Short Stories for Japanese Learners (You Can Read Japanese Level2, The Red Candle): Beginner-Friendly Fun and Engaging Stories to Expand Your Vocabulary and Kanji Knowledge!

The best series for beginners

Short, sweet, easy to understand stories that really boost your confidence in reading as an absolute beginner. My review will be the same for all of the books in this series because they were just incredibly useful. It's been a while since I've read them and they wouldn't really be useful to me anymore, but I still remember how fulfilled I felt after finishing them.

A Good Step Up in Difficulty from Level 1

Very similar to the 2 Level 1 books, just at a higher difficulty. If you started with the level one books, I recommend continuing with this one. It reuses vocab from that series, and is a very similar style, just at the N4 difficulty.

Summary A collection of ten very short stories at what the author calls a pre-intermediate level:

Suitable for learners who can understand basic phrases and language structure in addition to reading slightly longer sentences.

I got this on Audible, so the text is a PDF that came as a supplement to the audio. Judging from the Amazon book preview, though, I think both versions present the content for every story in the same way:

1. In Japanese with furigana
2. Vocab list with romaji and English definitions
3. Multiple-choice reading comprehension questions in Japanese
4. Answer key
5. The story in Japanese again, this time with line-by-line English translation

Most of the stories involve realistic situations like work colleagues talking or an exchange student staying with a host family, though there are a few with supernatural elements such as monsters and talking animals.

What I like I really appreciated having the line-by-line translation for every story, because that meant I didn't have to flip back and forth between the Japanese version and the English version. The translations are just that--translations, without extra notes or explanations--but since the grammar is very straightforward I didn't feel like it was lacking in any way.

The stories are nice and short! Great for giving your brain an easier time.

The audio is definitely beginner-friendly. The reader reads very slowly and clearly, and she reads all of the content out loud for each story including the vocab list, the questions, and the line-by-line translations.

What I didn't like Personally I would have liked a version of the stories read at native speaking speed. I played the audio at 2x and the stories still felt a little slower than what I'm used to hearing on audiobooks. That said, this is material aimed towards the beginner end of the spectrum so it's really not a big deal.

Highly recommend this for anyone dipping their toes into reading for the first time. I wish I had found it sooner!

Very good book for beginners

I think this is a great entry to reading your first stories in Japanese. I personally found the stories more interesting than in other books on this level. Also it is written in a more natural way than other stories for beginners. I honestly did not care too much about the questions and just read the stories. So if you are around N4 level, then this book should be pretty easy to read.