ピーターラビットのおはなし ピーターラビットの絵本

Fun-to-read classic, but language is not as easy as you'd think

This is the Japanese translation of Beatrix Potter's classic. It's silly and cute and heart-warming to read if you're fond of her stories already, but I'm glad I waited to read it in Japanese until I was past an intermediate level, as I was noting points throughout that definitely would have frustrated me as a beginner and probably would have discouraged me from trying to read the rest of the series.

I read the edition included in the miniature collection, which has the same translation (by いしい ももこ) and I assume has the same writing style as the full-sized edition listed here. Text is almost entirely in hiragana (even words that are normally written in katakana, which threw me off a bit), with the very few simple kanji used having furigana. There are spaces here and there, but they don't do much to help identify where words begin and end for readers who aren't confident parsing sentences yet, so looking up unknown words and grammar out of long strings of kana may be difficult.

And there are lots of things to look up, even with a larger vocabulary base, as the story uses lots of words for things like farm tools and plants that are not everyday language. The illustrations and context will help to identify most of them, though, so the rare vocabulary is not a huge barrier. The hardest part for lower-level learners would be the sentence structure; frequently several upper-beginner grammar points will be chained together in a way that makes for good practice, but may overwhelm learners who aren't already very confident in using them anyway. There are also a few higher-level grammars used that would be difficult to pick out and look up if you've never seen them before.

Overall I recommend it, but the readers who would get the most out of it learning-wise are probably past depending on children's books already, so I think it's better to just read for fun. Trying to parse the deceptively-complex grammar out of a sea of kana would have been very frustrating to me if I had approached this at a lower level, so I don't think it's a good "first book" for beginners to read without help.