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Japanese Stories for Language Learners: Bilingual Stories in Japanese and English
Blurb
Beautifully illustrated in a traditional style, Japanese Stories for Language Learners offers five compelling stories with English and Japanese language versions appearing on facing pages. Taking learners on an exciting cultural and linguistic journey, each story is followed by detailed translator's notes, Japanese vocabulary lists, and grammar points along with a set of discussion questions and exercises.
The first two stories are very famous traditional Japanese folktales: Urashima Taro (Tale...
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(3.29/5)Summary This is a graded reader with five stories: Urashima Taro, Yuki Onna, The Spider's Thread, The Siblings Who Almost Drowned, and Gauche the Cellist. As the author explains in the book's preface, stories 1-2 are simplified versions of the original folk tales while stories 3-5 are unabridged and unedited other than the addition of furigana. Each story is first presented in English, then in Japanese, followed by with translation notes, grammar points, and vocab. At the end, the
Great mix of stories containing a good mix of difference grammar structures, vocabulary and difficulty levels. Each story gets progressively longer and more difficult as you progress through the book.
There are grammar and vocabulary explanations for each story after the full story, which could have been made better by having those after each section, but it only takes a few seconds to flip to the explanations if you need them.
There is audio for each story read out slowly by a native Japanes
Poor Layout and Dated Language
Book Layout
The main appeal of this book is the inclusion of the English translation on the opposite page and the dictionary entries in the back. While these may be helpful, I found myself using them rarely. There is also furigana on all newly appearing words (per section).
The English translations didn't always appear on the same page as their Japanese counterparts, and it sometimes felt too time-consuming to read the translation. I think that struggling through the effort of trying to un