[DeepL Translation - needs review] The story of a fourth-grade girl, Xiaoyu, and the legendary gods and beasts of the Forbidden City, a vast castle in Beijing.
Because her mother works in the Forbidden City, Xiaoyu spends every day after school in the Forbidden City. She is good friends with the animals in the Forbidden City.
One day, after finding a pair of beautiful stone earrings, Xiaoyu begins to hear the words of Lihua, a stray cat that she always feeds. ......
Many Chinese dragons, ph...
This book is based in mythology and kind of has a little of the fairy tale vibes, less realistic and more “letting your imagination go on a wander” sort of tale. It reminds me a lot of young children's books in English though not as gritty as our fairy tales. It’s a feel good story (from what I understood of it) but nothing inherently bad happens in it so if you’re looking for mortal peril, look elsewhere.
That being said, I did enjoy it but unsure how helpful it will be for language learning for natural Japanese as I’ve been told it is a translation of a Chinese children’s book. There’s a lot of Chinese words but it does have images at the beginning and end of the book (as well as a few pages explaining certain cultural aspects) of most of the Chinese words.
Without spoiling much, my understanding of the story is that it follows the adventures of a young girl and a stray cat with several side characters that pop up from time to time. The other books in the series follow a similar vein. There are nods towards certain aspects of Chinese mythology, with a little Chinese and Japanese culture thrown in. It was easy enough to follow, though I did falter at one chapter where I kind of lost the story due to not looking up some of the words.
Each chapter is a separate story of its own following one or both of the main characters. Though as you read each chapter you do get to understand the characters a bit more each time.
Most of the difficult words I came across were names or Chinese words. Otherwise I felt the grammar to be around N4/ lower N3 level and most of the rest of the vocab was every day stuff.