命をつなげ!ドクターヘリ 日本医科大学千葉北総病院より

This is a nonfiction book for children about a helicopter ambulance program in Chiba. The target age range is elementary school 3rd or 4th year and up. It’s 189 pages and includes full ruby/furigana. There are black and white photos throughout the book, illustrating the stories.

It starts by following a young doctor taking his first flight, in which the setup of the Doctor Heli team is described, with all the people who have to work together to make this possible. (Teamwork is a big theme of this book) Through the middle of the book, the Doctor Heli team goes out on a few missions, and we also learn how the team members do checks and preparations every morning before flights begin. The last 4 chapters cover an especially complicated case requiring a whole new level of teamwork and cooperation.

I knew very little about helicopter flight or emergency care, and I enjoyed learning about these things at the same time as I was practicing reading Japanese. I think this book might be a good early read for people who are ready to start picking up full books written with simple grammar for young children, but who aren’t interested in reading stories about child protagonists. If you want to eventually be reading stories about grownups racing in life-and-death situations, and you like flight and/or medical stories, this is probably one of the easiest books you could start with to begin acquiring basic vocabulary and usage patterns for those genres.

The grammar is mostly N4 with some N3 phrases sprinkled in. The sentences are written in a direct way to describe action or explain things. Most of the vocabulary is very common and useful to learn, and I think it may have more overlap with the words that adult language students tend to learn than children’s books usually do. However, there is of course some specific vocabulary related to medicine, emergency care facilities, and flight. Everything has furigana, but it will be easier to learn the words if you have some familiarity with the kanji already. The technical/science words are mostly of the surface-knowledge level that any normal grownup would know, and that might easily appear in a TV show, like “pilot,” “stethoscope,” “I.V.,” “takeoff”, and so on. Those slightly-specialized words are introduced gradually and tend to repeat, so they become familiar quickly.