Specs
Reviews
(4.21/5)Decent beginner book (but slightly overrated)
I feel like i´m one of the few who have actually never heard of this book, so i may offer a bit of a unique perspective. I thought the book content-wise was alright. Pretty standard children flare with a few themes about imagination and so on. Pretty one-sided views as well, but since this is (hopefully) aimed at children, i´ll let it slide. I never quite got into any of the characters if i´m being honest. I thought the youth of the narrator at the very start of the book was actually the most interesting part, which unfortunately was quickly left behind in favor of the actual little prince.
As far as language goes, there are some weird parts which i assume came to be because of its age, the fantasy aspect and the target audience. That said, there is lots of hiragana and only a few kanji to worry about. Personally, i would have liked more kanji + furigana more but whatever. The sentences can be simple to moderately difficult in length and in grammar, but managable all things considered. I very much liked that the book is relatively short and yet contains so many small chapters, which makes it easy to read on a regular basis (of motivation).
Overall, i thought this was a decent read. Don´t know exactly why this is considered to be THE first book to read for new language learners (of all languages), but it´s not a bad pick either.
Review for the 河野 万里子 translation
Make sure you select the correct edition when reviewing and rating 星の王子さま, because there are several different translations of various difficulties.
In the back of this book there is a biography of the original author of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, as well as some comments about the translation process from 河野 万里子. This section is significant harder than the story part of the book, but I'll just consider the story part when rating the difficulty.
This is a book I read as a kid, reread as an adult, and now rereading it a third time. I love it very much and it grows on me each time, and makes me think of people and situations in my own life and how they've changed.
Reading the biography at the end of this edition of 星の王子さま was very worthwhile. It gives some insight into things in the author's life that might have given inspiration to the elements in the story, such as the rose and the fox.
The biography had a lot of difficult vocab, and much less furigana than the main story, but was able to make it though with my e-reader. The biography is probably somewhere around 28-30+ in difficulty in Learn Natively levels.
Great touching story
I found this book hard in the beginning. The long sentences and over use of Hiragana made it confusing. But roughly halfway through I got used to it and the second half of the book was very enjoyable and went pretty fast.
I like the story, it has a few very nice points and the fact that it is a bunch of related but independent stories makes it easy to follow and forgiving if there was something you didn’t understand.