Hello everyone,
Following my disappointment with Genki, I decided to go back to reading material to learn Japanese. It took a little while but I finally found some children books available in pdf format for free (it's legal).
There are only three books available at the moment but it's a good start for beginners looking for something simple to read provided you prefer to read in kana.
In this entry, I figured I'd explore them to give you a better idea of what it looks like.
In all three books, the illustrations are really nice if that's something you're into. The quality of the scans is a bit mediocre, unfortunately. Zooming in on text reveals blurred furigana which makes them hard to read:
This is most unfortunate as the reader would certainly benefit from a crisp, clean and readable font. It's something that could have been easily prevented by scanning in a higher definition.
As for the text itself, it contains spaces that can be useful but the books contain very few kanji (or none at all) which is also unfortunate as it doesn't expose readers to the Chinese characters.
Of all three books, I would recommend ''let's be friends'' the most:
The text is the easiest to read (although it only has two kanjis in the whole text, 力 and 気). Here's a sample of what to expect the text to look like:
Finding this a bit too easy, I found another website. It has some JLPT4 reading material with furigana and English translations. It also has a vocabulary chart for each article for the more difficult words:
Vocabulary chart for The North Wind and the Sun, the first lesson.
At the time of writing this entry, there are a total of 36 lessons available.
Thanks for reading!
Following my disappointment with Genki, I decided to go back to reading material to learn Japanese. It took a little while but I finally found some children books available in pdf format for free (it's legal).
Beginner Books in Japanese
There are only three books available at the moment but it's a good start for beginners looking for something simple to read provided you prefer to read in kana.
In this entry, I figured I'd explore them to give you a better idea of what it looks like.
The three books
In all three books, the illustrations are really nice if that's something you're into. The quality of the scans is a bit mediocre, unfortunately. Zooming in on text reveals blurred furigana which makes them hard to read:
This is most unfortunate as the reader would certainly benefit from a crisp, clean and readable font. It's something that could have been easily prevented by scanning in a higher definition.
As for the text itself, it contains spaces that can be useful but the books contain very few kanji (or none at all) which is also unfortunate as it doesn't expose readers to the Chinese characters.
Of all three books, I would recommend ''let's be friends'' the most:
The text is the easiest to read (although it only has two kanjis in the whole text, 力 and 気). Here's a sample of what to expect the text to look like:
Learn Japanese Online - Wasabi
Finding this a bit too easy, I found another website. It has some JLPT4 reading material with furigana and English translations. It also has a vocabulary chart for each article for the more difficult words:
Vocabulary chart for The North Wind and the Sun, the first lesson.
At the time of writing this entry, there are a total of 36 lessons available.
Thanks for reading!