As an Amazon Associate, Natively earns from qualifying purchases through any Amazon links on the site.
All of our Movie & TV metadata comes from the wonderful project,
The Movie Database. Thank you! While we are permitted to use the TMDB API, we have not been endorsed or certified by TMDB.
A choose your own adventure escape book
I loved this book! It's nice to feel like I was on a literal adventure while reading something a bit adventurous for my Japanese.
I won't give anything away, but the general idea is that you wake up alone in the jungle after an accident and you've got to survive plus get out. There are scenes that are generally 1-3 pages, and at the end of most scenes is a 2 or 3-way decision on what to do next. Then you follow that to the next number to see what happens. The beginning is tougher than most of what follows because of the scene setting. Then you get used to the most common vocabulary and how it works, and it feels a lot easier right away.
The reading level and kanji presented seem like they are at the 3rd grade level. All kanji have furigana, but it seems like above a certain level they don't show the kanji, just kana. I haven't fully figured out the rules for that (in general, not just this book), but if you look at the Wanikani book club there are sample pages posted to see for yourself. Despite being set in the jungle, the vocabulary is largely very common use.
There are some great features intended to help the target audience (Japanese children), that also help us as Japanese learners. Namely, there are a few different styles of information / text / story, so if you get lost, read a few sentences or even look at the next page for some of the following features: First, at the start of a scene there is a main idea in bold font. Make sure you understand that and you will probably understand what follows. Some tricky words or unfamiliar animals (Amazon-related stuff) are explained in the text. So for example, there is a description of the action, then there might be some text in parentheses to describe what that word/animal is in more common words. Because we're adults and already generally know what kind of words and animals exist, you can often guess from that.
Furthermore, sometimes there are pages with slightly smaller horizontal text. These are great info sections where you can learn about various survival tactics or the Amazon rain forest. This text is a bit harder than the main adventure text, but it's not necessary to understand the adventure. So if it's just a bit too hard, you could choose to skip it, read it more loosely, or continue with the adventure but slowly make your way through those as you go / later, as you wish. They are really interesting, though, and I thought added a lot to the value of the book.
I felt like the combination of the adventure text, descriptive scenes, and informational sections did a great job of scene setting. I could really imagine where I was and what was happening, so it was an immersive reading experience.