Specs
Reviews
(3/5)February 1, 2024
February 16, 2023
This is a book of twenty fairytales arranged for learners. As with all fairytales, expect a fair amount of bad things and violence to happen. Some of them are famous stories you might have already read, but I hadn't heard of many of the ones here. Each story has a parallel English translation, an audio recording, and cultural notes and vocabulary after the ending.
To compare it with textbooks I have used, I would say you could probably tackle it after completing Genki, as most of the grammar is fairly simple, but there is the occasional N3 grammar point that I think was covered by Tobira.
Positives:
- I liked the narrator. She is easy to understand and does good character voices.
- The stories are short and split into many sections, so if your reading stamina is low, you can easily stop in the middle of a story and come back later.
- Stories start more simple and more repetitive and gradually grow harder and longer (though I felt the hardest one was the penultimate one, Kaguya-hime, since her tasks use some pretty obscure vocabulary). Stories near each other also tend to use similar lower-frequency words (e.g. mortar).
- English translations are natural.
- Good way to learn onomatopoeia because the stories use a lot of it. Ditto for animal names.
- I enjoyed the story selection!
Negatives:
- My biggest issue is that the book seems confused as to what its audience is. The vocabulary sections are so extensive that it can be hard to find words in them, because they translate every word, even ones as basic as が and 美しい. There's furigana on everything. And yet the stories use a lot of obscure, non-常用 kanji like 鉞.
- Only the first occurrence of a word in each section gets furigana... but because the sections are so short (most are a paragraph, maybe two), in practice, this means that few words don't have furigana and so the idea doesn't really work.
- The comprehension questions are useless and don't test comprehension, just your ability to find-and-replace a word. Skip.
- This is a general issue with fairytales, but since they do use lower-frequency and historical words, if you're primarily concerned with contemporary contexts, they might not be the best vocabulary builders. However, there are definitely still some words that are useful in general.
Gradings
Why can't I grade this item?
Activity
No activities
Fascinating Stories with a Good Length and Difficulty
Book Layout
The main appeal of this book is the inclusion of the English translation on the opposite page and the dictionary entries in the back. While these may be helpful, I found myself using them rarely. There is also furigana on all newly appearing words (per section).
When reading, I used Shirabe Jisho (a free dictionary app) most of the time, rather than the included entries. I didn't need to flip through pages and was able to do it using an external tool faster.
If you compare it to Japanese Stories for Language Learners, the English and Japanese sections line up perfectly, so you won't need to do page flips to find the translation. However, as I said in my previous review, I think that struggling through the effort of trying to understand something can be more beneficial than reading a translation.
The folk tales are divided into sections, roughly 10 per story, each being about a paragraph in length. I found the sections way too short. If you haven't read as much in Japanese, you may enjoy the section length as it creates natural stopping points very frequently and you won't tire mentally while reading.
There are also some comprehension questions, but I didn’t see any value in using them.
Language Learning
As this book is a collection of stories, the difficulty progresses as you continue reading. Difficulty is subjective, so I found some earlier stories harder than some later stories, but that should be expected. No story stuck out to me as being too difficult, and the progression was very consistent. Another thing to note is that the stories tend to get longer later in the book. All of the stories are short (even the ones at the end) and contain repetition of the same sentence structures, which is nice for studying.
I didn't have any major difficulty reading. The grammar seemed understandable in most cases. (For reference, I am studying N2 grammar).
When I was reading I sometimes wondered whether or not the words that I was learning would be useful. Some language refers to things from the past, or may not be used frequently anymore. However, this should be expected as the stories do not take place in modern Japan.
I was pleasantly surprised with how much I enjoyed the stories. These would not be things I would have gone out of my way to look for, but I found them interesting. I think this book is much better than Japanese Stories for Language Learners despite getting recommended significantly less. If you have already read the other book, I would compare the contents of this one to the first two short stories in terms of length and difficulty. The layout is significantly improved.
If you are interested in the book, you can listen to the stories by downloading the audio here.