Kodomo Manga

Hey all!
I'm about to finish learning katakana and already have hiragana under my belt. I was wondering if there were any websites where I could read children manga to retain my reading skills.
I was trying to find some on onemanga.com but I could only find mangas that were translated to english.
There was one called 'Nodame Cantabile' and I had read about it being a childrens manga so I was hoping it would help me because I do not have a big vocab in Japanese.
If any of you would think this would be a good manga please let me know or if you know where I can find japanese children manga online please let me know!
Thank you.

Umm, going under the assumption that your a beginner since you said you just finished the kanas, your going to have to pass on Manga for now, you really don't know how difficult it can be, but don't take my word for it, here's a link to a site that has some kid's stories in Japanese. Good luck.

Jericho Desu said:

Umm, going under the assumption that your a beginner since you said you just finished the kanas, your going to have to pass on Manga for now, you really don't know how difficult it can be, but don't take my word for it, here's a link to a site that has some kid's stories in Japanese. Good luck.

Click to expand...

Jericho has a point here. Knowing your hiragana and katakana will help you pronounce the words, but you won't figure out the meaning, unless you have acquired a level of grammar and vocab.

BTW, Nodame Cantabile is not kids manga. It's a story about young people studying music at a music college in Japan and later launching professional careers in Europe. Very popular among grownup women (including myself )

okok.
I like the honesty!
lol
But I was kind of thinking of like a children's first book with pictures and all that.
Like I remember when I was first learning to read English there were children's books like
"See Spike run" then a picture of a dog running
"see spike sit" picture of dog sitting

It's will be extremely embarrassing but I want to try that. I am taking a Japanese course and I have memorized a few phrases, but I usually memorize them for the test then forget their meaning. So I was thinking to start extremely small would be helpful and kind of set a building block for grammar structure instead of me doing homework and hoping its right. LOL. Of course I read my text book, but even in that I kinda of cheat because there is romaji right under the kana and they have spaces between the words.

My internet is being extremely slow at the moment and I haven't gotten that link open yet from Jericho Desu, but I'm hoping those are the kinda of manga books I was thinking of... Maybe I should have said picture books. idk.

But if you have any suggestions please let me know!
And thank you Jericho Desu & epigene for your honesty and for replying!

Spaces between the words when writing in kana is quite normal, incidentally; if there is romaji in your text book then take a piece of paper, cover up the page and read a line at a time so as to avoid "cheating".

Lots of people decide they want to do this (e.g. learn from kids books). I've never seen anybody get very far with it. (Usually something like "I thought kids books would be easy, but I can't find ねちゃう in any dictionaries, help!") Manga can make a good starting point once you're ready to go into real text, because the images help with context - but not at the very start.

The problem is, children's books don't use necessarily use "beginner" grammar/vocab. Kids are going to easily recognise things like たべちゃだめ which won't even be taught in beginner texts, and words like "skip" and "hop" (or "skippity-hop!") which aren't really a high priority for a second language learner. (Not to mention the possible hurdle of running across the equivalents of "pee pee" and "choo-choo-train", without having any way of knowing which words should not be used by anybody above the age of seven).

Think about something like Dr. Seuss or your example; a non-native speaker is not necessarily going to immediately recognise "Spike" as a relatively common dog name as opposed to an ordinary noun, and "see Spike run" may not be a grammar pattern a beginner will recognise. I'm trying to think how to put it in Japanese now: スパイクが走ってるのを見て!, perhaps? It's also not that useful as a sentence pattern; I don't think I'd ever say "See (name) (verb)" in real life. ("Look at him go!", maybe).

If you do want to have a go there is plenty online. Jericho's link is good, but you might also try:

http://www.nikonikoehon.net/picturebook1/index.html
http://www.nikonikoehon.net/picturebook2/index.html - cute "animated" picture story-books (some with English-translated versions). If you can parse the descriptions (e.g. sentences like: とてもいい においがする フシギな木の実がありました。) then you'll probably be okay with these.

トップ - Kibiehon - possibly the best book ever (this site has example extracts of various picture books, this just happens to be my favourite).


As an alternative to kids books, I think one simple source of reading material is something along the lines of this:
動画を見ながら折れる『おりがみくらぶ』
You will need to know things like: て-form of verbs, verb stem + かた means "way of/method of", some origami-related vocab for which you should read this one first: 無題ドキュメント . However, there's no slang/dialect, no cutesy sound effect words, and so on. Plus, you get to make origami.

Green44 said:

I'm hoping those are the kinda of manga books I was thinking of... Maybe I should have said picture books. idk.

Click to expand...

Picture books are "e-hon". They're distinct from manga. All manga are going to be too hard until you know a lot more, but if you do want to torture yourself, some of the easiest ones out there are Yotsubato!, Chi's Sweet Home, and Dragonball. My experience is that boys' manga are too slangy and girls' manga are too formal for a beginner. Children's picture books are also much too hard. Not only will they use grammar you don't know, but it can be quite hard to tell homophones apart when everything is written in kana. (Kanji take a lot of time to memorize, but they're much less ambiguous, so you can at least look them up in a dictionary.)

The Dick and Jane books ("see spot run") aren't usually considered "picture books"; they're graded readers (i.e. textbooks used in grade schools to teach reading). You can get the same things in Japanese, but I think you'd have to order them from a Japanese bookstore.

If I were you, I'd just find a Japanese (as a foreign language) textbook that has a lot of example text and study off of that. It will be better suited to a foreign language learner than a gradeschool native speaker's textbook would be.