Japanese Short Stories for Beginners: 20 Captivating Short Stories to Learn Japanese & Grow Your Vocabulary the Fun Way! (Easy Japanese Stories)

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Most people go into a textbook with zero knowledge and wind up spending a large chunk of their time looking up words they don't know. How much of a sentence is vocabulary? Depending on the length, it's easy to answer "more than 80%." Girls Channel– a bulletin board, kind of like Reddit but just for girls. Good for learning internet slang and girls’ talk. Good pronunciation starts with hiragana. While hiragana alone won't teach you everything, it is the key to understanding how and why Japanese words sound the way they do. It will also help you get the foundation you need for a native-sounding accent. At the very least, hiragana will get you 80% of the way there. Set a goal, collect a decent amount of new vocabulary, read aloud to yourself for speaking practice, and then stop. It’ll feel much better than plugging away until you burn out. Keep a dictionary handy…but don’t use it as a crutch

This means that each new thing you learn should be a 20% (or smaller) incremental step. A +1 from where you are, rather than a +20 or +100. There are currently 16 translated stories here, including well known ones such as Momotaro and Kaguyahime. This collection features 146 of his novellas and short stories, spanning the time frame from the 1920s up to the 1970s. With a style described as “haiku-eque,” Kawabata explores themes of ambiguity, emotional complexity, epiphanies and transformations and of course, nature, a perennial Japanese favorite topic.

Since the scenes are set up in everyday situations, vocabulary is kept quite simple. Furigana is used to accompany all kanji, but Yotsuba’s speech bubbles are written exclusively in hiragana. This may lead to confusion for some readers, so purchasing an English copy of Yotsuba&! to use as a cross-reference might be helpful. 11. “Slam Dunk” At the intermediate level, you will be able to understand longer sentences and more difficult works. You can also read some kanji. You need some reading resources that introduce these features of the language, but you still need a bit of help understanding new words.

Kowai!” is aimed at young readers, so there’s furigana that accompanies kanji and occasional pictures will help readers with the context of the novel. If you’re coming to me with a rich mosaic of anime-watching under your belt, I’m thinking you might know “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time” from the anime movie of the same name. Here are some Japanese Children’s Book resources that I thought were good. Traditional Japanese Children’s Stories Our goal is to reach Japanese fluency as directly as possible. Unlike a teacher or a textbook, we have the freedom to be ruthless in the path we take to get there.The sentence is very short: If a phrase only has three parts (ex. "[vocabulary] + [particle] + [vocabulary]"), and you don't know one of them, you're going to be at 66%. In cases like this, you can make an exception. Knowing 66% of a three piece phrase, or 75% of a four piece phrase is acceptable. This will be very common in the beginning.

This one requires several steps (and some basic Japanese skill to navigate), but it is well worth it. The themes of each book vary from tales of passengers on a bus to guides on how to wear traditional clothing. New vocabulary is slowly introduced according to level, and furigana accompanies new kanji. Since the vocabulary is relatively simple, a beginner should be able to handle the first few books without a dictionary. Note: Read "Japanese Pronunciation, Part 1" (below) before you start learning hiragana. Basic Japanese Pronunciation

Japanese Children’s Books

Watanoc is a ‘free web magazine in simple Japanese’. The name comes from ‘wa’ (Japanese) ‘tanoshii’ (fun). It has a lot of articles of different lengths and different levels, so it’s suitable from beginners to intermediate. The topics include food, culture, events and funny news. After each title, it tells you the approximate JLPT reading level (N5 is the easiest). Also, if you hover your mouse over a word, it will pop up with an explanation in English! Highly recommended for upper beginners and lower intermediate. Many of the companies that produce graded readers aim to publish a range of different stories that appeal to learners regardless of age and interests. As you learn kanji you will also learn vocabulary that use those kanji. Not only will this help solidify those kanji concepts in your mind, but it will also be where you learn the remaining kanji readings. Plus, as you know, this vocabulary will be used to give you something to glue together with grammar later.

Pouch– Pouch describe themselves as offering ‘cute, fun, weird’ content for women! It’s a round-up of content on popular culture, cute items, trending internet stuff, random blog articles and more.Many Japanese learners and non-learners have been introduced to Studio Ghibli or Hayao Miyazaki films at one point in time.