In this article, I wanted to focus on books that were meant for language learners rather than native speakers, had a series of different grades or difficulty levels available, and were written entirely in Japanese. That means the list of recommendations won't include materials that offer English translations. While having the English translation can certainly help comprehension, it reinforces translation rather than natural comprehension. Some readers come in the form of a guided reading text, where English boosts you along as you get familiar with Japanese kana and kanji. There may be full-on whole text translations set side-by-side with the Japanese text. The first half of the book may be in Japanese and the second half in English.

This is the work that brought Murakami to fame in Japan, a fact that I think makes it worthy of being one of our first full works of literature. It’s a story of loss, identity and sexuality, themes explored as the main character falls in love with another woman while already being in a relationship.

The Best Apps & Websites to Improve Your Japanese Reading Skills

Whether you use a Kindle, a smartphone reading app or even an online tool like LingQ or BliuBliu, starting digital can help with an issue you’re sure to encounter: looking up translations in Japanese can be complicated. The reader is dual-language so that stories are presented in Japanese first and then translated into English.

Tabata-Sandom, Mitsue. 2013. The Reader-Text-Writer Interaction: L2 Japanese Learners' Response Toward Graded Readers. Reading in a Foreign Language 25 (2): 264-282.German Book Shop is an excellent source for graded readers. You’ll find fables, fairy tales and simple stories for the lower grades, working up to intricate plots and stories written by popular German authors, can be found here. Some come with CDs so accurate pronunciation is made more accessible. Keeping all this in mind can help you understand what makes a graded reader set good. It should have a wide range of books, across a number of different skill levels, so that you can find something that's not only suitable for your abilities, but pertains to your interests as well. And remember, your aim should not be to translate a book into English as you read, but rather to comprehend the story as it is in Japanese. This might be a little difficult to grasp for absolute beginners, but as you learn more of the language you'll encounter concepts that you can understand or express better in Japanese than in English, and you'll find your thoughts moving straight from the Japanese text to understanding, without having to make a detour into English.

Japanese Uncovered is a story-based language learning course created by British polyglot Olly Richards. Level 1: Stories with length between 400 and 1500 words. They are perfect for both JLPT N5 and N4 students.All definitions have multiple examples, and they're written for Japanese learners like you. Tap to add words you'd like to review to a vocab list. Longer books should be read extensively. Try to relax! Don’t stress too much about knowing the book inside and out. It’s okay to only get “he was sitting under a tree” from a sentence that actually says “he was sitting all by his lonesome under the shade of a sagging willow tree.” The second sentence might be longer but its core idea hasn’t really changed. The Extensive Reading Foundation grades readers according to vocabulary. It’s all about the words—how many we acquire and our ability to use them. Can anyone benefit from using graded readers? Sakura Tadoku Lab is an online library of graded readers that offers books at eight different levels of difficulty. What this means is that with the added granularity, it's easier to find books suited more precisely to your level.