Yumi Boutwell

Yonde Miyo-! Yumi Boutwell

Have you only recently learned hiragana but need practice? Or perhaps, your hiragana is no problem, but you want to build your hiragana and kanji reading comprehension?


This new collection of stories is here to the rescue!


Read real Japanese-beginner level but not boring Japanese! You won't find the Japanese version of Dick and Jane, but you will find stories written for adults. Enjoy reading flash fiction, super short essays, and funny stories of common mistakes made by learners of Japanese.


Best of all, the only requirement is that you can read hiragana and have a very basic understanding of Japanese. Vocabulary and grammar will be defined and explained.


The format is a little different from our other more advanced readers. The idea is for the reader to read the entire story three times. Each page will have a sentence or two in hiragana (with spaces between words for you to see "words" instead of syllables) at the top and that same content in full Japanese (with furigana-small hiragana over kanji) at the bottom. The middle will have the glossary and grammatical explanations. Lastly, the story is presented in Japanese without furigana. See if you can read it after going through the previous two versions and explanations.


If you have just learned hiragana, you may want to listen to the sound file while reading the hiragana section to practice correct pronunciation. If you have studied Japanese a bit longer, you may want to start with the bottom version and take note of the glossary for understanding.


The glossary will have the word as it appears in the story, but it will also give the "dictionary" form so you can look the word up further.


Having fun while learning a language is a great way to increase motivation. With increased motivation, you are less likely to skip a day's study. A skipped day can quickly become a lost week and then a lost... forever.


And so, we hope you will have as much fun reading these stories as we had writing them.