I’m thinking something along the lines of elementary school fairy tales and the like to see beginner-intermediate kanji and vocabulary utilized in different kinds of sentences.
A good example (and a book I’m reading right now) would be [Intermediate Japanese Short Stories by LingoMastery](https://www.amazon.co.jp/Intermediate-Japanese-Short-Stories-Captivating-ebook/dp/B094YHNM6Y/ref=mp_s_a_1_7?crid=2VAJG5A75RY90&keywords=intermediate+japanese+stories&qid=1663478367&sprefix=intermediate+japanese+storie%2Caps%2C124&sr=8-7). Better yet, text is highlightable so I can use a third party dictionary for Kindle.
Another good example would be [Japanese Stories for Language Learners](https://www.amazon.co.jp/Japanese-Stories-Language-Learners-Downloadable-ebook/dp/B0796WKTBS/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?crid=3NIL4UGOTXTZU&keywords=japanese+stories+for+language+learners&qid=1663478472&sprefix=japanese+storiesfo%2Caps%2C123&sr=8-2). Although, the text in this is not highlightable which makes it a pain, but at least the book itself contains translations (full sentences, vocabulary, etc.).
I tried jumping into 君の名は and ヘリー・ポッター but I found myself looking up too many words at a time and it tore out the fun aspect of learning for me.
Thank you!
4 comments
Use [https://learnnatively.com/](https://learnnatively.com/) to find something for your level, be it more graded readers or easy native material (sounds like N3-ish?). The difficulty ratings are generally good.
Conversational Japanese Dialogues [lingo mastery] (I have this one, it’s pretty good.)
Any children’s stories along the lines of いっすんぼうし
More high intermediate to advanced: 親指 さがし by
山田 悠介
Does your Kindle comes with 3 months Kindle unlimited?
Mine did when I bought my Paperwhite last year. Read quite a number of free books by authors I never knew before but they were good!
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may I ask what level you are about, and ~how many vocabs you got? Because looking up a lot is quite normal in the first few chapters or first volume of a series (unless you want to wait until you have like 10k vocabulary).
Authors tend to use the same words and writing style over and over, so its completly normal for the first few chapters, up until the first volume to “struggle”, but its gets much smoother the farther you read. Thats why I would recommend Series rather than “one shoot” novels.
But all of this is highly dependend on your current level/vocabpool , because if youre not even n3 (even n3 is a bit early, ~n2 is the best time for novel reading not to feel like a herculean task).
For the vocab part, you have to also work you way into books, starting with a fantasy novel at first would be a bad example, because there will be thousand of fantasy(and author) specific vocabs, which would just be “annoying” to look up at once. 君の名は is a great example for a “trap” , at first you could think “its a romance story, i guess it should be quite easy”, but in reality theres much “deep” and “supernatural” speech and inner monologues. RomCom light novels tend to be the easiest, if you can bear them, they would be (atleast imo) the best entry point.
After you adapted your reading skills to novelstyle and got into the “rythm” of reading them, I would slowly expand your repertoire towards genres you enjoy the most. Maybe go to fantasy, scifi (this one could be a pain the in the ass :D), Mystery, adult and so on.
Whilst starting of with simple RomComs (or just slice of life like stories overall) does not only gets you used to the writing/reading style of novels, but it does also help you expand you vocab/grammar/pattern pool, which will become quite handy, as Slice of life talk will most likely occur in every type of genre (so you can focus on the new type of vocab/grammar/patterns of new genres/authors).
I know you didnt want something where you have to look up a bunch, but i just wanted to say that its completly normal to struggle with novels (unless you want to wait untill you have 10-15k vocab which still wouldnt be enough for many series), especially if its your first “real native” one. So depending on your current level, you may arent that far of from acutally reading a native novel (of a “corresponding” to say).