Resources for Starting to Read Japanese Content

The articles in Satori Reader are fairly short, and written specifically for the site, but they’re nearly always part of a series, which I guess would make the total text length for each series fairly long without getting anywhere near a novel’s length.

Anyone else know of something closer in form?

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@Radish8 I skimmed a bit through this thread but didn’t see Reajer and wanted to mention it since I think it’s worth considering adding to the list. Sorry if it’s been mentioned before and just didn’t notice.

Reajer consists of numerous short stories from real Japanese authors with varying difficulty levels which have been turned into a kind of bilingual story. After each sentence, you can find the sentence with Furigana, the English translation and some additional information like grammar explanations.

I haven’t used this site very much yet either since I just recently stumbled across it but I guess I will use it as preparation before diving into ‘real’ novels since I’ve only read some manga so far.

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Oooh, wow! Thanks very much for mentioning that. It hasn’t come up before, no.

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Hi, these free graded readers came up on another thread and I thought they’d be a good addition to the section on the graded readers! The site also links to other sites that have free graded readers (some even with audio).

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I was literally just sitting down to add Reajer, so perfect timing :grin:

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Any time I try to open Reajer I get an error “This site can’t be reached.”

:thinking: I… have no idea why that might be… It definitely opens for me. Have you tried going via Google?

Going via Google doesn’t work either. Apparently Reajer is hosted on Weebly which blacklists my country. It’s mentioned in the Wikipedia article about Weebly.

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Well, vpn time, then.

Goodness. That seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but I suppose my knowledge of internet security is pretty minimal.

I’ll add a note to the OP.

Finally added a load of things from your Reddit link :stuck_out_tongue:

There were a number of good sites with free content, either graded or bilingual, and I added some online readers from looking at Tofugu reviews as well (Japanese IO and Manabi Reader). I might leave ReadNihon and TenjinReader for now unless somebody here has tried them out and had a good experience, as although the reviews were positive it sounds like they have some minor issues.

Mostly, though, I’ve realised I’m going to have to re-organise the content yet again D:

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お疲れ様!:purple_heart:

But isn’t that what you like to do? :stuck_out_tongue:

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:purple_heart:

Yes, but there are a lot of resources and working out how to present everything so that it’s easy for people to find what they need is haaaard :sob:

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These links now don’t work… I can’t seem to find a central page for the series now… there has to be one better than https://www.ask-books.com/category/product/japanese/多読ライブラリー/ ?

Btw, thanks for the great resource list, it’s been really useful, and I’ve followed the links many times!

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So they don’t :thinking: that’s bizarre. I agree that surely there must be some kind of central page still… I’ll try to investigate more properly tomorrow - thanks for pointing this out!

Really glad to hear it’s been useful for you :blush:

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Thanks for this! The materials are very helpful!

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@CyrusS I don’t know where else to post this, so I’m just going to ask here. Similar to the API subcategory, can we get a blanket rule where threads in the Reading subcategory never close? I want to make sure people can always ask for help in old book club threads, no matter how old they are.

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One issue is that threads in the API category are still closing

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Oh, that’s still happening? That’s concerning…

Thanks for unwittingly tipping me off to the Breaking into Japanese Literature book @Abstormal :wink: now I just need to sort out the Graded Reader section :sleepy:

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