Reading material advise

Japanese Language Reading
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Hello all,
I’ve been reading Olly Richard’s Japanese Short Stories and I’ve really been enjoying it. I’m about halfway through it and its my first sort of physical
japanese novel I’ve gotten this far through. There is no parallel english. There is brief summary of the chapter at the end of each chapter, again in Japanese, a small dictionary for some more obscure words at the end of each chapter and questions at the end to quiz yourself about plotpoints. At first I was having a hard time getting through the book because I was trying to translate every sentence, but after a while I just tried reading through it for the plot and then found it was actually kinda fun and that I knew way more than I thought I did.

I was wondering if anyone is familiar with this book and if there are any books of similar difficulty one could recommend. I have a couple other graded readers I’m gonna go through after I’m finished with this (Read Real Japanese, New Penguin Parallel Text). But I was thinking about maybe reading a translated novel. Like the Chronicles of Narnia (not sure if that’ll be too difficult though)

What are your thoughts on this? Does anyone have any book recommendations?

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Haven’t read those myself, but obligatory question:

Do you know of learnnatively?

The short stories are on there ( Short Stories in Japanese for Intermediate Learners: Read for pleasure at your level, expand your vocabulary and learn Japanese the fun way! (Teach Yourself) | L23 ) and are currently rated at a difficulty of 23. Finding something of a similar difficulty on there should be doable.

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I was not familiar with that site… I’ll have to take a look around their level 23 if that’s comparable to the book I’m going through now

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Seconding the Natively recommendation; you should definitely be able to find other books at a similar level to its L23. (A lot of what Natively has at that kind of level is manga, but not exclusively so.) Or going the other way if you find something you’d like to try reading you can see if Natively has a level for it to see if it would be a step up or not. The Narnia books haven’t yet had enough gradings by readers to reliably peg them at a level, but I suspect they’ll end up being a bit more difficult than L23.

People vary on whether they want to read translated novels – personally I have mostly avoided them because I feel more enthusiasm about reading something I haven’t before and where perhaps I wouldn’t have the option to read it in English; but I know others find it helpful to be effectively rereading a story they’re already familiar with so they don’t get too lost. I do think that it’s important to find something you want to read, whatever that might be, rather than feeling obliged to pick the “getting started” books that are often recommended, because getting started with reading in a foreign language is hard work and if the book isn’t something you’re having fun with it’ll just be an awful slog.

魔女の宅急便 | L23 (the book that was the source material for the Kiki’s Delivery Service anime) comes in at L23, and the WaniKani beginner’s book club read it a few years back, so the discussion threads for their read-through are still on the forum. I remember reading and enjoying that.

Or you could see what the beginner’s book club is reading now (more often manga than books):

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Also, don’t feel like you’d have to seek out something that’s exactly the same Natively level as what you’ve read, or only one step above.
I’d say have a look at their grading system and search for books/manga you think you’d enjoy reading within a level range you feel comfortable with. Or even on the lower end of the next range.

Sounds like you like reading in print, however there are certain advantages to the electronic format when starting out: Yomitan instant pop-up dictionary, machine translation tools…

And even with printed books, the various book clubs here and on the Natively forums usually come with vocab listings which could prove very useful when digging into a new title.

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Strong second for checking out the Natively listings! I also read the collection of Olly Richards and it’s enjoyable but I didn’t get to shake off the feeling that those were stories meant for language learners as opposed to “real” stories.
I’m ambivalent about the whole translated novel thing but I think it probably does help - but you may want to gauge them yourself first. Either Bookwalker or Amazon.jp let you browse the first few pages of an ebook for free. Last year I bought myself the full Harry Potter hardcover series when I went to Japan, which I’ll get to and obviously the advantage is that I know what happens so it should be easy to follow, though I can’t imagine what parsing all the spell and character names in katakana will be like! :laughing:
One caveat with children’s books like 魔女の宅急便 or the 駄菓子屋銭天堂 series is that it’s aimed at schoolchildren in the elementary grades - which is fine in the sense that sentence structure and plot will be simpler, but a) it will be, well, children’s stories, b) ironically, harder to read, because it will avoid mid/upper level kanji so you will be dealing with parsing long streams of hiragana. But the advantage is, of course, that there will be already amply curated vocab sheets to help you along!
Two more book recommendations: 夜カフェ which is a bit lame story-wise but it’s cute and good step-up after grade-school readings, and then また同じ夢を見ていた which I think was the first adult-aimed novel I managed to complete and I really enjoyed the story.

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Apologies in advance, this is a long one but hopefully you might find something suitable

I’m on Learn Natively and I have also read the book you’re currently reading. I would recommend children’s books around natively level 18-20 for things of a similar grammar level but be aware that you may need to do many look ups for Vocabulary that you don’t know and may also struggle with longer sentences. Novels/ Children’s books and Light novels around Lv23 will be a lot more difficult than the Olly Richards book.

A lot of the books I’ve read on their site around that level are much harder, mostly because there are no vocab lists and they are actually written for native speakers not learners so the grammar is different. Olly richards stories are not written for native Japanese speakers so they do aline more with how a learner would understand (easier grammar used) but feel off to someone who is a native speaker (I had my tutor and some of my language exchanges read parts of the stories and they all said it was understandable but didn’t feel quite how it should).

The Kitty detectives/ Doggy detectives are native but a lower level (なャンなャン探偵団 / わんわん探偵団). Around the same level as the ミラーさん novels from Minna no Nihongo, though I found the Kitty detective series more difficult because it’s written for natives and contains more vocabulary than I knew.

世界の真ん中の木 I felt was a bit easier than other Lv 23-24 books, it has some pictures though but very little furigana.

There’s also Olly’s 30 day mastery series which is similar in difficulty to his short story book but shorter chapters and each book is only one story but helps you to better understand basic uses of certain words and grammar points.

Something that shows around the same level as the Olly Richards short stories would be things like this. Although around the same level on the site, they are much more difficult due to lack of vocab list and lack of summary. The sentences are longer and more complex than what Olly Richards uses. Not to say it’s a bad thing, just to say be prepared for a more intensive experience.

Other graded readers I would recommend are:

  • Intermediate Japanese short stories (there are 2 beginner level ones both those have full translations whereas this one has just a vocab list, questions and summary like Olly Richards iirc, also has audio available separately).
  • Let’s read Japanese each book has a few stories that get longer and more complex as you go up the levels (content warning for the last book which has a harrowing account of a historical event) beginner ones are about on Par with the Olly Richards book iirc. Also liked the fact it has some folktales and traditional non fiction stuff thrown in for cultural aspects.
  • Short stories for language learners 2 books that have a mix of folktales and short stories with access to free audio online. These have the full story in Japanese and an English translation separately. And are around the same level as the Olly Richards ones.
  • the Read Real Japanese series you mentioned is great too. Breaking into Japanese literature is another but be aware of trigger content rape, cannibalism, murder, mutilation

Any book is accessible, but it’s more about how much time and effort you want to put in, to making it comprehensible as well as how much ambiguity you can tolerate and how many look ups is too much.

I read Zoo (a Japanese short story horror book by 乙一) after spending a lot of time with graded readers and of the 6 short stories, I understood the majority of 2 of them but missed a major plot point, understood parts of 2 so I got snippets of what was happening but didn’t fully understand, and then completely blanked on the other 2. I also had similar experiences reading things around the Lv 22-24 mark but it is a good jumping off point on e you get comfortable with the grammar and a lot of the common vocal for the genre/s you choose.

If you find an author you like or a series you like, stick with it and it will help your progress :slightly_smiling_face:

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In my experience (mainly with Russian and Portuguese, not Japanese) reading translated novels tends to be significantly easier even if you’re not familiar with the original. No weird dialect, no opaque cultural references and the original English grammar and syntax still somewhat constrain the translation so you usually won’t get super exotic sentences.

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