Sharon Domier's blog

musings about East Asian studies librarianship, research using Japanese and Chinese language resources, and fabulous new finds on the Internet

???????? Read Alouds

November 8, 2019 by sdomier · No Comments · Uncategorized

Picture books for children can be both fascinating and super challenging. They are usually written in hiragana only, which is hard for L2 learners who don’t know the vocabulary. Even if there are pictures, it doesn’t always help. Also, sometimes the text looks like handwriting (which strikes many Japanese as giving warm feelings) but can be hard to decipher, especially if you don’t know the vocabulary.

But picture books are also often beautiful to look at and are designed to trigger emotions of happiness, sadness, joy, etc using a minimum number of words. And there is no getting around the fact that many are written to convey what adults think is important for children to know. So not reading children’s books, especially picture books in your target language would mean that you are missing big chunks of cultural understanding (and vocabulary) that helps you to understand the culture better.

One excellent way to deal with the challenges of picture books is to read along with someone reading aloud. In Japanese story hours or read alouds are called yomikikase ?????, because the person is holding the book in front of you and reading it aloud. At UMass Amherst we have ????? in a variety of different ways. In person holding up a book, using a document camera and projecting page by page, and sitting with a single student or two and reading it with them.

One more option, and one that I particularly like, is watching ????? on YouTube. This way, you can sit in the comfort of your own room or anywhere you have a wifi connection and read along as the narrator reads the book. You can slow down the speed if you are having trouble keeping up, enlarge to full screen, and stop/rewind when you want to go over something again.

I had no idea that there were so many people on YouTube reading picture books aloud. This is a game changer for me, and I hope L2 Japanese learners will take full advantage of it.

Here are a few channels that I have particularly enjoyed:
YUKO ASTRAL chooses all kinds of books that I would hesitate to add to my academic library collection, but make me laugh. How can she read them with a serious voice? Here is an example, Miss Poop gets married

Yumi Channel is another one. She does a number of the Kaidan ehon series and the new Tono monogatari series. So good!!

?????Japan Kids Channel is another place to look.

But really, the key phrase is ????? and then the title of the book or the author if you are looking for something particular.

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