It’s aimed at elementary school students: a year’s worth of short, one-page articles on a huge array of topics, from Japanese and Western history to Studio Ghibli movies. All kanji have furigana, so lookups are easy.
Vocabulary is wide-ranging and fairly complex: there will probably be words and individual characters that you don’t know. For instance, today I read about 北里柴三郎, who among other things isolated the bacteria that causes 破傷風 (tetanus). The articles are short and cover only a single topic, though, so the “hard” words are repeated more than once and you’ll be done soon even if you look everything up. Grammar is simple.
This is the only one I’ve personally seen, but apparently this author is something of a celebrity in Japan and has written a number of other books along the same lines.
This looks interesting, thank you.
Sorry to be so thick but I am overwhelmed by that page! Who do I look up for the author (I am in the UK so will have to find it elsewhere)?
The author’s name is a link right below the title. 齋藤 孝 or Takashi Saito. (Note that there’s a famous baseball player with the same name, so check search results carefully.)
The baseballer’s name is written 斎藤 隆. Wikipedia does know of several people named 齋藤 孝, but the one in question appears to be famous enough that he dominates Google results.
It probably depends on where you are searching from, and in what language. In English, and in the US (and using an incognito window so my search history doesn’t tweak the results), the baseball player dominates.
Searching in Japanese takes away the ambiguity, and the results are almost all Japanese (and Chinese) links to the author.
