Lingo Mastery Intermediate Japanese Short Stories: 10 Captivating Short Stories to Learn Japanese & Grow Your Vocabulary the Fun Way!

Um produto muito bom para praticar o japonês. Não precisa ser do intermediário para entender, embora obviamente a leitura se torne mais fácil conforme o nível adquirido. Recomendo para todos que estão na metade do básico ou já no intermediário!

Super intéressant. En japonais avec kanji et en anglais(ce qui est bien c'est que le texte anglais est après la nouvelle en japonais) il faut déjà un bon niveau pour le lire

Now, don't get me wrong. The title is meant as a warning and the book is not inherently bad or anything. Just be careful with what they say in the description and always err on the side of safety: most of the times the authors would try to fish as many buyers as they can so they just slap pretty words or innaccurate statements here and there. That being said, let's also clarify that I'm not really a beginner to japanese and I have in posession a good variety of material on which my opinion is based on. (But do keep in mind it is my opinion only, so it may not be true for everyone). The book is marked as "Intermediate" but in my eyes it's just slightly above the beginner level. In literature it's quite common to find a certain variety of words in stories so just because certain words have been classified as either N4, N3 or even N2, it doesn't mean the actual difficulty of the text is on par with that level. From what I could tell, this book does have those words, yet the grammar being used is really easy, not to mention quite redundant: I've lost count of how many lines were repeated twice close to each other, and don't even get me started on how "direct" speech has been portraied (after every quote you'd have "he said" or "she replied" and stuff like that, and if there are a lot of interactions you can guess how it gets tiring quickly). I can imagine the care the author(s) put into the book (the stories look written by a foreigner who lives in the country, probably) and besides a few missing furigana and some typos (and let's face it, using "hu" instead of "fu" in romaji looks awful) I can still appreciate the stories, and besides the redundancy I could still keep going. I'm not sure if it's because I've also attempted to read more difficult stuff in the past, but it didn't really pose the challenge I was expecting. If I were to suggest this to someone, I'd say that for grammar it's perfect for someone getting out of N5 because of the really simple and easy-to-follow approach to the story, while if it's just about the words being used you might want to hold off for a bit, for when you get aquainted a bit more with kanji (unless you're a masochist and just want to learn them by rot memory). If you watch a lot of stuff and/or somewhat understand half of what a normal japanese person would use in their daily life, you might use this as more of a freshener rather than "learning" material in my opinion. The "intermediate" part of the japanese language is the biggest chunk of it, so I guess they didn't really lie when they used the word for their book :)

Un libro con buen nivel de Japonés y relativamente fácil de seguir, se repiten las ideas para reforzar el mensaje del texto. Mejor esto que ofrece un pequeño reto (si ya sabes un poco de Japonés p.ej: N5 estudiado) que algo más básico. Por supuesto no hay gramática, pero el listado de vocabulario está bien. El único pero (aunque no molesta mucho) es incluir romaji en el listado de vocabulario... sobra completamente en este nivel. Muy recomendable como complemento al estudio y para leer japonés en contexto.

I've read the first 5 chapters so far and I really enjoyed them. At least for me, the words that had vocabulary help were the only ones I didn't know so I'd say it worked well for my level of proficiency. I don't need the English summary at all so I'll probably go for the more difficult one after finishing this book. I love how this book tells actual stories of Japan, for example of Tama, the train station chief cat oder Natsume Souseki, the author. I'd say you need a good amount of proficiency (N3 at least) if you want to understand how the book is written. I doubt N4 would be enough as the gap between N4 and N3 is so much bigger than between N5 to N4. The short story series for beginners, which I got for my boyfriend, would be a better choice at this point I'd say.