Not referring to textbooks.
I’ve always been big on reading, and I wanted to try reading some books in Japanese. Can anyone recommend me some good fiction novels/short stories that are written in Japanese? I can read hiragana and katakana well, and am working on memorizing radicals for kanji.
This is mainly to prevent burnout. Reading textbooks gets boring. I figured fiction stories would be both entertaining and a good way to learn practical Japanese.
Thank you.
8 comments
You can find [N6-N1 Stories](https://yomujp.com/n5l/) here for free. With an audio feature to play along while you visually read if you choose.
Try reading light novels online, reading free manga on your phone or computer, and reading children’s books since those are mostly the easy writing systems and almost very little Kanji. Can you tell me how you learned Hiragana and Katakana so fast? I’m focusing mostly on speaking and am falling behind on writing. I might have to go to college and go major in Japanese so someone can teach me because I need someone to teach me.
You can find popular books (including graded readers) for your level here: [https://learnnatively.com/browse/](https://learnnatively.com/browse/)
For your level I can reccomend graded readers, which are stories written for learners with simple grammar and pictures to help understand new vocabulary. YomuJP was already recommended in another comment, so I’ll link you the [tadoku free graded readers](https://tadoku.org/japanese/free-books/) and [Sakura Tadoku Lab](https://jgrpg-sakura.com/library/) as free resources. There are also some you can [purchase as physical books](https://dokushoclub.com/2022/02/12/graded-readers/).
Try japanese.io : [Japanese io](https://www.japanese.io/home)
Plenty of material to read or watch.
I used it for months for free before upgrading in order to read some of my Japanese Manga easily
A popular author of fiction these days is Tomihiko Morimi
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The resources linked in the comments below are all very good.
Keep in mind, without kanji (and especially the vocab that the kanji are incorporated into), you won’t be reading “fiction novels” and short stories in the traditional sense, as you may know these in English. Even relatively simple visual novels and Manga have kanji in them (although they have furigana to help you sound them, you still will need to know the words in order to read them). The best bet is to try with simpler texts to start, which are written in kana with little or no kanji, and then as you build your knowledge of vocabulary (which incorporates kanji, but isn’t the same as learning kanji in the abstract, which you may or may not want to do, there are different schools of thought on that) over time, using your text or additional vocab resources, you progress to more advanced ones, with more vocabulary (and hence more kanji). In any case, it’s a good idea to get reading actual Japanese as soon as you can, so it’s a good idea for you to start.