I have been learning Japanese for almost an year now. I am looking for only Hiragana text comics or story books.
I teach small kids when I usually teach them a language, once they learn the alphabets, whether or not they understand the meaning, I make them read the text so that they learn how to pronounce and get familiar with letters and words.
So I wanted to do the same for myself in Japanese but everything has Kanji in it so it becomes hard to read at a stretch. Please help out.
6 comments
Does furigana count? Most manga aimed at kids has furigana for everything. Books are a lot more hit and miss though.
Try to get a bunch of used Shima Jiro books. They sell them here as a monthly subscription service and parents offload them as kids get older on sites like Mercari
Those are aimed at K to 1 year old kids but honestly an adult N5 learner who doesn’t know the vocabulary will delightfully struggle like me
>So I wanted to do the same for myself in Japanese but everything has Kanji in it so it becomes hard to read at a stretch. Please help out.
You’re not doing yourself any favors by avoiding kanji. After a year of study, both hiragana and katakana should be well known and you should know hundreds of kanji. Kanji make reading much easier.
Anyway, my advice is that you do yourself a favor and start learning words with kanji in them (you don’t need to be able to write kanji at this stage – just recognize them). N5 level only requires 800 words and with that you can start reading. [Satori reader](https://www.satorireader.com/) is a useful tool if you are just starting to read (you can select ‘no kanji’ (if you must) as well as a lot of other options).
[See here](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/s5mtva/comment/ht1lo0x/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) for some more general advice.
Picture books are your friend. They’re generally written all in hiragana
>I teach small kids when I usually teach them a language, once they learn the alphabets, whether or not they understand the meaning, I make them read the text
This works great for kids who’s native language is Japanese! For learners though, this approach has some unique challenges, like unknown grammar and play on words (Japanese picture books have a LOT onomatopoeia).
I can recommend **graded readers** as a better approach for language learners: simple vocab and grammar, pictures to convey meaning, furigana on all kanji. Try some free ones [here](https://tadoku.org/japanese/free-books/), [here](https://yomujp.com/n5/) or [here](https://jgrpg-sakura.com/library/). These [here](https://dokushoclub.com/2022/02/12/graded-readers/) are for purchase.
Thank you so much everyone. Couldn’t thank you all enough. I think I get the idea on how to search for these now.