About the project
Reading in Japanese is the best way to get better at reading in Japanese. But until now, it has been hard to find a lot of texts that might be "easy" for you, whatever "easy" is for you. That was the impetus for this project: bringing together a vast collection of quality Japanese texts to help learners ladder their way up from upper-beginner to fluent, independent readers of Japanese.
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Although "easy" means something different for everyone, and will encompass such features as kanji and grammar, expression, and style, we hope that by categorising the texts by vocabulary level, we have removed the largest barrier (i.e. the number of unknown words) for learners.
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Many people who have an interest in reading Japanese have heard of the Aozora Bunko - a free online digital repository of copyright-free works of Japanese literature. However, navigating the site and finding texts that might be within your comprehension level can be challenging for Japanese learners. So we took the hard work out of it for you by sorting all the texts by vocabulary level.
FAQs
What do the vocabulary bands mean?
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The vocabulary bands represent the 95% coverage level of the texts on Aozora Bunko. So, if a text is in the 1100-band, it means that 95% of running words (or tokens) in the text belong to the most frequent 1100 words in written Japanese. This means that, if you know all of the most common 1100 words in written Japanese, then you will know 95% of the words in the text, and it would be potentially within your reading comprehension level. For reading fluency and language development, it is important to read at a level where you know at least 95% of running words in the text. If you read above this level, you will find comprehension difficult, you won't be able to read smoothly, and you may develop reading anxiety and begin to avoid reading Japanese. We hope to avoid learners developing reading avoidance by using this website to develop their reading gradually and with sufficient vocabulary scaffolding.​​
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What did you use to sort the text by vocabulary level?
We identified the vocabulary coverage level based on the Written Japanese Frequency List, which is found in the Supplementary files of Matsushita (2012).
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Why did you choose 95% and not 98% as some researchers advocate for?
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​We believe that given the semantic cues in kanji, the clear word type structure of Japanese words (i.e. verbs always end in some kind of 'u' sound), and the case marker system, Japanese readers may be able to be comfortable reading at a slightly lower text coverage rate than for English, which is the language context that the 98% figure comes from.
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The author's names are not in order?
Yes, sorry about that. We are working on a fix for it.
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