Japanese Short Stories for Beginners: 20 Captivating Short Stories to Learn Japanese & Grow Your Vocabulary the Fun Way!

Introduction

So, you want to learn Japanese? That’s awesome!

Like any other foreign language, it’s going to open the doors to discover a completely new culture. Whether you’re learning Japanese for work, studies or fun, the knowledge of the language will broaden your mind, let you meet new people, and will become a new page in the thrilling book of your self-development.

Heard about Japanese being impossibly hard to learn? That might be true. But that’s what we’re here for. Rely on this book that was written with your needs in mind and accept the challenge without any fear or doubts.

What is the following book about?

We’ve written this book to cover an important issue that seems to affect every new learner of the Japanese tongue — a lack of helpful reading material. While in English you may encounter tons (or gigabytes, in our modern terms) of easy and accessible learning material, in Japanese you will usually and promptly be given tough literature to read by your teachers, and you will soon find yourself consulting your dictionary more than you’d want to. Eventually, you’ll find yourself bored and uninterested in continuing, and your initially positive outlook may soon turn sour.

Our goal with this book will be to supply you with useful, entertaining, helpful and challenging material that will not only allow you to learn the language but also help you pass the time and make the experience less formal and more fun — like any particular lesson should be. We will not bore you with grammatical notes, spelling or structure: the book has been well-written and revised to ensure that it covers those aspects without having to explain them in unnecessarily complicated rules like textbooks do.

If you’ve ever learned a new language through conversational methods, teachers will typically just ask you to practice speaking. Here, we’ll teach you writing and reading Japanese with stories. You’ll learn both how to read it and write it with the additional tools we’ll give you at the end of each story.

Stories for Beginners? What does that mean?

We don’t want the word to be misleading for you. When thinking about you as a beginner, we focused on combining two things:

Judging by our extensive experience, it’s impossible to make any impressive progress by dealing with the material that you are absolutely comfortable with. Dive into the unknown, make an effort, and you’ll be rewarded.

To make things easier for you, we picked only common words – no rocket science, that’s for sure. You won’t encounter any complex sentences with multiple clauses and prepositions.

Just take the final step on your own — apply your diligence and work hard to go over to the next level.

The suggested steps of working with this book

What if I don’t understand everything?

Remember — understanding each and every word is not your goal. Your goal is to grasp the essence of the story and enrich your vocabulary. It is absolutely normal that you may not understand some words or structures and that sometimes you may ultimately not entirely understand what the story is about.

With that said, you will be provided with the very same story again but this time, with the English translation available under each paragraph.

Other recommendations for readers of Japanese Short Stories for Beginners

Before we allow you to begin reading, we have a quick list of some other recommendations, tips and tricks for getting the best out of this book.

Read the stories without any pressure: feel free to return to parts you didn’t understand and take breaks when necessary. This is like any fantasy, romance or sci-fi book you’d pick up, except with different goals.

Feel free to use any external material to make your experience more complete: while we’ve provided you with plenty of data to help you learn, you may feel obliged to look at textbooks or search for more helpful texts on the internet — do not think twice about doing so! We even recommend it.

Find other people to learn with: while learning can be fun on your own, it definitely helps to have friends or family joining you on the tough journey of learning a new