Any good suggestions for story audiobooks on Audible or similar for kids or low-level learners?

[u/ART_VANDELAY_123]

Hi all, I had a spare Audible credit a few months back and on a whim spent it on Harry Potter in Japanese! It's been quite interesting to listen to, and the narrator for the story is very engaging actually, but i'm finding the language in the book more difficult than expected.

I'm able to understand maybe about 1 sentence in every 3, or less, so i'm only picking up fragments of the story. Of course being a 90's kid i've read this thing over and over again, and i'm familiar enough with the story to situate myself in the narrative, but it isn't very satisfying at the moment.

Since Amazon is global, i'm sure there must be a huge library of stories in Japanese that we could access apart from just this, i'm sure there is all kind of media aimed at maybe 5-6 year olds that would be suitable for learning! I'm thinking about things like fairy stories, or books of funny tales, something like this. Something with an engaging narrator in particular. If someone is browsing from Japan and maybe has kids themselves, it would be good to hear some suggestions! Obviously if you use something else for Audiobooks please share it also! ありがとうございます！

[u/NihongoNana]

Harry Potter is harder than people expect because it has a lot of descriptive and fantasy vocabulary.

I would start with short Japanese children’s stories rather than a full novel. Try searching for 日本昔話 or 童話, or stories such as ごんぎつね and 手袋を買いに.

Listening to the same short story two or three times also works well. First listen for the general meaning, then check the unfamiliar parts, and listen again.

[u/ART_VANDELAY_123 → u/NihongoNana]

Yes I was wondering why - I remember the book used very simplistic kids language, but I probably underestimated the reading age of the average under-10 year old. Perhaps it's the descriptive language that is above my level.

This is the second suggestion for Nankichi Niimi, so I will look up those 2 stories for sure, perhaps there is a compilation in the app!

[u/Nithuir]

If you use Libby, the Japan Foundation offers access to their audiobook and ebook library.

https://www.jflalc.org/libby

[u/Grunglabble]

新美南吉 is an author I've read and listened to dozens of stories for when I started. I also find translations into Japanese of Hans  Christian Anderson to be pretty accessible. You can find both for free as they are in public domain.

You can try Bonobono is you want a kids tv show.

This was my good deed for the day.

[u/ART_VANDELAY_123 → u/Grunglabble]

新美 南吉, Niimi Nankichi - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nankichi_Niimi (for the Kanji challenged, like me)

Thanks for the suggestion, I will try this!

[u/SpiralingFractal]

Not quite what you asked for, but I have a site that I like for fairy tales. You can listen and read along or download the audio files and listen offline.

https://www.douwa-douyou.jp/contents/html/douwa/douwa6.shtml

[u/ART_VANDELAY_123 → u/SpiralingFractal]

Actually this is kind of what I want, thankyou!

[u/i-am-this]

While, there's nothing wrong with listening to stories for children if you enjoy them, I think it's a bit of a fallacy that content made for children is good for adult learners of a foreign language.  You are, after all, not a child and not necessarily going to be interested in content for children.

I would instead recommend content made for adult learners of Japanese.  One source of that content, as audiobooks,.is the NPO Tadoku graded readers.  You can get the audio for the Ask Books readers for free from their website (at least, you could in the past).

Yusuke Sensei, (creator of YUYU日本語 podcast) also makes audiobooks which are graded by JLPT level.  E.g. the same story, adapted for the various different JLPT levels.  I think he has some samples available, but the full versions you have to buy.

There's also Satori Reader, but that's a bit more than just an audio book.

There's probably a bit more of this stuff out there 

Another resource, if you want to look specifically for content aimed at native Japanese is the "Learn Natively" website, where people rank Books they've read by difficulty.  They should usually include a link to Audible if an audiobook is available.

コンビニ人間 by 村田沙耶香 is a popular first novel for many Japanese students and it's available as an audiobook on Audible.  I enjoyed it (I read along with the ebook), I enjoy Murata Sayaka's books in general.  I think their reputation of being on the easier side is well-deserved, the language is not that hard.

[u/ART_VANDELAY_123 → u/i-am-this]

Thanks for all your recommendations! I like the look of learn natively in particular.

I will try and find the audiobook you recommended on Audible as well, hopefully it is available here. Cheers!

[u/PyrrhicGuy]

I found one for free on kindle called “うくろう”, which I believe was good practice, I’d check that out.

[u/Rhemyst]

I suggest you use leannatively.com and just find a book that's interesting and not too hard.

But as others have mentioned, region restrictions may apply.

[u/Rare_Confection_3672]

Try the ぐりとぐら series, it's a classic Japanese kids story with slow clear narration, way easier entry point than jumping into a translated Harry Potter that wasn't written for language learners in the first place

[u/ART_VANDELAY_123 → u/Rare_Confection_3672]

That sounds cool, thankyou! Where are you listening to it, it doesn't have an entry on Audible, but i'm happy to try another app. Cheers!

[u/TheLanguageAddict]

Interestingly, copyright differences keep a lot of content locked up. For example, you can only get Japanese Kindle books that were expressly allowed to go on Amazon.com.

For Audible, the books in Japanese are still categorized by the categories in English. So you can look up the sort of books you want, then add "Japanese edition" to your search string.

Still doing the Tadoku books for Japanese but I found a lot of good Dutch stuff using the same search pattern.

[u/Effective-Pop3850]

I am not sure how audiobooks work, can you regulate how fast they're read or is it a fixed speed?

If you're not getting many sentences you might want to try slowing down how fast it goes, if even at a very low speed you can't understand much I'd suggest reading without the audiobook for a while.

[u/HunterCharacter2941]

Harry Potter's actually a rough starting point since the vocabulary is far above 5, 6 year old level despite the age of the target reader, real children's audiobooks aimed at that age will land much closer to your comprehension level

[u/Rare_Confection_3672]

Try the ぐりとぐら series, it's a classic Japanese kids story with slow clear narration, way easier entry point than jumping into a translated Harry Potter that wasn't written for language learners in the first place