Japanese Short Stories for Intermediate Learners

A mostly useful little guide. I like that the stories are fully in Japanese and utilizing all three alphabets and furigana to help with learning. Even the questions after are in Japanese so you're constantly practicing apart from when checking your translation.

However, it's formatted like an English book. It could have been more useful to have it read down like an actual Japanese book for more natural practice.

However, I would recommend this book and though it says it only needs to be read once. I'll definitely be using it again when my vocab and reading skills have improved.

"Japanese Short Stories for Intermediate Learners" by "Language Guru" delivers exactly what the title promises. However a more accurate title might have been "Practice Reading Japanese with 10 Easily Consumable Episodes of a Typical Salaryman's Life Including Glossaries, Comprehension Questions, and Excellent Language Advice."

I completely agree with the author's premise that reading is an excellent method to develop language skill. People with a good command of any language are typically avid readers. As an educational tool, this book provides an excellent framework for an intermediate student of Japanese that would be well suited for a formal learning environment. Each chapter covers an aspect of the life of Makoto, a typical single male college educated worker at an insurance company. The topics are well chosen to showcase a variety of vocabulary and situations that are stereotypically representative of life in Japan. These include medical care, dieting, food, hobbies, exercise, dating & relationships, work environment, house work, family, and education. The glossary that accompanies each chapter is sufficiently comprehensive that a separate dictionary is unnecessary for the intermediate learner.

The target audience for this book is accurately described as "Intermediate Learners". This book assumes that the learner can read Hiragana, is not afraid of Kanji (But don't worry! All kanji are annotated in Furigana!), and has a decent grasp of Japanese grammar (but here too, some of the grammar is explained in the glossary). In other words, the target is someone who can already read Japanese, but needs some more practice, and could stand to learn more vocabulary. For advanced learners (or even intermediate learners that do not need formal structure), I would suggest reading something a bit more entertaining, perhaps a novel by a Japanese author that writes in a genre that you like.

For Netgalley users: For me, the only provided version of this book that was readable was the one in the NetGalley Shelf Smartphone Application. The pdf version displayed no Japanese characters at all, and the Kindle version had the Furigana AFTER the Kanji which was nearly impossible to read. I am confident that the paper version is fine, as I verified that the ebook version available directly from Amazon shows Kanji and Furigana correctly. (Though to be very picky, in a future edition, I would suggest using a slightly larger font for the English words in the glossaries.)

I thank The Language Guru for kindly providing a temporary electronic copy of this work for review.