The Great Japanese 30の物語 初中級 ―人物で学ぶ日本語

Useful way to reinforce N3 grammar and vocab

I found this book to be a useful way of reinforcing N3 grammar whilst practising my reading comprehension.

The book is divided up as follows:

• 30 'chapters'
• 148 grammar points in a cheatsheet format, each point a few lines.
• A couple of pages with the answers to the questions and challenges in each chapter
• A vocab section for each chapter. It would have around 30 words. It's a mix of words used that are specific to that chapter, the names of significant people, proper nouns of institutions or historical events etc, and then in bold, words that are on the N3 vocab list.

Each chapter has 4 pages. The first page and around half the second page, are for the story itself; generally around 30 lines of text. Each story is graded on difficulty between one and 3 stars; I have to say that I didn't think that made a huge difference in terms of difficulty. Each story is on a note-worthy Japanese figure; some are scientists, others historical figures, some entertainers, athletes etc, quite a good blend.

The second half of the second page has a quick vocab check of the 'fill in the missing word in the sentence from the list above' variety. The next two pages have questions to check one's comprehension of the reading material, and then a 'grammar' check list. This is a bunch of snippets/clauses from the text and then a number to reference you back to the grammar points in the checklist.

So, what did I think?

Well the stories aren't too difficult, around the 22 - 26 level here on learn natively.
Obviously, they can't go into too much detail given the length, but they were interesting enough. The questions are challenging enough, some trivial, some tricky. Probably quite good practice for N3 takers. Going through the grammar check list after each story was surprising useful when I was honest with myself about the extent I really understood the snippets. It has helped reinforce some points, and highlighted the ones I don't quite get time and again ようになる、ことになる I'm looking at you!

I followed the books recommended technique about the order of things. I tested by vocab knowledge by covering up the furigana (helpfully underneath the word) and the meaning. I have used my Kitsun 10k deck to help me with new or forgotten words. This has been quite useful way of filling in gaps in my N3 vocab and nice feeling when realising I know 80-90% of the words I'm supposed to.

I more or less stuck to a schedule of one 'story' per day and completed it in around a month. Each chapter/story would take me about 45 mins but thats a combination of doing the questions, the vocab test along with the reading. It would take about 10-15mins to read the story.

I would recommend this book to people studying JLPT N3. Its a bit of a more interesting way of practising vocab and reading.

There is also audio of the books that could be listened along to. I didn't do this though.