This is a mobile optimized page that loads fast, if you want to load the real page, click this text.

Japanese books with limited vocabulary?

Gollums9

Registered
Joined
1 Nov 2021
Messages
12
Reaction score
4
Hi,
Having studied lots of japanese during my adolescence, I took a 20 year hiatus and strruggling to relearn things.

I found a solution to re-acquiring the grammatical might if there were books in japanese such as those by Dr. Seuss. The book Sam-I-Am notably only uses a vocabulary 50 words. Are there books similar to these in japanese which could facilitate my progress? Thanks.
 
Gollums,

It sounds to me like you are looking for what is called a graded reader, which keeps the number of kanji down and only introduces a few kanji every chapter. One of the problems with today's textbooks is they usually only have dialogues but not reading sections.

Here is the Naganuma study textbooks from 1950 (!) I like them because they have lots of reading and the vocabulary and kanji is carefully controlled in each chapter.

The Naganuma series is actually a set of books, a reader, a dialog book, a vocabulary book, a grammar book, etc. I read the series many years ago and it was great.

(I have removed the inital letter h in the addresses because the links are refusing to appear correctly.

ttps://www.amazon.com/Nippongo-Tokuhon-Standard-Japanese-Readers/dp/B07HGC2B7T/ref=sr_1_15?qid=1655661648&refinements=p_27%3ANaoe+Naganuma&s=books&sr=1-15&text=Naoe+Naganuma

ttps://www.amazon.com/Basic-Japanese-course-Naganuma-language/dp/B0007JZ0QS/ref=sr_1_5?qid=1655661648&refinements=p_27%3ANaoe+Naganuma&s=books&sr=1-5&text=Naoe+Naganuma
 
Last edited:
Thanks Buntano. I don't really have a major issue with kanjis, because the internet (e. g. Google translate, wiktionary) greatly facilitates deciphering them. However, I believe to understand japanese requires first and foremost coming to grips with the topic-oriented structure of japanese, which is so different from western languages, and which I knew nothing about, and despite once being quite fluent in kanjis, my teacher left many things unexplained. (I think she never even explained things as basic as こと and とき -structures which seem so obvious to me now.) Surely I'll check out these links.
 
Cookies are required to use this site. You must accept them to continue using the site. Learn more…