is a bit of a special case, but even so I knew going into this that aside from the toil of Rtk, grammar, and some basic vocab (first two of which I'm nearly done with), gratification would be nearly instant, just like with any other activity I do for relaxation and fun. Now I'm starting to realize that I can make things fun even earlier, with the help of these graded readers.

Yes, if it was imperative that I learn Japanese as soon as possible, I would do at least another thousand pre-made vocab sentences before attempting reading. I do realize that furigana and translation aided readers are not as effective as actual reading, or sentence mining and Anki reviews. But my goal is to learn Japanese as a fun, relaxing activity. From this point on, I think I can do that (with some use of Anki, but very little, compared to what some of the guys around here are doing, or what people at Ajatt are doing).

Fillanzea Member

From: New York, NY Registered: 2009-10-02 Posts: 534 Website

There's actually a fair amount of research to support the effectiveness of large amounts of "sheltered" easy reading (that is, books written specifically for second language learners even before books written for native speaker children.) Some of the more progressive ESL curriculums in Japan, from what I understand, are shifting towards extensive reading with graded readers. So I do think it's not necessarily accurate to say that starting to read graded readers right away is less efficient.

kitsu Member

From: washington Registered: 2008-09-09 Posts: 55

Second 多読よむよむ. They are seperated into collections, each containing 4 difficulty levels, with each level containing 4-5 books. Level 1 is mostly pictures, level 4 is mostly words.

I read collections 1 & 2 starting at level 1 intermittently while learning via other resources. At first I got stymied in the 2nd/3rd levels, later I made it to the 4th, but couldn't understand much, and eventually read straight through with no problems. It was a valuable base for moving on to something like キノの旅. Do do the tadoku thing as explained at the beginning of each book. You should be learning vocab and grammar from other sources, an use the readers to practice reading.

uisukii Guest

^^^Stansfield123, I think we are working under two different understanding of self enjoyment. I enjoy helping other people with things which I also find interesting, in the same respect that I would feel positive to, say, help someone carry something heavy to their car, being able to be apart of a research team for vaccines, philanthropy etc. This isn't something related to hedonism or in such context of self-pleasure.

Perhaps my post was worded poorly. The point wasn't efficiency (in that I wasn't trying to make a suggestion of one method over another) in time, but an efficiency in doing what you ultimately want (not in the context moral relativism, etc.) as opposed to doing something you ultimately don't want to do.

In respect to learning Japanese, I should have expanded upon what I meant by when I stated that "It is purely opinion[...]". What I meant by said post was that, to put it one way, is that it is my preference to only do what I actually want to do while learning Japanese. Even if it's tiring to create a spreadsheet for Anki, or some other related study tool, as long as it doesn't bore me, I will continue it. If it starts to become boring, I stop. That it isn't about focusing on learning X amount of words, or grammar, or anything, to be able to understand, watch, read Y. It is about enjoying all the bits in between and being able to get even more out of being able to read more desirable things.

It is a mindset issue, in my opinion, more-so than the selection of texts, study aids, etc. available. When learning a language you basically have to learn to crawl and walk all over again. Since we have to spend a decent amount of time on the basic movement before being able to run, it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to focus only on the running and finding the rest a chore. Not when one has the option to enjoy the process entirely. Focusing on the process is focusing on the present, and while distant between here and all the way over there may stay the same, it feels much less when each part is enjoyable. I think that is the point. Not just in learning languages, but in life in general. The application is universal.

Um, yeah, something which I probably haven't been able to express properly again, either.

Aspiring Member

From: San Diego Registered: 2012-08-13 Posts: 307

@Stansfield
You've probably seen this, but...
http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?p … 67#p125567

Listening-Reading method explained here. (by same author)
http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_ … ssages.htm

I came across that ^ and thought it was extremely relevant to this thread.
We learn to read because we love reading books.

Anyways, buonaparte has uploaded a lot of parallel texts w/audio that you might find useful.
Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, Japanese books, news...and so much more.

Last edited by Aspiring (2013 February 27, 12:21 am)

Altaira Member

From: USA Registered: 2012-01-10 Posts: 27

Whoops! Nevermind.

Last edited by Altaira (2013 March 19, 9:04 am)

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