Using Kindle to read Japanese is genius. If there’s a word you don’t know you can just click it and the dictionary will pop up with the explanation (you have to buy a dictionary but they are cheep. I bought this one, made by a Redditor). You can also save all the words you click in a word bank and practise them via flashcards.
It’s amazing what you can find of books as well. I started by reading Pippi Longstocking, the Swedish children’s books series which story I know by heart. Reading something I already know the story behind helps a lot, and I love the Japanese drawn version of Pippi.
Kadokawa Tsubasa (角川つばさ文庫) is my recommended publisher. They have clearly marked difficulty levels, use furigana on all the kanji and have lots of international children’s literature, aka. stories you might already know. In addition to Pippi, which is elementary intermediate level, I could recommend you a series about a bear cub called Kuku, which is elementary beginner level with lots of nature and cooking vocabulary.
[Kodansha Aoitoribunko] (http://aoitori.kodansha.co.jp/) (青い鳥文庫) is another similar children’s publisher I discovered after writing this post.
How do I buy their books for Kindle? Do I need to have a Japanese Amazon account or do they sell DRM-less ebooks? (I’m locked to the UK shop).
I’m not very good with Japanese yet and the colours of the website are killing my eyes so it’s hard to orient myself there >< If this is explained somewhere on their website, could you direct me to a link please?
You need an amazon.co.jp account. When you register, you also have to register at a site like tenso ( a shipping service ) so you can get a japanese address.
Put that on your account.
Everytime you purchase a book, you’ll NEED a proxy/vpn or after 5 books they will not let you purchase them anymore. ( For not being in Japan. )
Yup, there’s tons of free Japanese books on Kindle. Lots of classics, because their copyrights have expired, and some newer ones, because of promotion.
Here is a search on children’s books, where the column on the right marked 無料 Top100 are Top100 free children’s books. I’ve read 手袋を買いに, and it’s a really cute story. Not much furigana in the classics though, so here the dictionary function comes in handy.
Is there no other way - that is, are there no shops which sell and let you download books in a non-Kindle format, like epub with Adobe DRM? I can convert them myself later.
The Kadokawa option will forward to Book Walker for their e-books. Pushing the orange “電子書籍を買う/buy the e-book” button underneat the red “この本を買う/buy this book” button will also forward you directly to Book Walker.
The bk1 option, 7 net option, Kinokuniya option and 楽R天 option are all good as well. Just look for iPhone/iPad, Android, PC, EPUB and 電子/Electronic for buying the electronic version.
Registering and buying books is probably gone be a project, since the pages are in Japanese, but at least there is some options, and google translate and guides out there to help
I forgot about that one, thanks for mentioning it. I have it in store for when my kanji gets better. Right now the kanji in manga on my kindle is a bit to small for me to comprehend. I can magnify it but it gets tedious and blurry, and with no dictionary help and little furigana it’s just to difficult. People used to kanji can probably understand from the general shape and context, but I can’t. Or maybe it’s a resolution thing and the newer Kindle is better at showing manga?
I like manga and I did read a physical manga series with all furigana (aimed at middle schoolers) once, and that worked, so there’s hope. Looking forward to future advances in the technology.
Thank you! This is very helpful. I missed the button on the Pippi page >.>
I think I’ll be able to deal with the actual shop pages a bit better with help of rikaikun and/or google translate - text on images was what killed it for me
…and here are the results:
Book Walker lets you pay with Paypal and has an app available for iPad/iPhone - not everything available in Japan will be available abroad.
Rakuten: cannot use credit cards issued abroad
bk1/Honto: says that overseas use unsupported; apparently uses an app+credit cards
7net: can’t find anything about overseas use; requires credit card or yahoo wallet; readable on a windows reader, iOS, android
kinokuniya: they say they have ePUBs but still require you to use their reader Kinoppy; but they don’t offer ebooks overseas.
Looks like the Book Walker is the next thing to investigate
Yeah, too bad manga are pictures so you cannot use a dictionary with them. I am kind of disappointed that the file sizes are small leading to blurry pictures (there are some exceptions). You can find manga scans with better quality.
I would love to see a series like よつばと！come to Kindle but it seems some publishers hate money.
Oh, too bad it wasn’t as straightforward as I thought it would be. It never is. I guess every internet company has to address copyright and country border issues, not only Amazon.
It’s good that you posted this for everyone to learn. Foreigners that don’t own a Kindle learning Japanese in Japan can at least benefit a lot from you research, and hopefully so will Book Walker work out for people outside of Japan?
So far it does work for me, although registering was a pain because the app is Japanese-only so I had to manually look up kanji etc (I’ll post the translations on my blog later; basically you have to create an account on their website and then log in with the account before you can use the app). I haven’t bought anything yet (but I think that shouldn’t be a problem with Paypal), but I have downloaded an excerpt of a book which displays well, although the letters are on the small side.
