Inside that Japanese Book is a blog and twitter feed from Inhae who has been studying Japanese and passed the N1 test in 2019. Lots of good recommendations for reading. What is great from my perspective is to learn from actual language learners what is and isn’t challenging for them. In this case, the writer […]
Learn Japanese with Manga
January 20, 2020 · No Comments · manga, websites
I am very late to Twitter, but I have found a number of folks/organizations to follow for good information about recommended reading and new publications. Learn Japanese with Manga @MangaLearn Updates about YouTube videos where Naoto explains the contents and grammar in particular Japanese manga to help Japanese language learners learn through reading manga. Sample […]
Graded Readers
January 14, 2020 · No Comments · books, graded_readers
??????? There really is nothing better for beginning readers (besides their textbook) than graded readers. Graded readers are designed to be read at a 98% comprehension level, using limited vocabulary and grammar. There should be absolutely no reading pain when you are reading a graded reader as long as you choose the right level for […]
Chrome extension for Netflix!
January 13, 2020 · No Comments · Uncategorized
This may be a game changer for a number of people who want to learn more Japanese through anime and film. Scott Wilson, a UMass Amherst alum who majored in Japanese, reported on the new extension in an article in Sora News 24. He walked through the process of setting up the options and provided […]
??? mooks
December 19, 2019 · No Comments · Uncategorized
A mook is a morph of a magazine+book. Mooks get ISBN but they also sometimes get ISSN as well. It gives librarians the opportunity to add them to their collections as a magazine or do subject analysis on each one like a book. For readers interested in science, a well known publisher/title is Newton. In […]
?? Shinsho and their value to L2 readers
December 19, 2019 · No Comments · Uncategorized
Shinsho ?? are an amazing resource for people who are looking to gain a generalist’s knowledge of a particular topic. The regular shinsho are written at a level that a high school graduate can read and understand. The prices of shinsho are entirely reasonable (currently 600-900 yen) and pocket-sized so they are light and convenient […]
Kindle Unlimited’s options for reading Japanese
November 25, 2019 · 1 Comment · Uncategorized
Once I started on my quest for combining audio with text, I also started to explore Kindle to see if there was much there that would be useful to me or others trying to gain fluency in Japanese. In a perfect world I would have access to the Kindle Japan store, but I don’t have […]
Informational picture books
November 19, 2019 · No Comments · Uncategorized
I feel like the genre of informational picture books deserves a great deal more attention. When the Japanese educational system finally started supporting independent research projects as opposed to making students regurgitate facts learned in school textbooks, a new genre developed called ???????????????????), ??????(???????????),??????????????or even ???????????). The beauty of these books is that they are […]
Some of my favorite picture book series
November 19, 2019 · No Comments · books
I have a few favorites that I would love to see included in all collections that include Japanese picture books. ??????????????????????????is advertised as ?????. It would be easy to misinterpret this as an “adult picture book” but really the series is a collection of really famous stories beautifully illustrated that all Japanese likely read as […]
???????Picture books, their use and challenges in L2 reading
November 19, 2019 · No Comments · Uncategorized
I will start out by saying that I love picture books and that I will buy them for academic collections even if we don’t have a separate juvenile collection. In the field of East Asian studies, research on children’s literature has been very slow to gain any traction and I find it a great pity. […]