Sharon Domier's blog

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 short like picture books (generally 40-60 pages), fully annotated with furigana, and include photographs or images of primary source materials. I have had a lot of luck recommending them to students working on senior theses or independent projects. Many of them are listed as appropriate for mid-elementary school or higher.

I have collected a number of series that can be used to either supplement readings in Tobira or at a higher level. We have also used them in Japanese literature in translation classes to give students visuals to accompany their readings.

?????????????? is leveled at ????? and includes Taketori monogatari, Genji monogatari, Heike monogatari, Makura no soshi, Tsurezuregusa, and Oku no hosomichi.

????????? is published by Poplar. There are at least 14 volumes in this set. Another set that gets used is

??????????????? is an older series published by Akane Shobo that is very useful for providing students with the vocabulary, maps, and images used in Japanese. As I look at the offerings at Akane Shobo, I see that many of the newer titles now have ????????????????? I see some really good ones including language studies, social conditions, history, etc.

What I am differentiating between is ???? and ????. Here are some examples of informational picture books that I think could easily be incorporated into 3rd or 4th year classes or independent reading. A number of them are reference books and not something that most people would read like a comic, but for students who are building their vocabulary in a particular field, super effective.

????? Fukuinkan Shoten published a soft-cover monthly book/magazine called ?????????? Gekkan Takusan no fushigi that is science-oriented or nonfiction. The monthly publication doesn’t have an ISBN. Many of the titles are also published in hardcover if they are popular under the series ??????????? Takusan no fushigi kessakush?. The reading level is listed as ????? and up, so it really is a perfect reading level for students interesting in reading nonfiction. The category listed is: ???????? (science picture books, zukan)

Examples of titles that I have purchased for my collection include: ??????????? Watashi ga gaijin datta koro, which is the autobiography of the famous Japanese historian and philosopher Tsurumi Shunsuke, graduate of Harvard who was deported from the United States in 1942 along with a number of other Japanese nationals living in the US at the time.

?????? Wagashi no hon is a zukan. That means that there can be a lot of informational text to accompany the images. A student could, of course, just look at the pictures, but most are also interested in the text. In the beginning I gave these lower reading levels, but students asked me to reassess and so I have.

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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. It is a particularly rich field to harvest, whether you focus on portrayals of war, social justice, wordplay, or Buddhist traditions, and it is possible for undergraduates to read Japanese picture books and write about them intelligibly in English.

There is now excellent research being done on Japanese picture books by scholars such as Heather Blair at the Indiana University Bloomington who write about Buddhism and Hell in children’s books. Another scholar to keep an eye out for is Mika Endo, currently an independent scholar, who is doing work on 3.11 and how nuclear disasters are portrayed in children’s books. Kathryn Tanaka has also done work on picture books about Hansen’s disease. I look forward to reading or listening to talks about many more topics and hope that there will be regular panels at Japanese studies conferences on children’s literature.

But this blog is about reading and collecting materials specifically for L2 Japanese readers. And that is where it starts to get tricky. In general, Japanese picture books present a number of challenges to L2 readers.
1. Lack of kanji
2. Lots of unknown vocabulary
3. Use of slang/dialects
4. assumes background knowledge/cultural background that we don’t have and often don’t get through university textbooks

All of this is true, and all of it is important. To have a better understanding of current Japanese culture, I think it is really advantageous to have read similar books and to understand the ethos that underpins those works. And so, like someone learning to walk again after a stroke or a major accident, it is possible to go through the motions of learning to walk again and be able to do it much faster than when we were babies.

When people ask me about picture books and tadoku, I suggest that picture books require more support than traditional graded readers. Picture books are best read aloud – by an instructor or a more seasoned reader. It helps to stop and point out images that reflect the words or scene being depicted (like a parent or teacher would with children), so that the readers have a clear image in their minds of the story. Alternatively, the instructor/advanced reader could read the entire book aloud without stopping (this is traditional read aloud technique yomikikase ?????). I don’t think this is as effective for L2 readers because they could be missing the key terms in the text and not be able to follow along at all. Then it could be read again, using shadowing techniques where both readers read together at the same time. And finally, the reader could read it alone fluently. This is a pretty standard pedagogical technique for improving reading fluency. It could also be tedious, so it really depends on the reader.

Without a clear understanding of the story, a complete text of hiragana can be frustrating to an L2 reader. Picture books try to compensate for that by using wakachigaki ????? (word division) so that words appear as units rather than a long string that needs to be deconstructed. Students who read picture books tell me that once they know the vocabulary, they are comfortable with hiragana and can read fluently because having the hiragana makes it easier to read aloud.

Recently I found out that if I watched picture books being read aloud on Youtube, I could turn on the closed caption feature and see the text produced in kanji. There are mistakes though, because the closed captioning is done automatically and slight mispronunciations could generate the wrong kanji or artificial intelligence chooses a different kanji with the same pronunciation. In spite of the few errors, having access to picture books being read aloud in Japanese (and being able to see the text at the same time) is a very powerful tool. I also believe it is a copyright violation and at some time the videos will be taken down, but until they are I will continue to use them privately.

In a perfect world, I would love to see instructors use picture books in classes – maybe at a third year level – so that the students could read and have the opportunity to talk about or write about what they have read. It would be possible to tackle slang/dialects as well as cultural assumptions/portrayals with more nuance this way. Depending on the emphasis of the class, students could read in Japanese and write/discuss in English or any combination. Activities could include reading a book in dialect and rewriting into standard Japanese, or changing a dialogue into a description. So many options!

Picture books tend to be 32, 46 or 64 pages long. The amount of text per page varies widely, but in most cases the books are meant to be read in one sitting. That is very satisfying – particularly to an L2 reader. Picture books are also a really good option for students who are more used to reading manga or using video as part of their studies.

What is interesting about Japanese picture books is that they are not all intended for the very young. There are fabulous picture books written for all ages in Japan. Some stay faithful to the concept of hiragana only – such as the kaidan ehon ????? series by Iwasaki Shoten. Many of us involved in tadoku have a knee jerk reaction to place these picture books in very low levels (like level 1 or 2) but in fact they often have rich vocabulary and use of onomatopoeia that language learners find quite challenging. In my library I have moved these books up to a higher level based on student feedback.

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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 an advanced search in many publishing websites (much easier than doing it with the online bookstores) and limit to ?? AND ?? in order to locate picture books that would be of possible interests to adults as well as young children. One excellent source for finding these materials would be using ehonnavi. Since the entire website is focussed on picture books, it is is a simple matter to click on ?? to get recommended picture books for adults.

If you check the back of the book or the age-appropriate reading guidelines on publisher websites, you will see a phrase like: ???????????????????????????. If you read to a child, 3 years and older, if they read to themselves, beginning of elementary school.

Generally, picture books are leveled like other books for children with the addition of the very young.
??????????? – baby. Often board books. Bright colors. very simple and repetitive. Vocabulary. Feelings.
?? (???) – very young. Gomi Taro ?? ?? ????????????The ???????series. One sentence per page in general.
?????????? – grades 1-2 In the case of picture books is a lot of overlap between ?? and ????, because it takes into account adults reading to children and children reading by themselves. The text is all or almost all hiragana, but the books might be longer. The Japanese translation of Frog and Toad is an example, as is Peter Rabbit. This level is the beginning of the transition from ?? to???? and might be counted in both groups.
?????????? – grades 3-4 picture books at this level have a lot more kanji, accompanied by furigana. There are a number of beautiful picture books that are picture book renditions of famous stories/tales that are tagged as appropriate for ???? and up. There are also a lot of informative picture books that are labeled this way.
?????????? – grades 5-6. At this level, there is less furigana, a lot more text included, and totally appropriate for adult Japanese L2 learners. Most of the picture books that I have seen are ???? and above, not ???? and above. I have to think some more about this.

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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 but the trick is figuring out how to generate it.

Google Play Books – there is a … menu option that lets you turn on Start Reading Aloud/Stop reading aloud. It does not read the furigana along side the kanji, but beware that when the author has chosen a specific reading for a particular kanji (especially in light novels) the computer generated voice will likely give you the common reading instead.

It works! And since it is Google, clicking on kanji will bring up the Jpn dictionary. Score!!

Looking at Google Play Books, here is the info on a Japanese light novel: Language: Japanese Genres: Juvenile Fiction / General
Content Protection: This content is DRM protected.
Read Aloud: Available on Android devices

READING INFORMATION
Smartphones and Tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and Computers
You can read books purchased on Google Play using your computer’s web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like the Sony eReader or Barnes & Noble Nook, you’ll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Please follow the detailed Help center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.

iBooks also has this capability. It is under the Edit menu->Speech->Start/Stop Speaking. BUT, it reads both the kanji and the furigana and it doesn’t highlight the text being spoken. This seems to be different than the Google Play read technology. Remember that with your Mac, you want to go into the Accessibility menu and you can choose either the female voice or the male voice and change the speed of speaking.

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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 only recently that software is allowing us to do this more conveniently. I used a Kindle book in English recently that was tied to the audiobook version and allowed me to flip between the two or use them at the same time. So I did and the text was highlighted as the audio portion ran. This was brilliant and made me really want the same thing for Japanese. I chatted about this with a Japanese instructor the other day and she was excited to hear about the English one because she said that she often gets lost when trying to do the two at the same time. The information (and wording about Kindle books is here) What you are looking for is to make sure that you have the Audible narration as well as the Kindle e-book. The category is eBooks with Audible. Likewise, another feature that is super interesting for language learners/growing readers is Word Wise, that provides explanations above difficult terms.

Now I am on a hunt to find the same thing for Japanese. I have been buying my ebooks from eBookJapan because I can use an American credit card and my IP address, country of residence isn’t an issue. I can also purchase from audiobook.jp. But there are no audiobooks in eBookJapan, nor are there texts in audiobook.jp. I also haven’t seen the option in BookWalker or honto.jp.

So, Amazon Japan? I check the website and there is no link for eBook with Audio. There is for Word Wise, but when I select that it limits me to English language books. Can it be that the technology hasn’t made it to the Japanese market yet? It may be. I wonder why not. I did find this website talking about it though, so I am going to read through it and see what I can figure out.

Having checked with friends in Japan who have both Kindle and Audible memberships, there isn’t a whispersync option available to them. One person MacGuyvers it by listening to the audiobook on his iPhone and reading the text on his iPad. That is what it takes at the moment and it is better than nothing.

But I may have found an application that has been designed for content creators to incorporate audio into their own ebooks. One is called kataribe (storyteller). It worked on an iphone/ipad. This review claims it to be a good option for Japanese students with learning disabilities. And that means it is also likely good for L2 students. The app itself has almost no instructions though, and I would much rather create things on a laptop with a keyboard than my ipad, so I am going to hunt down some samples and web pages.
?????

The Kataribe application for iPad/iPhone offers tadoku graded reader creators an amazing opportunity to incorporate voice recordings tied to text in the books. It is a very simple app to use and I would love to see it tested by tadoku folks.

https://apps.apple.com/it/app/?????????????-????/id1202733539

There are other options for iOS out there like Hinagiku:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/????-?????????????????????/id1124643029
and
Nojigiku is the viewer.

??? (wadaico) is an add-in to Word that uses automatic generation of audio using the Microsoft speech platform. There is a brief video showing how it works.

oh, this page is not well organized, but I finally hit the right terminology to start finding stuff. There is a much greater interest in Japan now for accessibility, and more tools coming out. Good news.

From the Access Reading site. All kinds of add-in tools to explore for content creators.

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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 own section. I decided to do the same thing with my Read Japanese collection.

There are thousands and thousands of Japanese books and manga be published annually and both funds and space are very limited. My Read Japanese collection is already pretty full so I have to make very strategic choices about what I add. I decided that I would select titles that were popular enough that English language translations existed for them so that it was likely that the students had already some familiarity with them. For manga and light novels this was particularly important to me because those just aren’t in my wheelhouse. I have no idea what is and isn’t good. I can read the rankings and reviews but it is still guesswork. By reading reviews of the translations I can work backwards and choose the Japanese titles.

There are many public libraries that are collecting English language manga and light novels, so I can ask the students to borrow those through our local library system. I spend my limited funds on the Japanese language titles that aren’t held or aren’t widely held. I scour lists like this one: 50 MUST-READ YA BOOKS IN TRANSLATION and of course websites like Seven Seas Entertainment for ideas.

Because these titles are not graded readers and are generally written at a much higher level than 0-5, I have expanded the tadoku reading levels to go up to level 8 (basically high school Japanese). Manga in my collection start in level 3, I have a lot in level 4 (if they have furigana), more in level 5 and a few in higher levels. Light novels are in level 6 and above. This way students can still browse easily a small collection and if they like what they see and can read it, then we can add more to our regular East Asian language collection.

I am also looking at this website: Books??? Books Amadare for lots of good reviews of middle/high school books, including ?? books.

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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 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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I was living in Japan when the Hanshin Earthquake hit. I remember we had an English teacher come out to Miyazaki and talk with us about the effects of the earthquake, the cost of rebuilding, and the challenges of communication.

There were many foreigners non-Japanese living in that part of Japan and many of them could not understand the emergency information. Even the ones who had enough life skills Japanese couldn’t understand the bureaucratic Japanese language used in emergency events and notices. My Japanese is pretty good and I am a Japanese librarian, but I still shook my head at the stiff and awkward formal language.

And from that traumatic period was born the ??????? movement. Japanese language instructors, civil servants, activists(?) are advocating for simplifying Japanese language posters and announcements so that they are comprehensible by someone who is at an N3/N4 level of L2 Japanese or a grade 2/3 level of L1 Japanese. Just as a reminder N4 is basic daily life. N3 would be newspaper headlines, daily life, and more difficult words if easier explanations accompany them.

This push opens up a lot more information on the web that could be utilized by L2 language learners in their 3rd year or end of 2nd maybe if they are working intensively.

Here is a website at Hirosaki University.
http://human.cc.hirosaki-u.ac.jp/kokugo/EJ3mokuji.htm
It includes sample posters for signs in simple Japanese, guidelines for people doing the writing, and lists of vocabulary – with a clear focus on disaster support.

Here is another website, this one by Iori Isao, who is at Hitotsubashi University.
http://www4414uj.sakura.ne.jp/Yasanichi/index.html You may have already figured this out but yasanichi is a contraction of yasashii nihongo (easy Japanese). Professor Iori’s work seems to center on multicultural Japan and making it easier for non-Japanese to function as part of the Japanese society by being more accepting of simplified Japanese. Prof. Iori has a link to the Yasashii Nihongo checker, which reviews the text submitted and rates it according to: vocabulary, kanji, formality, length of sentences, and grammar.

I took an example from the Fukuoka Prefectural government page on disaster preparation. This website uses Google translate for non-Japanese as its way of dealing with the issue. Putting the Japanese text through the yasanichi checker gave it a poor score – difficult vocabulary, legalize writing with specialized vocabulary, and difficult grammar. Popping the same text into yasashiku naare – made a few suggestions but not enough to make a difference.

Still good to have these tools, especially if people continue to work on them and improve them.

Of course, speaking of yasashii Nihongo, please don’t forget News Web Easy. I love that website. And… I just found or rediscovered this one. Matcha – a web magazine on travel written in yasashii Nihongo.

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I am putting this here and leaving it in draft form so I can find it again.

I have been looking for readability checkers for Japanese for a while and just came across a few that have some real potential for L2 Japanese as well.

The links are on the Yomimono Ippai website here: http://www17408ui.sakura.ne.jp/tatsum/project/Yomimono/Yomimono-ippai/howtomake.html

I am playing around with it looking at different writing styles to see how they are analyzed and how it would affect L2 Japanese readers.

J-Lex is one option that is aimed at “foreign students” ???. It analyzes the text you paste in from either a vocabulary or a kanji perspective. And then it considers the vocabulary you should know depending on your field of study (arts, humanities, social sciences, sciences, medicine). It evaluates the vocabulary according to the old JLPT levels (which means it really should be updated). There is also an option to see if a word appears in the Genki (textbook) list of vocabulary. Also the software will remove furigana (kanji readings) so that doesn’t mess up the calculations. Removing the furigana could also be useful for other applications – like text to voice. There is so much of interest here, it is really worth exploring and would be a fabulous project for someone to continue working on.

One of the interesting ones is Yasashiku naare – where you paste in your text and it suggests ways to make it easier to read. It comes from the people involved in Reading Tutor at Tokyo International University.
????????????

And I found this app for adding oral to text in e-books. I really want to try this, but need to understand it better. I am putting this here so I can find it. The app is called ?????It is for iPhones/iPads. Not available in app section for my laptop. https://apps.apple.com/jp/app/?????????????-????/id1202733539?l=en#?platform=ipad

The app has been used on Pepper the robot, to read books to people. Here is a video showing how it is done.

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The jReadability portal has 4 different options, 2 of which are the most important for L2 Japanese learners (and my interest).

There is a video that shows you how to use the jReadability function. This video was quite helpful, so the link is here:
https://youtu.be/faOGrpAjook

The URL for portal is here: https://jreadability.net/en-portal.html

jReadability allows you to check the reading level of writing to find out the level of difficulty. The readability scores are for L2 not for L1 readers. It also has the option to remove furigana (like from Aozora texts) before calculating readability. I can see this option being very helpful as faculty and students try to select texts to read.

I tested a few texts that commonly get used with undergrads-Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s Kumo no ito and the results look pretty good. Because they are old texts, the jReadability doesn’t really recognize old hiragana but because you can look at text details, it is quick and easy to decide whether the advanced stuff is really too advanced or just the right amount of challenge.

I have been looking for this kind of analyzer for a while and am so happy that I finally found it (and can’t quite believe that I didn’t find it before this). I will never lose this website again.

The jWriter function is to help students (and their instructors) see how their writing level is progressing. There are only 5 levels here (compared to the jReadability that has 6 levels). I think this could also have some real benefits for the tadoku courses where students are submitting their own books as the final assignment.

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