Childrens Japanese book: Lilly's Surprise. Ririi no bikkuri shii: Children's English-Japanese Picture Book (Bilingual Edition)

Simple bilingual children's book

This is a story about a girl introducing her friends to her animal pal on her birthday. It's not very compelling for adult readers, but still makes good reading practice for beginner learners.

The text is entirely in kana, with spaces between most words, so no kanji knowledge is required and word boundaries are easy to identify. It's a picture book, so unknown words are easily guessed by looking at the illustrations, and the sentence structure is very simple. Nearly all of the grammar used is N5-ish level, and most of it is written in polite form.

Each page has both the English and Japanese translations on it, which can be used to check broad accuracy, though it's not a very close translation and the English is missing several details compared to the Japanese. Consider it a good challenge to identify how the texts map to each other and where they differ, rather than using the English as a crutch to understand the literal meaning of each sentence.