This is a collection of miscellaneous educational trivia for elementary school children, intended to be read one page per day over the course of a year. The book covers a tremendous range of topics, such as language, famous people, interesting places, wild animals, useful inventions, and cultural traditions. Each week covers a different theme, for example "Legendary Manga Artists," "Weird Creatures," and "Dances from Around the World," and then each page covers a specific topic within that theme, explaining or describing what's so interesting about it in three bullet points and illustrating it with a small monochrome photo or drawing.
What's challenging about this book is the enormous variety of vocabulary. Since each page focuses on a different topic, every page has new vocabulary. It's the kind of stuff kids study and get tested on in school, so it's good to learn. If you're very good with kanji and familiar with the topic, you'll be able to figure out the meaning of a lot of these words — if not, all kanji have furigana so it'll be easy to look words up. Still, it can be pretty tedious to get through even one page when every other word is a word you've never seen before. That said, grammatically the book is not hard, since all of the sentences are brief, simple statements of fact, and the format of the book makes it very easy to skip around and read only the topics that interest you; there's even a place to date each page so you can keep track of what you have and haven't read yet.
If you're interested in broadening your vocabulary and you like reading bite-sized facts about random topics, this book may be a good choice for you. I would recommend getting the paper edition or reading on a 10 inch tablet or on a monitor, as the rigid formatting of each page makes it awkward to read on a small screen.
Excellent for broadening your vocabulary
This is a collection of miscellaneous educational trivia for elementary school children, intended to be read one page per day over the course of a year. The book covers a tremendous range of topics, such as language, famous people, interesting places, wild animals, useful inventions, and cultural traditions. Each week covers a different theme, for example "Legendary Manga Artists," "Weird Creatures," and "Dances from Around the World," and then each page covers a specific topic within that theme, explaining or describing what's so interesting about it in three bullet points and illustrating it with a small monochrome photo or drawing.
What's challenging about this book is the enormous variety of vocabulary. Since each page focuses on a different topic, every page has new vocabulary. It's the kind of stuff kids study and get tested on in school, so it's good to learn. If you're very good with kanji and familiar with the topic, you'll be able to figure out the meaning of a lot of these words — if not, all kanji have furigana so it'll be easy to look words up. Still, it can be pretty tedious to get through even one page when every other word is a word you've never seen before. That said, grammatically the book is not hard, since all of the sentences are brief, simple statements of fact, and the format of the book makes it very easy to skip around and read only the topics that interest you; there's even a place to date each page so you can keep track of what you have and haven't read yet.
If you're interested in broadening your vocabulary and you like reading bite-sized facts about random topics, this book may be a good choice for you. I would recommend getting the paper edition or reading on a 10 inch tablet or on a monitor, as the rigid formatting of each page makes it awkward to read on a small screen.