Sharon Domier's blog

Graded readers are beloved by language instructors because they have been written with carefully controlled vocabulary and grammar, and because of this readers can gain confidence and fluency reading books at the right level right from the very beginning. In the case of Japanese, it is important to not only think about the vocabulary but also the kanji and graded readers use the kanji appropriate to that level. Sentence structure in the lower levels is also standard polite Japanese using desu/masu. This is a very big difference from children’s picture books, that are usually written entirely in kana and often are written in spoken Japanese with slang or dialects.

There has long been graded readers for English language learners, but there was very little for Japanese language learners – especially at the lower levels. Instead we slogged through textbooks and then in 4th year had to make a giant leap to trying to decode “random” articles or essays selected by the literature faculty. I remember seeing students spending hours using dictionaries trying to figure out place names, people’s names, abbreviations, as well as just literary Japanese. It was rarely pleasant and so many students just gave up reading Japanese when they graduated. Or, just read manga.

These days, however, there are lots of interesting graded readers and more each day. The first place to start for Japanese is with the collection at NPO Tadoku. There are six levels of graded readers (called ?????????reberu-betsu yomimono?It starts 0 and goes up to 5. The books are now available both in print and as e-books. There are also audio files available for them. They used to be sold with a CD, but so few people have CD players anymore that audio files make more sense.

See here for the titles: https://tadoku.org/japanese/graded-readers/

The ebooks are available through Kinokuniya Books and Maruzen Books and EBSCO (for those libraries who are used to dealing with EBSCO as a vendor). Generally I find that the students prefer to read the paper books if they have a choice, but these are skinny things and it is so easy for them to slip down behind shelves or get lost in return boxes, so I always warn students to make sure that they hand them in rather than just trying to drop them off.

I love, absolutely love listening to audio. I would much prefer to hear a good Japanese voice in my head than my own trying to read in Japanese. If I could be more proactive with the students, I would ask them to pull out their phones and listen to the audio while they read. It would be so much better for them. Or, in a perfect world if NPO Tadoku had the funds and skill, the audio should be embedded into the ebook version. That would be best.

Another set of graded readers that I adore comes from England. The Let’s Read Japanese series from Oxford Brookes University has fabulous illustrations and is appealing to students who are interested in literary Japanese. The level of difficulty is higher than NPO Tadoku. It goes from 1 to 6 and doesn’t have the pre-novice levels, so students should have already tackled 0 through 2 of the NPO Tadoku series. See here for more information about the series and the levels: https://www.brookes.ac.uk/lets-read-japanese/

Here is an equivalency chart where I tried to figure out how the different standards and publishers matched up. I would be happy to take corrections.

Every library collection should have at least these sets of graded readers to help their students begin to read outside their assigned textbooks. But there are still many, many more graded readers available.