In a previous post, Books for Japanese Children, I talked about some of the books I have been (attempting to) read! In this article want to share some links to websites I have found and bookmarked. To be honest I haven’t used these to their full potential, but I really hope I get to them because they look like fantastic resources, which is why I wanted to share them!

きょうのイソップ童話 This one is great! It is a short story for every day of the year. There is text in Japanese and audio you can listen to while you read. The audio is nicely narrated and I hope to make an effort to improve my listening skills soon with this very resource. You can download the audio easily too, so you can easily put it onto your mp3 player of choice and listen on the go.
The stories are short so it is easy to either quickly listen to it and move on, or to study in depth. Also, check out the parent (gateway) site, which leads to other websites for children. They include videos and more stories, etc. Click on “パソコン” to access the sites on your computer, the other links are for mobile phones. Some of the content is a bit too much for children (irritating videos on washing your hands because of the flu) but other stuff is cute and easy to understand. Highly recommended! There is also a website to learn about other countries, featuring national anthems and all. 日本の歌 This is a website full of Japanese children’s songs, ordered from easy to hard. Each page has the lyrics, music notation, and music with and without singing. Very nice! There is also a grammatical terms guide. This one is a bit different in that the website itself isn’t aimed at children but at language learners. However, the songs themselves are children’s songs so I thought it was appropriate to include them on this list. ふぁんた時間 I really want to explore this website more! It seems like it is a podcast. It feels very professional and I think it may be done by NTT. I’m listening to one now and it has background music which is great, but perhaps also a bit distracting for the language learner. Def one that I want to look more into!

If you know of any more websites intended for Japanese children, please leave me a comment! Also check out my post on Japanese Children’s (print) Books! I think there are advantages to reading from a book, but no audio…   Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.   If you like this post, please soc it at JapanSoc, a social bookmarking website for everything Japan related!  

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Books for Japanese Children There Is No Best Method – Or Is There? Some Awesome Websites Let’s Enjoy English! Kanji Websites

After a bit of conversation in my article about my recent study methods I thought it would be good to get into more detail about the books I’ve been reading! Besides some manga, I’ve been reading books intended for Japanese children. There are a few problems I’ve found reading these compared to graded readers that are intended for beginners to the language. For instance, while children might not have a sophisticated vocabulary like an adult, they still have a large pool of vocab to pull from. Never the less children’s books are obviously going to be a challenge to read, they are going to be easier than adult fiction, and thus can be a nice stepping stone for those of us who want to get to that stage one day. Amazon.co.jp ウィジェット

齋藤孝のイッキによめる！名作選（3年生）

This is the first book I attempted to read. It is a collection of short stories. It really is quite good, I feel, in that the amount of kanji is recognisable at least for someone in the upper beginner stage – not too much kanji but not so little that it is painful to read. Everything has furigana in any case. And some words have a little definition under them as well which is very helpful. There are a few pictures through the book, and at the end of every little story is three quick questions which test comprehension of the story. Over all I think this is a great book, just not right for me. The more I think about it the more I think it is just ill suited to me – I just didn’t realise it at the time which is why it frustrated me. But when I think about it, I had the same “Is that all? Am I missing something?” feeling I get when I read short stories in English. Although – it is important also to point out that I was missing things. A co-worker had me translate a line into English, which I did, and I was right, but he then explained some nuances that I missed. I think I’ll continue to miss nuances of course until my Japanese becomes more sophisticated. Never the less, I think this also shows that even if you get the basic story line, with these books you can have room to grow with them, perhaps discovering new things every time you read them. So yes, I recommend these books to you if you think you’ll like the short stories. After all, my problem isn’t with these books, I think they are fantastic, but rather the realisation that short stories and I don’t really gel in any language. Get this book from Amazon or scroll up a bit to check out the carousel of more books in the series, all the different grade levels.    

10分で読めるお話 This is the next set of books I bought. So far I’ve only read through this grade one book. It was a bit more satisfying in that I understood much more without having to consult the dictionary as much. These are smaller stories than from the other book (although I don’t have the grade 3 one to compare with the grade 3 one I own, so perhaps they are comparable)… There are more pictures in these ones too, and have some poetry which I actually really enjoyed! The stories do get progressively longer and harder too which is nice. Thumbs are enthusiastically up for these ones as well. Amazon.co.jp ウィジェット   Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.  

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Reading Manga For Japanese Language Learning Going Gung-ho – November 2009 Some Awesome Websites Remembering to Remember the Kanji Let’s Enjoy English!

So, incase you don’t know, I recently moved to Japan as part of the JET program. I moved from Australia to Mie-ken in Japan to teach English. I arrived in August, which is school holidays for the kids. So my first time teaching in Japan wasn’t at a school but was at a Summer “camp” for children aged 5 to 11ish. It was at two locations each with two sessions. It wasn’t exactly a camp, but more like a class that the kids came to. It involved all the middle school/elementary ALTs, some JETs some not, in my area.

The above photo is our preperations for the classes. The program itself was called “Let’s Enjoy English”, of course using the “let’s” form which is everywhere in this country.
    We broke each day into three sessions of about 30 mins each. We wrote down a whole heap of topics we could perhaps use and then finally narrowed them down to the ones we would use. Then we broke ourselves into groups and put each group in charge of a topic to come up with the activities. They were all fairly simple topics such as feelings and fruit as most of the children were in grade one.

The two days were lots of fun. My topic was fruit and we were lucky to have some plastic fruit with us. First we played the missing game, taking away different fruit each time and the kids had to guess what was missing. And then we put blind folds on the children and made them guess what fruit they were holiding.

It was lots of fun, but oh my goodness I was worn out afterwards! The kids were so cute – shy while by themselves but really got into the games. So luckily my first experience teaching children was a very enjoyable experience. I have quite a few photos but unfortunatly I was requested not to put them up on the inernet. In stead you’ll have to put up with this photo of me covered in body part stickers.

A job that involves playing all day is pretty sweet
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