なぜ?どうして?せかいはふしぎ 2年生

Solid for native kids, unsuitable for language learners

This was my first native japanese material that i´ve ever read (apart from occasional tweets or youtube comments). This book is pretty much about fun facts from all over the world, which makes it kind of hit or miss depending on what you actually find interesting. It´s intended for native 2nd graders, so there is some light kanji usage in an ocean of kana. Thankfully, the writers thought of that and created spaces inbetween the words for visual aid on top of the accompanying images.

Even with all that help though, this read was a bit too hard for someone like me, who was around N5 level at the time of starting this book. There is obviously lots of vocabulary you won´t find in textbooks. Since the content revolves around the whole world featuring different cultures, the words are also pretty varied and sometimes specialized, which makes progressive reading not exactly easier. On top of that, you would think that looking up words would be easy when words are mostly written in hiragana. Too bad japanese contains lots of homonyms, so you will have some trouble quickly finding the real meaning of some words. Kanji with furigana would make this trivial.

That being said, the sentence structure is rather simple and the average grammar used not too overly difficult. Just prepare yourself for the odd N3 grammar point here and there - especially when you seem to know every word but not the sentence itself. What i also liked was that the author sometimes directly addressed the reader and asked questions, which could help "get into" the material. Lastly, なぜ?どうして?せかいはふしぎ 2年生 is moderately short and subdivided into several smaller parts, so it´s relatively easy to digest in terms of time management.

Overall though, i wouldn´t really recommend this book. As a first dive into reading written japanese, it´s still a tad too difficult with its vocab and its entertainment value is hard to pin down for any specific target audience. And when you would finally be able to comfortably read it, there would be better alternatives. Now, this book isn´t terrible or anything. It´s just that, at this stage, graded readers (lvl 2-4) will still be more valuable for improving japanese reading as they have a higher chance of actually providing a reading "flow" with hand picked vocab and grammar precisely for foreign language learners.

This is good book for learning a lot of vocabulary, especially with regards to foreign countries. The language is relatively simple and standard and the WaniKani group helps a lot. The actual content is what you'd expect in a second grade classroom - it's a bunch of 2 page explorations about different 'wonders' of the world (largest waterfalls, strange eating customs, the dead sea... etc). I learned some facts I didn't know and the descriptions of things were relatively cute.

However, towards the latter part of the book, I was itching to move on. If you're looking for a narrative I wouldn't recommend this book.