Children's books for learning Japanese Help

[troffbenoit]

Hello,

I'm looking for a source to purchase some Children's books written in Hiragana. Something equivalent to 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade US readers. Simple Children's stories and if possible the Dr. Seuss books.

Thanks
Stan

[Taurus]

It's actually really difficult to learn Japanese from children's books. Children's books use a lot of words that you won't be familiar with, and the use of hiragana makes it difficult to look those words up in a dictionary.

(I think it's probably the same in English, except in English it's easier to look up the stuff you don't know. Take The Steadfast Tin Soldier, for example. This is how it starts:

"There were once five-and-twenty tin soldiers. They were all brothers, born of the same old tin spoon. They shouldered their muskets and looked straight ahead of them, splendid in their uniforms, all red and blue."

I think if you've just started learning English, you could expect to have problems with all of the bits in bold.)

[graynod]

I'll agree with Taurus. There's some good books on Amazon, Kodansha's bilingual stuff. My tutor loves them and it helps her to keep from getting bored I think, but I struggle. And sometimes she has to look up some of the terms too! I feel now that my time would have been much better spent in conversation practice, and leave the books as a goal for down the road, I can read them on my own anyway as I improve.

[Taurus]

Oh, and there's this series of graded readers, too (available here, for example)

[graynod]

Wow... That's awesome! どうも　ありがとう　ございました！

[hajime]

It's actually really difficult to learn Japanese from children's books. Children's books use a lot of words that you won't be familiar with, and the use of hiragana makes it difficult to look those words up in a dictionary.

OTOH, when you listen to spoken Japanese, all you "hear" is hiragana. I used to be really annoyed at the hiragana in the 4級 and 3級 levels of the JLPT (N5/N4) until I realized that parsing phonetics is critical to understanding spoken Japanese. So practice in parsing a steady stream of hiragana is actually good for your understanding spoken Japanese.