Specs
Reviews
(3.81/5)Mixed feelings but I'd recommend it to beginners
I’d like to give two separate ratings for this book—one for those who conceived or “produced” it and another for the person who actually authored and translated it.
The Producers (2.5/5)
The production quality is not up to mark. The bolded words are slightly blurry, though still legible. The story titles use large fonts that encroach on the furigana above them. None of these are deal-breakers.
Each story is first presented in full Japanese, then rewritten paragraph by paragraph, with the Japanese followed immediately by an English translation. Furigana is included in both the “full Japanese” and “Japanese + English” sections, which is a major flaw. There’s no way to read comfortably without hints unless you manually cover the furigana.
That said, I would still recommend the book because of the stories.
The Uncredited Author (5/5)
It’s not quite accurate to call these “stories.” The 20 pieces squeezed into this book are more like brief episodes—often almost completely uneventful—taken from people’s lives. They appear to be written by a native Japanese speaker or someone very comfortable with the language.
The level of vocabulary is excellent for beginners—great for building confidence without feeling dumbed down. I’m familiar with several thousand words, yet each story contained a handful that were new to me. A couple of the stories were really endearing.
The author has done an excellent job, which makes me overlook the book’s other flaws and recommend it.
Read if you have a copy, but don't pay for it.
That's my advice. I bought the book and wished I hadn't spent money on it, but if you can get it for free, give it a shot.
Weird and funny stories, furigana
I enjoyed the stories overall and found them "typical" japanese in some way. They are shockingly weird and while reading i translated them live to my GF which was enjoyable enough for her. The book offers Furigana and vocabs after each story (covering vobacs above N4). Sadly all Kanji have furigana so your eyes will always slide towards the easy to read Hiragana/Katakana. You get 4 versions of each story:
- Just the text
- Sentencer per sentence english translation
- Full english Text of the story
- A summary of the story which was really good to be honest, as reading the shortened version strengthend the overall text comprehension.
Would recommend a different book for early N4 holders, but overall for my way to N3 i would say its fine
Decent book for beginners
I honestly found most of the stories very boring and was even sometimes confused when they suddenly ended and there was no further information. When you read other books on this level (like "Short Stories for Japanese Learners"), you will realize that beginner-stories do not actually have to be boring or weird and can actually be quite fun. I actually even find the ミラーさん books more entertaining than this. Overall I think the book does a decent job at offering a first reading experience for beginners. Also most stories deal with different topics, so there is also a lot of different new vocabulary.
Not terribly compelling, but level-balanced appropriately
Many of the stories are quite dull and some either don't have an ending of have very weird morals, but as someone who baaarely passed N3 almost five years ago at this point, it was easy enough to get back into these and read them with only a few new words to look up.
My method was to read through the book once without stopping to look up new words specifically, using the english translation if I got stuck. I am now on my second read-through using anki to add cards for every word and grammar point I did not know off the top of my head. I expect I should be done by the end of the week if not sooner and can move on to something a bit more compelling.
The formatting on kindle is alright, but I really wish you could turn off the furigana.
Good beginners' book
This is a very nice begginers' book. Sentences are simple, and most the stories (all short, 1 to 2 pages long) are pretty entertaining for the length of them. It's very helpful for self-study as it has translations, vocab list, and a small quiz with answers at the end of each story.
I liked that it had furigana, however this is also my gripe with it. I feel like the furigana should have been better used only the first time a word was introduced, or only on the first story it appeared at, and not in ALL the kanji, to help force people to look and remember the kanji. At least for common words for N4 and N5 (since there were a handful of harder vocab in a couple stories).
Also, I don't know if it was just my copy, but the furigana was a bit all over the place. In the titles it had been displaced so it was printed almost all the way ON TOP of the kanji, making it impossible to read the furigana, and about a handful of kanji were missing furigana completely in the stories- which was clearly a mistake as everything else had it. It wasn't too many, and as there was furigana elsewhere it wasn't a big deal, but it was still bothersome to find the inconsistency.
Easy to read
I know about 2500 words, and those were enough to understand the stories.
Some stories are less interesting than others though. So I went through this book only to practice and have the pleasure of “understanding something”.
I’d say this book is a good material to make some grammar points stick into your head.
If you read on kindle, the book formatting is pretty bad and dictionary lookups often fail (impossible to select some words correctly).
Captivating???
As the other reviewers pointed out, the stories aren’t the most exciting. I was often left with a “so what?” Feeling when I got to the end of each chapter. I forced myself to keep reading though because it was actually great reading practice.
These stories are great for building confidence and reading skills. It’s useful to have the English translation to deconstruct the Japanese if you ever get confused in the longer sentences.
My recommended reading style is to read the passage in Japanese, consulting the vocabulary list as needed and then immediately take the quiz at the end. After taking the quiz, flip back to look at the English translation to see if there were any areas where you struggled.
Overall, very useful for language learning, but hardly had me at the edge of my seat.
Let's get the bad out of the way first: The extended title of this book is an outright lie. Some stories are interesting, and some are pretty boring, but none of them are "captivating".
I still recommend the book (I have even gifted copies to two friends!) to anyone starting out with reading in Japanese for one reason: It was the first book without pictures that i could actually read without a dictionary, which felt great. While the stories aren't super exciting per se, most were interesting enough to hold my attention during the part that actually excited me - figuring out what the sentences mean, and getting better at reading in the process.
In the end, despite the book's shortcomings in the entertainment department, I'm glad I found it, and I have already bought "Intermediate Japanese Short Stories" to continue. This time I'm trying the audio book version to see if I can use it to improve my listening comprehension.
PS: The Audible version comes with a free PDF of the book.
Pros: I think this is great book for beginners, the stories are very short so it's easy to find some time to read, you don't have to stop in the middle of a chapter. If you are N5/N4, go for it !
Cons: I would have liked to see a list of the grammar points used in the short stories. The furigana of the title at the beginning of each stories are badly printed and not readable. The stories are a little bit boring, definitely not captivating.
This is my favourite audiobook for learning Japanese. First, the story is told in Japanese. Then the story is narrated again, but after every sentence you listen to the English translation.
I would recommend this audiobook if you understand simple Japanese conversations, but can't understand Japanese audiobooks yet.
This is a great book! I highly recommend it for advanced N5 / N4 level readers. Each story is about a page to two pages long, with supplementary vocabulary, comprehension questions and a full translation after the story. I can't emphasize enough how nice it is to have all that at your finger tips. The stories themselves, while not super exciting, felt natural enough and they go beyond the super simple & repetitive 'see spot run' sorts of sentences - they touch on most of the grammar you run into in textbooks and beyond.
This was a great way to start to transition out of a textbook and to read some stories.
There are better books for beginners
Japanese Short Stories for Beginners includes 20 stories for language learners. Every story is only about 2 pages short and learners then get about 8 pages each of additional content of translations, vocabulary lists, summaries and reading comprehendion quizzes.
I think this approach is very close to how Japanese is taught in textbooks with a focus on intensive reading. If the aquiring of new vocabulary and word-by-word translation is what you are looking for in a reader, then this book is a good fit.
But if you are looking for simple stories to get into the practise of fluently reading in Japanese most other graded readers for beginners would be a better choice in my opinion.
I enjoyed this Audiobook for Beginning /Intermediate ear training. The PDF comes with the audiobook, so you can look at the writing in (1) kana and (2) native writing with kanji. Each 1-2 page short story takes about an hour to intensively study. (But you don't really have to look at the written) As someone else said,
A great first book, but don’t expect to be captivated
Overall, it’s a great first book, that I recommend reading after some Tadoku graded readers, for N5-N4 learners.
The general vocabulary is pretty simple, and lists of specialized vocab are given at the end of each short story, making it super convenient to learn in advance to enjoy the flow of the story. It’s also a great way to grow your vocabulary as it provides multiple words in multiple themes.
The grammar is in the right level, you can recognize a lot of patterns that you know from textbooks but that you might not encounter so often otherwise.
The real downside of this book is the unbalanced level of the stories. While a few are cute and pretty interesting, most of them are bland and lack any meaningful event to interest the reader. The fact that the stories are pretty short avoids dropping out, but sometimes I would also wish stories were longer.
In conclusion, a great book to gain the habit of reading, but not an interesting read.