なぜ?どうして?科学のお話3年生 よみとく10分

Learn something new while reading in Japanese!

This is the first of the なぜ？どうして？series of books that I have read. I think this book could be a great entry point for those looking to jump into reading native materials.

The book is broken into several short chapters usually spanning 2-3 pages that cover one particular topic in science. Even as an adult, I found myself learning some new things throughout this book which added to my enjoyment of it.

With respect to the language learning aspect of this book, the grammar was pretty straight-forward. I don't recall encountering anything beyond what I've learned through N5-N3 topics. The one thing that I found most frustrating as a language learner was the amount of words that are written in hiragana that I had already learned kanji for.

There were many times where I would encounter some hiragana and look it up in the dictionary only to realize that I already knew the word and would have recognized it had it been written in kanji. Sometimes the context was enough for me to make the connection, but other times I would have that experience. Also the difficulty of the kanji used in some words compared to what would have been used in hiragana words seems very random. I'm sure this has to do with the order in which Japanese children learn kanji in school, but as an adult learner, it was challenging at times.

For that reason, moving forward I think I will try reading books in this series aimed at higher grade levels such as 5年生 or 6年生。