絵本 Reviews: Level 2

Level 2: Mainly hiragana and katakana text. If there are kanji, furigana is given for each kanji. The text is longer but still contains a lot of pictures to aid student comprehension. Japanese native readers would be five to eight years old.

はな
[ふねさん]
~90 words

I really liked this one. It’s still hiragana-only, and the sentences are really basic, but it throws in a bit of onomatopoeia, the art is pretty cute, and there’s an actual story, which is kind of sweet. There were a couple words I didn’t know, but I was able to figure most of it out just via context and then checked if I was correct after, so that’s pretty much exactly the sort of thing I’m looking for.

かいじゅうのたまご
ゆうま・み
~150 words

Quite liked this one too, it was a bit funny and silly. Used simpler words, but more complex sentences/concepts, and it fit well as a landscape format on my phone.

絵本 Reviews: Level 1

Level 1: Hiragana and katakana only. The text is very short, and has one-word sentences, phrases, and some complete sentences. There are plenty of visual aids to help convey meaning. Japanese native readers would be three to six years old.

From what I’m getting out of them so far, I’d generally recommend these for someone who is a complete Japanese beginner. Ideally if you were self-motivated enough to just memorize hiragana and katakana before trying to pick up anything else, they would be really helpful in getting some basic words or practicing reading, at least. They are largely for vocab building, because if there are sentences at all, they’re really simple and often just keep repeating, page after page.

From Amazon’s Digital Collection:

こんにちは
[~ふねさん]
24 words

こんにちは くだものさん
[ふねさん]
34 words

おもしろねこちゃんーよんで字ぼうー言葉の本(1歳〜4歳向け
[Anthony Brigs]
21 words

– “おもしろねこ” was more random than the other two, the plain “こんにちは” book is animals, and then “こんにちは くだものさん” is, of course, fruit-themed.

ひーとぴーの絵本「あいさつ」
はすきしのぶ
42 words

I would have liked these better if the digital format on them didn’t kind of suck? The problem is mostly that for some reason the way this book was done, even in landscape mode I couldn’t get two pages to sit side by side. And the way the book was written in print, the words/sentences sit in the center of a two-page spread with illustrations around them, so words get cut off and you have to flip back and forth to read the whole sentence. And I don’t think the illustrations really link to the sentences as much; I knew all the words in it already, but at one point I realized I didn’t have any idea why the illustrations on the page tied into the sentence, so it could be confusing for someone who doesn’t already know the words.