Why are the reading topics so scarce?

Bunpro
#23

Fair enough! I guess if I have a question about something in a book, I just ask a friend or stay wondering until I die… I may not be curious enough LOL. I do need to go outside more though (don’t we all).

Regarding the book, it is a translation of classic works like Robinson Crusoe and The Little Princess aimed at 3rd year elementary school students! I picked it up because I thought that knowing the rough outlines of the stories already would help me. I prefer novels over manga because I find dialogue to be the hardest to read.

I guess as a follow up to this discussion tho I am curious about how people choose what books they want to read. People say Yotsuba is easy, but I don’t really get why. She uses a lot of childish language so I actually find it really hard.

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#24

Oh that sounds pretty good! I like books like that. Most of the audio books I listen to recently are revisions of the classics.

I am probably an outlier, but as far as books are concerned, I mainly just read the light novel versions of anime I end up liking. Main reason is because the LN is usually a lot better and longer than the anime, so I don’t need to worry about getting 2 books in and hating the story.

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#25

To add my two pence. I’m personally guilty of not posting in the book clubs. I bought Yotsuba and Pokemon special in order to take part and then didn’t keep up. I read the books but generally behind the book clubs and so there doesn’t seem to be much point in posting.

So while the book clubs have been useful to me getting started reading, I haven’t actually contributed and I suspect there are other lurkers like me.

To start I can’t recommend the tadoku graded readers enough but I haven’t seen anyone else mention them.
https://tadoku.org/japanese/en/free-books-en/

6 Likes
#26

I looooove Tadoku graded readers and used to go to an IRL book “club” (but actually it was a cafe where a Japanese woman supervised us reading) and read them but when it came to the book discussion time, people kept explaining the entire plot in Japanese and it was so frustrating aaaaaaaaaaaa
ETA: we were all reading different books so I kept getting them spoiled for me LOL (I feel I did not adequately explain that part)
I have been to the OG tadoku book club in Shinjuku as well and it was very nice there, but a bit inaccessible

I wish there were more of them though, I have actually considered buying some as well

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#27

I usually hop over to natively, pick a level range that feels appropiate, and read through the first few free bookwalker pages of books I’m interested in.

About yotsuba: it’s kinda like chis sweet home in that regards. I wouldn’t recommend either as a first read if you are reading on your own. All this childish language can be impossible to look up without a better understanding of japanese. But if you follow a book club or read with someone else, everything besides the childish language is pretty easy. Yotsuba especially not only felt easy, but also made use of mostly N5 vocab and grammar, so it was very approachable (if you can get over the occasionally childish speak, which also gets better during the whole series).

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#28

I’ve bought all of them… postage to the UK was more that the books.

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#29

I have actually never considered picking up a light novel, that may be something I need to look into! I don’t really watch anime though (another hindrance in my learning journey in a way) :’) I know a lot of people seem to learn a lot from watching anime so I keep meaning to try harder with it.

@Chimmsen I have never heard of bookwalker! So you can preview books for free on it? that’s amazingly useful :0
I have briefly browsed natively but there are so many titles that I wouldn’t know the first thing about finding in a bookstore that I was kind of overwhelmed, so that’s a huge lifehack

@lupine they’re so good! It must have been worth it!

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#30

It is amazingly useful! The levels on natively can be a little hit or miss, and the tags are oftentimes lacking. Bookwalker usually has about the first 20 pages free to read, that’s more than enough to see if the level is a good fit and the story is interesting for me. Though the quality of their digital manga can be quite lacking and I don’t like using their app :sweat_smile: But it’s a great tool for browsing and deciding what to read next. If you don’t know, they usually have tons of limited-time free manga, if you don’t care much about what you are reading, then you could read for free all day long ^^

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#31

You are an actual legend… This makes reading so so so much easier. Thank you!

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#32

I’m just leaving a link here to the bookwalker freebie thread on wanikani. The thread gets updated regularily with books that are free now and stay in your library even after the promotion is over :slight_smile:

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