Japanese Short Stories for Beginners: 20 Captivating Short Stories to Learn Japanese & Grow Your Vocabulary the Fun Way!

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 textbo

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 Japa

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:

1. Just the text
2. Sentencer per sentence english translation
3. Full english Text of th

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 begin

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 po

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 no

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,

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