10分で読めるお話 1年生

The 10分で読める series of books are often recommended to Japanese learners as a way to dip into reading native material, but I don't think they're necessarily the best option — at least, not the books for grades 1-3.

Each book only uses the kanji that Japanese kids are expected to know at that grade level, which sounds good for Japanese language learners in theory, but in practice makes actually reading the stories laborious because they're 90% hiragana and there's no way to know where one word starts and one word ends. On the plus side, the font size is gigantic, making it very easy to read for people with bad eyesight.

The real problem, honestly, is that the stories are intended for such young children they're just not that interesting for an adult to read. I'm an avid reader and willing to read just about anything, but the stories in this book were so simple and brief that while I'm willing to read them once I wouldn't read them a second or third time, which limits how much value I'm getting out of the book, both in terms of language learning and in money spent. The illustrations were too sparse to be useful as an aid to comprehension, another short-coming.

If you're going to read this series, maybe skip the grades 1-3 books and go for 4-6 instead — those would include more kanji and presumably have more compelling stories.