Great site beginners & up- everyday stories in kana &

[mikuji]

Minna-san

If you have not come across this site before do visit it for kana and reading practice. It is a delightful collection of simple stories in hiragana with assisting pictures :

http://botsan.com/botsan.htm

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

mikuji

[Tensei]

I can read most of these, but some of these leave me a little confused. How discouraging, I cant even read Japanese for 1 year olds. 、かてなくてこまっています took me too long. I was like...okay...katsu...kateru...katenai...katenakute...I dont even know what it means anymore after all that conjugation...and then worrying...oh, hes worried that he cant win!!!! YAY!!

[seanolan]

Why is a teddy-bear "imasu"?

うちには、たくさんの、くまが、います。

Or should we assume that Bot-san has many real bears living in his house?

Or am I missing something?

Sean

[Bueller_007]

Why is a teddy-bear "imasu"?

うちには、たくさんの、くまが、います。

Or should we assume that Bot-san has many real bears living in his house?

Or am I missing something?

Sean

I've never heard of this before, but it wouldn't surprise me if "imasu" were used to anthropomorphize (is that a word?) inanimate objects like teddy bears or other objects that are assigned human characteristics like names and personalities.

It makes the bear sound like a real living creature instead of just a chunk of fabric.

[Solvi]

My computer won't let me see the Japanese characters on this site... That's just weird. Any suggestions? I'm usually able to read and write them without trouble.

[Jason]

Try changing your character encoding to Shift_JIS.

Firefox;
go to View\Character Encoding\More Encoding\East Asian\Japanese (Shift_JIS)

IE:
got to View\Encoding\More\Japanese (Shift_JIS)

[Solvi]

Nope
I'll experiment a bit more later, but now it's time for delicious chicken soup!

[Ai]

My computer won't let me see the Japanese characters on this site... That's just weird. Any suggestions? I'm usually able to read and write them without trouble.

Mine did that too, do you use FireFox?

I went to View>Character Encoding>Auto-Detect>Japanese and that seemed to make it work.

Or maybe you have experimented and figured it out...?

[Solvi]

Thanks a lot, it worked!
I had forgotten about the whole thing, but now I'll go back and try reading those stories

[Derek]

Great site, mikujiさん!!! I have one along the same lines as yours.

http://www.his.atr.jp/~ray/stories/

This site has a bunch of traditional Japanese short stories, like いっすんぼうし (inch-high samurai) and ももたろう (Peach Boy). They are all in Hiragana with line by line breakdowns in English.

Hope everyone can get some use out of it.

[asahi_nysurf]

reminds me of Utada Hikaru's ぼくは　くま　くま

[modifiedB]

NTV has a bunch of Flash e-books for children that are fun (warning for diabetics, though, it can be a little too cute):

http://www.ntv.co.jp/mix/

If you're as slow at reading as I am, you can right click on the animation and take the Flash player out of play mode to pause.