Fillanzea wrote:

I've read some of the first book of マリア様が見てる. There are a few furigana, but not many -- about two words a page, outside of proper names. I'd say it's about medium in difficulty? I feel like the tone is a little old-fashioned and formal:

「どうぞ」
湯気の立ち上る赤い液体が白いカップに七分目ほど注がれ、目の前に置かれた。　これは、紅茶という飲み物だ。

"Here you are."
On the seventh minute, the steaming red liquid was poured into a white cup and put down in front of her eyes. This was the beverage known as black tea.

That was just the beginning of chapter five, but there are moments like that all the way through -- where the author feels the need to over-explain or over-describe or put things in terms more complicated than they really need to be. But aside from that, the grammar and vocabulary aren't too out there... There's a reason I put it down partway through, though. I was looking for a fast, easy read, and this wasn't it.

Ooh, duly noted.  Maybe I should re-set my goal to a year from now before I try reading them.  The books just look so pretty sitting on my shelf, that I'd love to start reading them.
Maybe my 6 month goal should be to work through one of my kids novels like　黒魔女が通る or 若おかみは小学生.  I think once I boost my vocabulary a bit more, and work through an Intermediate grammar text, they should be more at my level.

Tori-kun wrote:

Bokusenou wrote:

Interesting about Kino no Tabi's easiness level. The writing is pretty straightforward [...]

Yeah, have to agree on that. But I shrugged when I saw words like 燻らす O.o

Yeah, it's straightforward, but the descriptive parts can have some uncommon words, though that might be an issue with most fantasy-esque novels...

leosmith wrote:

How about any simple , short novels that have english translations available? Kitchen does. Any others?

You might already know of this book, but I would recommend "Read Real Japanese" (the fiction one - there is also an essay collection but I'm not familiar with it).  It's not a novel, but it contains several short stories by various Japanese writers.  The stories are presented in Japanese on the right page, and on the left side are some English translations.  There is a section in the back that also contains more notes on grammar, etc.  It also comes with an audio CD which I found really helpful.

Splatted wrote:

TheSlyPig wrote:

If anyone would like to share ways, links, stores that you get cheap Japanese literature in general, it would be greatly appreciated.

You shouldn't bother searching the forums for "a totally innocent thread about 日本語 books" because you definitely won't find anything worth your while (also be aware that the forum search function can't handle Japanese characters). On a completely unrelated note, I came across all the books I've mentioned on this thread entirely innocently.

As you stated, I couldn't possibly be bothered to search for such an admittedly innocent thread, but I seriously, seriously appreciate and am incredibly thankful for your efforts in attempting to lead me to legitimate ways to purchase such previously stated media units.

leosmith wrote:

I noticed someone said easiness depends on the amount of furigana. Are there people here who think reading a book with all furigana will improve their ability to read kanji? This is certainly not the case for me. I'll never buy a novel with abnormally high amounts of furigana. At this point, furigana is my enemy.

It depends what you mean by "abnormally high amounts". I think in general it's useful to have furigana at a quantity that roughly matches your ability, which doesn't mean "on every kanji" but may be more than "what you'd find in a typical aimed-at-adults novel". They give you the opportunity to mentally link "oh, these kanji have this reading" or "ah, this word I'd heard spoken is written like this" without having to break off reading and go and look things up in a dictionary; that kind of periodic reinforcement turns into memory. Furigana on first usage of a word but not thereafter is also common and good for painless memory reinforcement.

(of course statistically speaking books with more furigana are likely to be aimed at a lower reading age audience and have simpler grammar and vocabulary anyway so will be easier in that sense too :-))

Are there people here who think reading a book with all furigana will improve their ability to read kanji?

First, the ability to read kanji is not the same as the ability to read Japanese. I think that one of the best ways to improve general reading ability is to read a lot of stuff quickly, and I've done that with books with furigana and with books without furigana. The only difference is that when I learn words by exposure, if they have furigana I learn the correct pronunciation, and if they don't have furigana I learn the pronunciation as "mumblety-mumble." 

The other thing is that by seeing the kanji with furigana a dozen times, then by the time I see it without furigana I already know how to pronounce it -- without studying, without anything but exposure.

When I was in Japanese 3 in college, and we read short stories out loud, I was the person in my class who could read without stopping to think about every word. Up until that point I'd read... mostly, a million shoujo manga with furigana on them. Worked for me.

Fillanzea wrote:

Are there people here who think reading a book with all furigana will improve their ability to read kanji?

First, the ability to read kanji is not the same as the ability to read Japanese. I think that one of the best ways to improve general reading ability is to read a lot of stuff quickly, and I've done that with books with furigana and with books without furigana. The only difference is that when I learn words by exposure, if they have furigana I learn the correct pronunciation, and if they don't have furigana I learn the pronunciation as "mumblety-mumble." 
The other thing is that by seeing the kanji with furigana a dozen times, then by the time I see it without furigana I already know how to pronounce it -- without studying, without anything but exposure.

I see this idea touted a lot, that learning to read with furigana means that you won't learn kanji.  The furigana actually helps me a lot - I've learned new kanji compounds effortlessly this way, or at the very least, they've imprinted in my brain a bit, so that when I do come across them in Anki later, they are much easier to remember. 
Also, since I didn't finish RTK, I lack your guys ability to take a stab at kanji compounds.  Even with RtK, if you're a beginner reading a book, you may have an idea what the compounds mean, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you know how they're pronounced.
Just like Fillanzea says, when I come across kanji without knowing how to pronounce it, they just come across as noise, or I mentally say 'skip'.  With furigana, even if I don't know what the word means, at least it gives me something to sound out.  It makes looking things up in the dictionary much easier.
It all boils down to 'To each, their own'. Some people find that furigana doesn't help, or even hinders their progress.  But I'm going to come forward as someone that, at this point in my studies, loves furigana, and thinks that they are a huge help in my goal towards fluency.

Zgarbas wrote:

Also, I might be wrong about this, but I think Haruki Murakami's books have relatively easy to understand Japanese, at least from what I've seen (have not read full novels, just excerpts). It's a common trait with best-sellers.

They're not "hard", but they're not the easiest read you could find either. I think Yoshimoto Banana and Akagawa Jirou both write in a simpler style and in shorter lengths, for instance.

Of Murakami Haruki, I've read:

-After Dark (my favorite)
-Sputnik no Koibito (pretty minor)
-Norwei no Mori (about 2/3 of it)
-About the first 100 pages of Umibe no Kafka
-About the first 100 pages of Nejimakidori Chronicle (Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)
-About the first 50 pages of Sekai no Owari to Hard-Boiled Wonderland

My rule of thumb with him is that his more realistic writing is the easiest, and the more surrealistic he gets, the more difficult. Norwei no Mori was actually the first novel I ever made a good stab at reading in Japanese -- I abandoned it because it was too depressing, but it wasn't hard to read.

I can't believe someone's favorite Murakami book is After Dark, haha.  I guess that shows how much tastes can differ.  I thought that book was awful.

Tzadeck wrote:

I can't believe someone's favorite Murakami book is After Dark, haha.  I guess that shows how much tastes can differ.  I thought that book was awful.

I know right? Especially since he read Hard-Boiled Wonderland (my fave Haruki book by far)

Last edited by Zgarbas (2011 November 17, 5:13 am)

Fillanzea wrote:

First, the ability to read kanji is not the same as the ability to read Japanese. I think that one of the best ways to improve general reading ability is to read a lot of stuff quickly, and I've done that with books with furigana and with books without furigana. The only difference is that when I learn words by exposure, if they have furigana I learn the correct pronunciation, and if they don't have furigana I learn the pronunciation as "mumblety-mumble." 

The other thing is that by seeing the kanji with furigana a dozen times, then by the time I see it without furigana I already know how to pronounce it -- without studying, without anything but exposure.

When I was in Japanese 3 in college, and we read short stories out loud, I was the person in my class who could read without stopping to think about every word. Up until that point I'd read... mostly, a million shoujo manga with furigana on them. Worked for me.

quark wrote:

I see this idea touted a lot, that learning to read with furigana means that you won't learn kanji.  The furigana actually helps me a lot - I've learned new kanji compounds effortlessly this way, or at the very least, they've imprinted in my brain a bit, so that when I do come across them in Anki later, they are much easier to remember. 
Also, since I didn't finish RTK, I lack your guys ability to take a stab at kanji compounds.  Even with RtK, if you're a beginner reading a book, you may have an idea what the compounds mean, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you know how they're pronounced.
Just like Fillanzea says, when I come across kanji without knowing how to pronounce it, they just come across as noise, or I mentally say 'skip'.  With furigana, even if I don't know what the word means, at least it gives me something to sound out.  It makes looking things up in the dictionary much easier.
It all boils down to 'To each, their own'. Some people find that furigana doesn't help, or even hinders their progress.  But I'm going to come forward as someone that, at this point in my studies, loves furigana, and thinks that they are a huge help in my goal towards fluency.

I’ve been thinking about this lately, and even asked one of my teachers, so I thought I’d share. First, let me present 2 of the infinite number of theoretical paths to reading novels fluently. They are sort of 2 ends of the spectrum, and I doubt if anybody follows them exactly, but here they are.

They both assume RTK1 and the kana are mastered first. Next, they both assume you work your way through a text, gaining some comfort in reading very basic Japanese.
1)    Min Furigana. Every day make sure you get at least 10 min of “easy” reading. In the beginning this can be hiragana readers, readers with furigana, manga, excerpts from a text, etc. In addition, do an hour of intensive reading. Use a novel that has only normal amounts of furigana, and try hard to read as much as possible without help. Look up every word you don’t know, and put it in an SRS.
2)    Max Furigana. Every day do 1hr 10 min reading with furigana over all kanji. After 6 months, switch to novels that have only normal amounts of furigana. Never look up words.
After 6 months, who do you think will be better at reading novels without furigana? What about after 1 year?

I’m not saying that furigana is bad, I’m just saying there is a time and place for it in each individual’s language plan. And even after saying that, if you want to do things the “easy” way, for whatever reason, even if it’s less efficient, there’s nothing wrong with that. But I want to state my opinion that for the average learner, heavily relying on furigana to learn yomi is a slow way to learn. It will take a hell of a lot of furigana reading to get things to stick, if it ever sticks at all. These “links” between the furigana and the kanji are very weak. Readers are likely to barely glance at the kanji, or not try hard to remember them. It is that extra effort in intensive reading that finally lets me own the word in question. That extra few seconds is crucial.

But that’s just me. That’s the way my memory works. For example, I am probably at least 10 times more likely to remember a word if I put it in a flashcard than if I just rely on context. I know some people never use any kind of isolated word study, and are still able to learn languages. But I think it is a rare few who won’t learn faster with word lists, flashcards, etc. Maybe you are one of those though. 

I mentioned talking to my teacher about it. She told me that the students usually start out with kana or furigana over just about everything. The texts are graduated, and start to lose furigana. In addition, they are learning kanji every day, and are required to use the ones they learn in exercises, etc. So they are weaned off furigana. She says this process takes about 1 year for the Korean and Chinese students. The Indian, Philippine and western students usually struggle with kanji even after 2 years. (I would guess an RTK1 finisher would be more like the Koreans and Chinese).

She said furigana is great for just starting out, and gives students the ability to read lots of stuff which would otherwise be unavailable to them. She loves manga, and told me about the different kinds, her favorites, etc. She said in order to read novels without furigana, one needs to wean themselves off of furigana. If one wants to read novels, they should always be decreasing the amount of furigana they are using. I asked her specifically if she thought reading lots of material with full furigana would accomplish the same, and she “no”.

I told her about intensive reading, and she said they do something like that for teaching newspaper reading. She said the approach works well, because even though newspapers are kanji dense, they are very repetitive with straight-forward grammar. She mentioned there are really only a few hundred kanji required to learn newspapers, which doesn’t seem correct; maybe she was talking about a specific exercise. She said that the student will increase his reading everyday, and that he learns to read a newspaper quite quickly. I have 9 days left to study Japanese here. I think I’ll ask her tomorrow if this is enough time to learn to read one, if I read like mad. Sorry for rambling. Anyway, I told her that I thought a novel was a good candidate, because it’s a long story where the author will repeat her favorite vocabulary often. So there’s lots of reinforcement. I told her that I did this with a short story book once (the old Read Real Japanese) but it was quite hard, due to author changes. She was quite interested in the whole conversation. She is a superb teacher, very fluent in English and Spanish. She has even done English and Spanish language exchanges with me after class. Very impressive. Unrelated, but I thought you’d find it interesting.

I’m sure she has nothing against reading text with furigana as an extracurricular  activity. But she was absolutely clear that the student needs to be working towards eliminating the need for it. And she is definitely of the opinion that reading a bunch of furigana in and of itself is not going to give one the ability read normal novels.