Reading material for an absolute beginner

Can someone suggest some books to read for an absolute beginner? My aim is to build up my own anki vocabulary deck through reading.

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Graded readers are probably your best bet, as well as anything found in the :

They have vocab sheets, so it makes it quite easy to make an anki deck.

But what might also interest you is a site like https://jpdb.io/ where you can just choose a book you’re interested in (they don’t have a full selection, but they have A LOT of books these days), and the decks are pre-built for you.

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You could check out the Absolute Beginners Book Club // Now reading: Hunter × Hunter . You can read previous books or join their next pick. For the previous books, you can access all discussions, questions and answers. For some books people even translated large chunks so you can compare your understanding with what they came up with.

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Also there are some suggestions here for things online

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Crystal Hunters is a Japanese language learning manga aimed at absolute beginners. It’s even easier than graded readers. They have a Japanese (the easier version which is the one you want) and the Natural Japanese (harder version). The manga you can get on amazon kindle and on their website under free stuff they have guides that go along with each volume. The guides show every single vocabulary they use and then has grammar explanations. Read the guide first then read the manga.

It was very motivating for me as I was able to read the entire manga in Japanese. Currently they have 5 volumes and I’ve read all 5 of them too. You can choose to make an anki deck if you wish, but I never needed to make a vocabulary deck for Crystal Hunters.

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Satori reader.

The most absolute basic JP reading material I know of would be Level 0 Graded Readers, which have pretty simple sentence structure and use a lot of pictures. Think children’s books, but written for JP learners instead of natives.

If you want to try out some native material, I would suggest the Absolute Beginner Book Club. Just be warned, “Absolute Beginner” doesn’t mean super basic; you’ll likely encounter vocabulary and grammar you don’t know, but that’s what the forums for each week’s reading are for.

And there’s also Satori Reader. It categorizes its stories by difficulty level; you’d want to check out the “Easier” category for stuff that’s friendlier to beginners. The nice thing about Satori Reader is that you can get definitions and explanations of words and phrases on the spot within the application instead of having to click away to look something up. I believe it also offers its own flashcard system where you can mine stuff out of the stories you read, but I’ve never tried it so I can’t say if it’s worth checking out.