Any Good Children's Books You'd Recommend?

I have been wanting to get myself into reading more in Japanese, but I don't know where to start. The only way I can gauge my level of the language would be by my class text books. XD I have progressed to the Genki II books. This semester's class is titled "intermediate level", and I have taken all of the "Elementary level" semesters prior to this one. I hope I am making sense here, I apologize if this is confusing. >__< That aside, I was hoping to start my reading off in children's books and work my way up to see where I am at. Are there any titles out there that anyone would recommend? Thanks in advance! ^__^

Not really, but you can maybe browse through a list of Grimm's Fairy Tales (グリム童話) and see if you want to give one of them a shot. I'm not sure what the langauge will be like, though. You could also check 福娘童話集 -世界と日本の童話・昔話集, which has a collection of stories from Japan and the rest of the world. From that website I found ネコがネズミを追いかける訳, which also seems to have an audio file (actually, it seems all of them do). Here's the full text of that story, just to give you an idea:

むかしむかし、人間も生まれていない、大むかしのある 年の暮れの事です。
神さまが、動物たちに言いました。
「もうすぐ正月だ。元旦には、みんな私の所に来なさい 。そして、先に来た者から十二番目までを、その年の大 将としよう」
ところが、うっかり者のネコは集まる日を忘れたので 、友だちのネズミに聞きました。
するとネズミは、
「ああ、新年の二日だよ」
と、わざとうそを教えました。

さて、元旦になりました。
ウシは足が遅いので、朝早くに家を出ました。
ちょっかり者のネズミは、こっそりウシの背中に乗っ て神さまの前に来ると、ピョンと飛び降りて一番最初に 神さまの前に行きました。
それでネズミが最初の年の大将になり、ウシが二番目 になりました。
その後、トラ・ウサギ・タツ・ヘビ・ウマ・ヒツジ・ サル・ニワトリ・イヌ・イノシシの順になりました。
ところがネコは、ネズミに教えられた通り二日に神さ まの所へ行きました。
すると神さまは、
「遅かったね。残念だけど、昨日決まったよ」
と、言うではありませんか。
くやしいのなんの。
「ネズミめ、よくも騙したな！」
怒ったネコは、それからずっと、ネズミを見ると追い かける様になりました。

おしまい

That's about all I can offer for the time being.

I tried a couple of Japanese children's books after completing a beginners' course, and I was really disappointed at how difficult I found them. It seems to me that there is a vast gulf in reading ability between someone who has just completed an introductory course and the level of an average (say) 10-year-old native speaker. Of course, you may be further advanced than I was, and/or have greater ability, but if you struggle a bit then don't imagine it's just you. In the end I decided to do a load of intermediate-level textbooks first, and also learn lots more kanji, and then I plan to go back to the books some time in the future.

@Glenn : From the looks of that, I can only catch bits and pieces of the story. There are quite a few kanji I have yet to learn in that. Thank you for these links, though! They'll come in handy in the future! どうもありがとうございました。

@eeky : Back in my "elementary level" semesters, I tried reading books in Japanese. I have some Japanese Sailor Moon children's books and I could read most of it since it was written in hiragana and katakana (plus the katakana had furigana, although I knew my kata and didn't need it), the only problem I ran into at the time was my vocabulary range and I often didn't know what certain words were so I had to use my dictionary to try to figure out almost every sentence because they used a wide range of words that I had not yet been exposed to. Although the side dialogue that was isolated to individual characters were usually simple statements and phrases that I could catch. So I muddled my way through the books. The only other story I read in Japanese was the story behind the Tanabata Festival near the end of the Genki I book. That had a few words in it that our vocabulary sections had never covered so I had to look them up, but when it was isolated to kanji and vocabulary that I knew, I found I could read it with slightly more efficiency than the Sailor Moon books. XD

The pdf files linked below are from textbooks for pre-school children I quoted in another thread. I'm interested in whether my comment in the thread "it would be tough to grasp the meaning of the sentences even for learners who have learned for six months or maybe a year." is correct or not.

http://www.gamba.co.jp/step_pdf/1-1-yomimono.pdf
http://www.gamba.co.jp/step_pdf/1-6-yomimono2.pdf
http://www.gamba.co.jp/step_pdf/2-1-yomimono_600.pdf
http://www.gamba.co.jp/step_pdf/2-6-yomimono.pdf
http://www.gamba.co.jp/step_pdf/3-1-yomimono.pdf
http://www.gamba.co.jp/step_pdf/3-6-yomimono.pdf
http://www.gamba.co.jp/step_pdf/4-1-yomimono.pdf
http://www.gamba.co.jp/step_pdf/4-6-yomimono.pdf
http://www.gamba.co.jp/step_pdf/5-1-yomimono.pdf
http://www.gamba.co.jp/step_pdf/5-6-yomimono.pdf

The problem is children may need to have concepts "dumbed down", but there is no corresponding need to have the syntax dumbed down. That plus the fact that any native-speaking child is almost certain to have a vocabulary massively greater than the beginning/intermediate foreign learner has acquired means that what practically everyone assumes will be Goldilocksian "just right for me" reading material turns into a tiresome slog through dictionaries and a brutal realization of just how much they still have to learn in the way of grammatical structures....and ultimately a humbling when they realize that despite all their study they really don't know as much as a small child after all. And even if they do successfully wade through the material, they realize they have done all that hard work and the upshot of it is that they found out what happened in a boring-assed children's story.

Children's books are lousy learning materials, yet seemingly EVERYBODY (myself included) hits upon what they think is the completely novel idea of using them. If the exercise worked, we would see it talked around a heck of a lot more.

Personally, I think four panel comics are the thing to use as reading material when building skills to bridge between textbooks and "real" books. I read hundreds of volumes of them, then short stories, and finally regular nonfiction books and novels....I am pleased to report WITHOUT using dictionaries. (Reading while looking up the bulk of the words on the page isn't reading; it's decoding).

Toritoribe said:

The pdf files linked below are from textbooks for pre-school children I quoted in another thread. I'm interested in whether my comment in the thread "it would be tough to grasp the meaning of the sentences even for learners who have learned for six months or maybe a year." is correct or not.

Click to expand...

Just out of interest, and for your experiment, I looked at 1-1-yomimono.pdf. I've been studying for a few hours a week for about 18 months. I don't know exactly how that would compare to "proper" full-time study, but certainly I would not expect to be ahead of someone who had studied full-time for six months.

As it happens, I can understand most of that text reasonably easily. There are two parts I don't fully grasp. Now I've got this far, maybe you could help explain them?

1. ものの名まえには、人の名まえからつけられたものがた くさんあります。

It looks to me as if this literally says "There are many things that are attached from the names of people to the names of things". I figure this broadly means "There are many things that are named after people", but I can't really unravel the Japanese, or understand why it's so convoluted with もの mentioned twice.

2. イギリスの大じんにもなったことのある

I suppose this might essentially be saying that the person was a rich Englishman, but I don't understand にもなったことのある at all. I think this may be a typical example of where foreign learners fall down in comparison to Japanese children. Although learners might understand some more complicated words and concepts, they may fail to understand simple, common idiomatic expressions that even Japanese pre-schoolers find easy.

I think you are somewhere between intermediate and advanced, so those readings are relatively easy for you especially about the grammar.

1)
The second もの is a pronoun, the alternative to 名前. So it literally means "There are many names of things that are named from the names of people".

2)
It's not 大尽(rich man) but 大臣(minister).
Yeah, I agree with your opinion. This would be a good example of the vocabulary issue. Unlike 大臣, 大尽 is not common word. Probably pre-school children have never heard it. I believe you can understand the meaning of 大臣にもなったことのある.

Thanks Toritoribe.

1. I find this one a bit of a puzzle still. It may be because I'm misunderstanding つけられた. Originally I thought つけられた meant something like "attached", and the target of this verb was ものの名まえ, as indicated by に. But if the second もの means 名まえ then we would have a name being attached to the name of something, which seems illogical.

Now I'm wondering if つけられた could somehow mean "taken (from the names of people)". Overall, that would literally give something like:

ものの名まえには = (Given) as the names of things,
ものがたくさんあります = there are many names
人の名まえからつけられた = that are taken from the names of people.

Is this right? If so, which version of the verb つける is being used here? I can't seem to find an apropriate meaning in the dictionary. Maybe I have still got it all wrong...

2. Oh, does it just mean "(he) also/even became an English minister"? (My usual bugbear with も. "also"? "even"? something else?). I'm assuming that 臣にもなったことのある modifies 人, correct?

3. One other thing if I may. In the part すると、とてもおいしく..., would it be possible to use おいしくて instead, with the same meaning?

1)
Maybe I mentioned this somewhere in another thread, 物の名前には is the same to 物の名前の中には in this case.
つける is from a set phrase 名前をつける "to name/to give ~ a name".

物の名前の中には、人の名前から名前をつけられたもの （＝名前）がたくさんあります。

So, more literal, word-to-word translation is "In names of things, there are many names that are named from the names of people".

2)
Yes, that clause modifies 人. も would mean "even" here.

3)
Yes. おいしくて sounds more colloquial.

Thanks Toritoribe, I finally get it. Yes, I've learned before that ～には can mean ～の中には. Quite probably you told me. Unfortunately I forgot to apply that learning here!

Not much around - but try these

My husband and I have found the same problem in finding good reading material.
The best we've found so far are books not written for children, but are short stories specifically designed for Japanese students. The levels are more aligned with JPLT, although the level numbers do not match. The levels range from 0 - 4. Each level specifies the number of kanji and level of vocab. Eg. Level 2 caters for those who know 500 kanji and have a vocab between 1500 - 2500 words. The grammar is closely aligned with this level of proficiency.
They are Japanese Graded Readers by ASK. Check the website ask-digital.co.jp If you have a Kinokuniya bookshop near you should be able to buy them there.
There are 5 books in volume and there are 3 volumes per level.