ふしぎ駄菓子屋 銭天堂 1

It’s a good first (or second) book for language learners. The most difficult part was the onomatopoeia - as with other children’s books.

Though to be honest, I know this is a very famous book in the language learning community, but I couldn’t get into the hype. The stories boil down to moralism and the last one made me dump this book for 2 months before finally mustering the patience to read through it.

Language Learning:

This book has easy to understand grammar and about a grade 3 level of kanji, some without furigana. There are a lot of words that are written kana-only that would normally be spelled with kanji in adult books, so that may be a slight annoyance to learners. Beniko, the shop owner, speaks in keigo but she says pretty much the same thing every story so I don't think it's a big deal. The story structure being similar every story also makes it easier to read, so overall this is an approachable book for learners.

Entertainment:

I had fun reading this. I thought when I started that each story would be a straightforward morality tale, but each story is slightly different in how the mysterious sweet interacts with the character and what the consequences are. My favorite story was the Haunted Ice chapter.

check out the guidebook if you like the series

I love reading these books. It is just at the sweet spot for my Japanese level, and therefore, as a series, it opens up quite a fun way for me to read more and more easily. Each book broadens the world just a little bit, has enough predictable elements to keep it easy, and enough unpredictable elements to keep it fun. It's nice that the stories include both children and adults, and it felt more interesting as an adult reading for that.

Level: I believe these are targeted at 3-4th graders, because kanji is shown consistently through the 4th grade level (higher level kanji is generally just kana). 1st-2nd grade kanji/words have no furigana at all. 3rd-4th grade kanji have furigana on the first appearance per page. So if you know ~300 kanji or more at the start you're probably covered. And even if you haven't covered all of the kanji, 1st-2nd grade kanji are all very common kanji and generally even if I hadn't studied a few already they were easy to recognise or guess.

The audiobooks for this series are well done and are great practice for getting a better feeling for the mimetic words, since those tend to get more inflection.

Also, I wanted to draw people's attention to the guidebook (book 16 in this series), because if you're going to use it, it's best value if you start it from book 1 or 2 and if you think you'll continue with the series. I wrote a detailed review to give some insights on what's inside since it's not obvious.

Engaging Stories that are Perfect for Beginners

All of the stories were roughly the same in terms of my interest. I was engaged throughout, but they probably wouldn't be stories I would have read if I wasn't reading to study a foreign language. The slight twists are enjoyable, and I found the characters interesting. As this is a children's book, the stories have pretty obvious life lessons. If you think this would be irritating, this probably isn't the book for you.

The stories all have a recurring structure. A bunch of people try and solve their problems with magic candy. Once you have read the first one, you know how the major events of all of them will go, which can aid in comprehension. While the stories are formulaic, it doesn't mean they aren't interesting. Each story has slight differences in its mood, plot, and ending. Combined with the fact that each story is only 20 or so pages, reading them is less draining than full stories and you don't need to remember a lot of characters or events at a given moment.

The sentences are very short most of the time. If you tried reading other stories, but found the long sentences with a bunch of commas and clauses difficult to understand, you may find this book easier to read. The book also contains furigana.

The biggest difficulty I had was with onomatopoeia. Most learners have difficulty with this, but it was especially hard for this book. I couldn't find some onomatopoeia in a dictionary. Others are emphasized variations of other onomatopoeia that make it difficult for non-native speakers to tell the meaning, or even what to find in a dictionary. To give an English example of what I mean, instead of something like "boom," the book would sometimes use "ba-ba-booomm." As you can imagine, it is much harder to look in a dictionary for the meaning of these. I would not worry about it, however. They are infrequent and you can search for the meaning on Google. You can find readers explaining the meaning on the Wanikani Book Club forum.

Something else to keep in mind is that the recurring character 紅子 speaks in Keigo. I was able to pick up/understand by context what she was saying, but if you aren't familiar with the basics of Keigo it will be confusing. Just know that ござんす means ある and you'll probably get most of it.

If you don't know, this book is the first in a pretty long series of related short stories, so if you enjoyed this I would recommend picking up the others. I haven't read past the first book though, so I can't comment on potential difficulty or style changes.

Better than most other stuff that I have picked up

Writing this review already, over half way through, but I am already getting tired of the independent stories/chapters not continuing except for the very last line of each chapter where she logs the child and money received. I wonder if the broader story and her motives get addressed within the first volume or in later volumes? I am losing patience! Nevertheless, this is generally more interesting and an easier read than other books that I have picked up so far (generally try to avoid high school romance - 70% of Japan's output).

--- Finished the book. The stories are different and interesting later on. And yes, the very end of this first volume has a couple of pages about the shop and Benny Ko lady. I am ready to move on to other books and also need to progress my language learning; this book has limited Kanji usage to roughly elementary school with the rest in hiragana so it is on one side accessible but on the other side limiting kanji exposure.

I read it cause the kids do

I liked how easy this book is to pick up and put down. Each chapter is a self contained story with the only reoccuring thing being the sweet shop and the lady on the front cover.

It was also interesting although this series is aimed at kids, not all the stories were about children, some being about adults too.

Some parts were more tricky than others, such as how the lady speaks, it must be some sort of dialect, but the more you read the more you get used to it.

I want to read more of the books to see what she's up to. Thank you to my kids for recommending it.

Although I'd still say this book is a good choice for those new to prose, there are still difficult portions of the book. For reference, I found the grammar to be a bit more complex than something like 夜カフェ, but the language isn't as flowery as something like 魔女の宅急便. In fact, the descriptions are rather matter-of-fact, which made it easy to parse.

The reoccurring character 紅子 (the lady on the cover) speaks in a way that was difficult to understand due to keigo and some unfamiliar speech patterns — unsure if this is a dialect, a certain speaking style/register, or if this is unique to 紅子. This is where most of the difficulty came from. Even then, by the end you get used to her way of speaking.

The stories are quite formulaic, but they still went in completely unexpected directions. All of the candies and their effects were so creative! The formulaic aspect makes it easy to break up chapters if you need to. It was fun that 紅子 kept appearing outside of the store too, every time that happened I was like, wait, she doesn't just stay in the shop 24/7? idk, imagining this lady doing errands cracks me up for some reason.

Type: Short story collection Furigana: Yes Hurdle: Most words are in kana

Aimed towards kids, stories have repetitive themes.

This is a children’s series, but I think it's a fun one with broader appeal and I recommend it for people who are making the transition to reading material for native speakers. (I wish I’d been able to read it when I was at that point!) There’s a mysterious candy shop which sells candies that will fix any problem, but you have to follow the directions exactly, or things can go very wrong. Every story follows the same pattern and is about 20 pages long, and there are around 6 stories per volume. The main characters of the chapters may be a child or an adult. The stories move quickly with a focus on plot.

It’s a modern series, written within the past 10 years, so the language is current and settings are familiar. For the most part, the writing style is relatively easy and direct, but the grammar includes some N2 points now and then, and the shopkeeper Beniko (who makes an appearance in all stories) has her own dialect. Vocabulary obviously doesn't correspond to any JLPT level, but it’s mostly common words that appear often in everyday life or other books.