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So I know this idea isn’t original, or anything, but I think it’s brilliant! Taking familiar children’s books (Rainbow fish, The Giving Tree, Brown Bear, Brown Bear) and buying them in Japanese (I’ve found Amazon is a great supplier for this)! Children’s books are meant to be easy to understand and for children to, eventually start reading. When a person starts learning a new language they have to, essentially, go back to the basics just like young children, so reading kid books and then gradually moving to the more advanced stuff shows you how far you’ve progressed in your reading and comprehension of Japanese. Taking English (or whatever your native language may be) children’s books and translating them into Japanese is a good exercise, as well (my Latin teacher had us do this, and it was a huge confidence booster. Everyone was like “hey, I actually know some Latin” O_o )
Has anyone else ever done this? If so what books have you read? Did you like this technique?Hm I haven’t sourced and childrens books. I did buy Reading Real Japanese, which is just like a parallel text with glossaries etc. Its not super easy apparently, but the writing is interesting.
If you find a nice online source lemme know.
Me and my Japanese Tutor (along with her 2 daughters) are currently working through a children’s book – I’ve forgotten what it’s called though.
Me and my Japanese Tutor worked through Little Red Riding Hood (赤ずきんちゃん) a few months ago.I really like working through them – the kanji all have the furigana next to them for easy reading and whilst working through the books (translating them and learning new words) a lot of the kanji which come up frequently I end up knowing and recognising without the need of the furigana.
I bought some children’s books, and they were too difficult to understand. Even very simple language is full of idioms, set phrases, and other things that you can’t easily figure out on your own. You can try looking up words, but often the words you get stuck on are short little words written in hiragana that mean a million different things, and many of these meanings are not listed in Japanese-English dictionaries.
To make use of materials in Japanese, I think you either need:
* an English translation
* someone fluent in Japanese who can help you
* advanced enough ability to use an actual Japanese dictionary (not a Japanese-English dictionary)
I think having one of those matters far more than the age level of the material in question.
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