Japanese Light Novel Book Club discussion
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Looking for Easy Reads in Japanese
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Not sure, if you are still looking, but I can recommend the "齋藤孝のイッキによめる!" series of books or the 青い鳥文庫 label from publisher Kodansha.Also NHK offers NHK web easy - short news articles on various topics aimed at middle schoolers, but there are very easy articles as well and they come with audio.
やさしい日本語 (gentle Japanese) is also a good keyword to look for.
Hi Selena, did you find easy Japanese books you were looking for? I have no suggestion but am curious about the topic.
Like Fanta, I was curious to see what would come of your request. When I was learning to read japanese I ended up pretty much giving up on finding really easy stuff (grade school level) that was useful. I found things, but didn't feel like they were helping me get better and reading it was really boring. I don't know if the following is useful to you, but it's the advice that I usually hand out because it's what worked for me.Basically, I just started reading light novels. I first tried manga thinking that it would be easier, but manga is actually harder for a beginner I think. The first few books were really, really hard. I think my first volume took me in excess of a month of daily work and I recall that the first page took something like two hours. Basically, I was looking up most of the words as I went along, sometimes multiple times because I'd forget earlier worlds while trying to track down later ones. Over time I got the hang of it and gradually picked up speed, looking up fewer and fewer words as I went along. Pretty much what you'd expect.
So a few things about this process were unexpected. The first was that it took a lot of time. I think I had somehow expected that a year or two of hard work would be enough but that turned out to be optimistic. Second, it ended up being a lot of fun which is not what I expected from something that seems so much like studying. So it took a long time but I enjoyed it.
A key thing for me was picking novels that I was interested in but which didn't require a huge vocabulary. I started out by trying to read light novels for anime that I knew but that was a disaster because a lot of the anime I knew was super hard to read. The first ten pages of "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya" is just brutal for a beginner (not recommended). I learned to read the first few pages of various different series until I found one that worked for me, and then I'd proceed to read the whole series. Because a lot of the vocabulary carries over from one volume to the next the books gradually get easier and easier. Then you can reread it all from the beginning (you'll be much, much faster the second time) or start a new series.
Now when I started out in 2011 or so ebooks were not really a thing for japanese books, so I'd go to a japanese bookstore and stand around trying out lots of titles until I found stuff that worked for me. But now you can use bookwalker, which is a million times better. It lets you try out the first chapter of a book for free and you can look up words directly from the reading app on your reading device. This latter thing is a HUGE time saver. It especially helps with hard kanji which can be a huge pain to look up in a dictionary if you have to do in manually. I am a freakin' japanese dictionary ninja after hundreds of thousand of word lookups, but it is not a skill that I recommend cultivating if you can avoid it.
Mod
I just got a Kindle Fire tablet. If I can download the Bookwalker app, I'll have to give that a shot. :)
Doesn't look like they have an app for kindle. Their website shows support for iPhone/ipad, for Android devices, and for PC. Personally, I've done all my reading on an iPhone/ipad so that's what I know about, but I went to check out their "PC" offering and it looks like they have a browser based reader. I gave it a quick spin and it worked in the web browser on my PC so it might work in the web browser on your kindle.
Mod
If you have a Kindle, it might be worth registering an Amazon.jp account and downloading some light novel samples. I did this using the Kindle PC reader and it has been very useful - you can copy/paste the text directly into things like jisho.org and google translate to help build up an understanding of the vocabulary and grammar usage. And another thing you can do is to translate the synopsis for books that take your interest. :)
James wrote: "I ended up pretty much giving up on finding really easy stuff (grade school level) that was useful. I found things, but didn't feel like they were helping me get better and reading it was really boring."I agree with you. Being opposite to your place, I'm looking for easy English books for adults. There are many graded English readers in Japan also and actually I have some but their stories are as if for kids and thus boring like textbooks in school. I don't think using easy words that kids know equals making the story for kids. It should be possible that they can write books for adults in elementary school level words. But I have never seen such a book both in English and Japanese.
By the way, I heard Hemingway are easy and tried the sun also rises but gave up. :) I asked a story written in easy words and got some recommendations at Wattpad before, but they still had many words I had to look up in a dictionary. I think "easy" for learners of a language is different from for the native speakers. I heard even kids know 20,000 English words, while I know just about 5,000. Same as the third grade?
I am thinking about writing a story in easy Japanese which adults can enjoy like a normal novel. That's my challenge.
Fanta wrote: I'm looking for easy English books for adults. Have you tried "Penguin Readers"? They come in 6 different levels and are normal books that have been simplified to fit the level. They are not bilingual, but there are books even for level A1. :)
For Japanese, I am still recommending the former mentioned "齋藤孝のイッキによめる!" series (short stories from famous authors; 1 book per level of grade school; lots of hiragana, kanji come with furigana and sometimes short explanations), the 青い鳥文庫 label from publisher Kodansha and the 角川つばさ文庫 label from publisher Kadokawa (they have the same target group - students of all ages, books come with a corresponding grade and furigana).
The easiest manga I have ever come across is よつばと! (Yotsuba to!). It's a comedy manga about a young girl and her single father and their life. It's full of everyday language as well as quite a few explanations because Yotsuba does not understand how the world works or how to behave properly. ;)
If you go the light novel route, I recommend to choose something set in reality. You will never need those weird fantasy and sci-fi terms that come up otherwise and that you might no even be able to find in a normal dictionary.
Examples of the books mentioned:
Marley & Me 
Ikki Ni Yomeru! Meisaku Sen
消えた自転車は知っている kieta jitensha wa shitteiru 
君の名は。
Yotsuba&!, Vol. 01
Rose wrote: "If you have a Kindle, it might be worth registering an Amazon.jp account and downloading some light novel samples. I did this using the Kindle PC reader and it has been very useful - you can copy/p..."Do you know if this works now? (Using a kindle to read japanese books when you're not physically located in japan). I tried setting it up a couple of years ago and it didn't work for me. I know others that were similarly unable to buy japanese books from the U.S. At one point a friend of mine who lives in Japan complained that his japanese kindle books would be unavailable when he was in the U.S.
I wasn't able to find it clearly stated anyplace that amazon specifically disallows it, but I hadn't heard of anyone being able to do it. Of course, that was a couple of years ago. It would be great if there was a way to do it.
Fanta wrote: I am thinking about writing a story in easy Japanese which adults can enjoy like a normal novel. That's my challenge. I think you can do it. I found that regular romance novels are quite easy to read, actually. The hard part of them is that I don't really like romance novels. But of course Japanese romance is interesting because it's quite different in many ways than western romance, so that made it easier.
When I started reading japanese I was thinking that easier books would be a good way to start but now I'm not so sure. Now I think maybe it's better to just accept that the first few will be hard and go with something that is normal.
I spent some time looking at research on learning to read and vocabulary. I wanted to know how many vocabulary words I needed to learn before I could read. Of course the answer is fuzzy, but the answer turns out to be about 6000 for english. This number comes from statistics about word use and studies about how well people understand something if they don't know some of the words.
It turns out that to be able to understand something you need to know over 85% of the unique words and 90% is much better. If you know that many then you can guess at the others and you'll mostly be able to understand the text. For general english this means you need to know the most common 6000 words in the language in order to be able to understand the most common kind of writing. Almost all novels written in english will use the same 8000 or 10,000 most common words with variation in vocabulary mainly coming from specialized terms. A science fiction novel will have special science-y words and a detective novel will have special police terminology and so forth, but otherwise they're mostly the same. For a beginner those genres are going to be hard from a vocabulary standpoint, but if you're just reading everyday fiction the level is going to be about the same. And that everyday level is the one that must be learned in any case. If your first two or three novels are especially easy in terms of vocabulary then it'll be a bit more pleasant at first, but that won't last. To become competent you're going to have to read around 100 novels worth of stuff and they need to mostly be of normal difficulty.
So after learning about these numbers I just diligently worked to get through 100 books. And it worked just as you would expect.
As an aside, I learned that recent measurements show that the average native english speaker learns about 1000 words per year. Young children learn a bit more than that, but it's a good rule of thumb. So an average ten year old child will know 10,000 words and an average 40 year old will know 40,000. It's very hard to learn more than about 2500 words a year even with focused study but regular people learn 1000 new words a year by just using their language every day. These statistics apply for western languages. I could not find similar numbers for japanese, chinese, korean etc. But linguistics theory suggests it is probably about the same for all human languages.
James wrote: "Rose wrote: "If you have a Kindle, it might be worth registering an Amazon.jp account and downloading some light novel samples. I did this using the Kindle PC reader and it has been very useful - y..."Registering an Amazon.jp account can be done from anywhere. Some books might have a region restriction on them but you can get around that with a VPN, much like with Bookwalker. I don't know if it's different using an actual Kindle but I was able to download various light novel samples to the Kindle PC app without any issues from the UK.
James wrote: I could not find similar numbers for japanese, chinese, korean etc. But linguistics theory suggests it is probably about the same for all human languages. Actually, I think Kanji make Japanese somewhat easier vocabulary-wise than other languages.
You don't always have to know the actual word.
e.g.: if you know 鳥 means bird, you will be able to understand that the following combinations are all bird-related, even if you don't know how to say them out loud.
鳥肉 = bird + meat
青鳥 = blue + bird
白鳥 = white + bird
水鳥 = water + bird
Or if you know 省 means "ministry" you'll be able to grasp that 通産省, 外務省, 文部省, ... are all ministries - even though you might not exactly know what they stand for. (Context makes it often easy to guess, though. :))
Which is why I personally prefer books with Kanji and Furigana than just Kana. Around 2000 Kanji are needed for normal newspapers, but anything from ~500 will let you read easier literature (NHK web easy, easy light novels, books for grade school students) quite fluently.
Julia wrote: "Have you tried "Penguin Readers"?"Actually I have one of them, the secret garden, and many of Oxford bookworms. But again, to be honest, I felt as if I was reading a textbook in school from them. I would like more thrilling stories, characters, and twisting endings.
James wrote: "For general english this means you need to know the most common 6000 words in the language in order to be able to understand the most common kind of writing."
So does Japanese, if my memory serves me right.
As far as I'm concerned, covering 90% of the text is not enough to enjoy the story. The coverage is enough to understand what is happening to some extent, but I would not be patient for seeing unknown words, which make me worried that they may have important meanings for the story. So I think you are great. You read 100 books in a foreign language.
Unfortunately, I don't really like romance too.
I think you guys here can read some kanji. Here is a table of kanji that students in elementary school in Japan should learn.The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in Japan
http://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/shotou/new-cs/youryou/syo/koku/001.htm
Which grade can you read?
Mod
Once upon a time (~10 years ago), I had to pass a Jôyô Kanji exam (back when the list consisted of 1945 Kanji). Right now I'd say I know 500 well, another 500 so-so and the rest is very foggy. Use it or lose it. :(
If there is the English version, I mean an official list of English words graded in school, I'd like to try it.
Mod
I don't think there is, since the US education system is controlled by the States rather than federally. The closest I think we have us the SAT word list, but that's for high school
You could try "Most common words"-lists:http://www.ef.com/english-resources/e...
"although a native English speaker has a vocabulary of 20,000 words or more, learning just 3,000 words is enough to understand most of everyday English conversation and writing"
in fact, when I just started learning Japanese, I took up any literature until I came to the course https://jpapa.by/ where I was not only given the understanding that learning any language should be gradual, but also that literature it is best to use it depending on your current level, because this is how you do not jump from place to place, but consolidate the material already passed to the maximum
Japanese Light Novel Book Club
Books mentioned in this topic
Marley and Me (other topics)Marley and Me (other topics)
Ikki Ni Yomeru! Meisaku Sen [Grade 1] (other topics)
消えた自転車は知っている [kieta jitensha wa shitteiru] (other topics)
君の名は。 (other topics)
More...
I'm looking for suggestions for books that you'd give to a grade schooler, about grades 2 through 4. I don't mind if it's a book translated into Japanese from another language or if it was published in Japan to begin with.
Thanks guys!