Sharon Domier's blog

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 […]

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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 […]

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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. […]

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How are picture books “leveled” in Japan? I believe there are 2 main considerations (1) interest and (2) kanji used. This image shows the intended reading level for one of the books in the Kaidan ehon series. As you can see, the publisher deemed it appropriate for all reading levels. It is possible to do […]

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I have been looking for the whispersync technology for Japanese books, where the text being read aloud is indicated with highlighting. While I would really love the audio to be read by a professional narrator (like paying for the kindle+audible option) I am willing to accept computer generated voice. It pops up here or there […]

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I am going to add a few links here so that I can find them again and possibly flesh them out further – or find someone who wants to test them out. I believe so strongly in the need to pair reading with listening whenever possible in order to build real fluency, but it is […]

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Just like public libraries – there is generally a clear division between children’s books and adults books. Not always, some fabulous picture books aren’t intended for children, but by and large the division is clear. But then where does the YA fit? If you want it to stand out, it needs to be in its […]

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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 […]

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