魔女の宅急便 1

Good book

Overall, this is a really good book. It's different enough from the movie that you can read it without it feeling repetitive. Each chapter is a little story in it's own so it's perfect if you want to pair it with other books and read a chapter at a time.

Language Learning⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I've been asking my Japanese tutor to help me understand some difficult sentences and to her understanding the grammar in this book is a bit outdated. There are also many spoken grammar structures that can make it

Reasonably fun and useful, but not the best beginner book

魔女の宅急便 is a classic children's book, with an excellent Studio Ghibli film adaptation. It is relatively entertaining, although the episodic nature (each chapter is essentially a standalone incident Kiki is involved with) means there isn't really a strong story to carry you through. If you're an adult then unless you really love the film it might get boring for you, especially if you read slowly. I never got bored but didn't find each story that engrossing.

This book is often recommended to begin

Not the best novel to start out with

This might be the one book that is most often recommended as the first native japanese book to read. Personally, i have to disagree. This being a children´s book, it suffers from the same problems like other children´s books do, which is of course the lack of kanji. It´s hard to parse and annoying if you already know quite a few of those. And don´t be fooled - this might be classified as a "children´s book" but it reads more like being aimed at young teenagers. There is some scary grammar in

Slightly Boring but Useful

I genuinely don't have much to comment on. This book is frequently recommended due to its simplicity. Also, you've probably already seen the movie, so you should be vaguely familiar with the plot. Even if you aren't, there's not much to get confused about as the story is pretty simple. Kiki, with her cat companion Jiji, flies to a new town to help the citizens. Eventually, she opens a delivery service and goes on a bunch of small adventures helping customers.

At first, the lack use of kanji an

Great for learning but felt a bit boring due to being a children's book (personal opinion)

I can definitely recommend this as a good starting point for language learners getting into novels. Most difficult Kanji are replaced with hiragana readings, no use of sonkeigo/kenjougo, and no over-the-top wordplay/literary devices. Something I struggled with in this book was memorizing a large amount of onomatopoeia.

Personally, I prefer a slightly more mature story. So at times, reading this felt like a chore, but it was an excellent step to gaining confidence to tackle more engaging novels.

Language Learning

I have read this book a couple of times now. I think it's so so useful when you're just getting into reading books in Japanese. Pretty much all the vocabulary used is commonly known (as it's targeted at kids) so you don't have to waste effort looking up and studying obscure words. A couple complaints I often see about 魔女の宅急便 is that:

• There's not enough kanji
• There's too much onomatopoeia

But, I think both of these things actually improve the book's utility as a languag

I really liked this book

I really liked this book. I think it's worth a read even in English and even for adults. Unfortunately the English translation seems to be out of print.

And don't think it's the same as the gihibli movie. About halve of the movie was made up. The book is more episodic with a handful of adventures.

Language learning wise, this was the first book in Japanese that I attempted to read. But I gave up and came back to it after having read one or two junior bunko books (books with furigana). Though m

EDITED REVIEW (June 2022, 1 year later)

This is the book which inspired the Ghibli movie “Kiki’s Delivery Service.” It’s episodic, so each chapter has a different adventure with some new vocabulary. Some of the stories were adapted for the movie and will be familiar, while others will be new.

This used to be the JP community’s default “everyone’s first book” recommendation, but the more I’ve read, the more I wonder about that. It’s a charming story but there were other books I read later which