Japanese Reader Collection

This complete Audiobook is designed to not require the e-book or paperback. Improve your Japanese listening comprehension while walking the dog, driving in your car, or while cooking dinner.

Learn Japanese vocabulary while listening to the stories of Momotaro and Usagi to Kame (Tortoise and the Hare). For upper beginners of Japanese and higher.

For beginning to intermediate students of Japanese. Listen and learn Japanese with two well-known Japanese folktales: "Inch-high Samurai" and "Kaguya-hime", the Moon Princess. The first is about a tiny, yet brave samurai who ends up saving a princess and seeing his wish come true. The second story is the famous moon-princess Kaguya, who was found in a bamboo stalk. "Kaguya-hime" is one of the oldest Japanese tales and perhaps the world’s first science-fiction story.

Learn Japanese with Stories 4: The Mouse Bride and Ikkyū-san turns these two classic tales—stories every Japanese child grows up hearing—into a complete listening course for upper-beginner Japanese learners.

Two of Japan's most beloved folktales—and more than two hours of guided listening built to make real Japanese finally click. An old man keeps a pet sparrow he loves like a child. His sharp-tongued wife has other feelings—and one afternoon, over a bowl of spilled starch, she does something cruel. What happens when the old man goes looking for his little friend, and what he chooses to carry home, has been teaching Japanese children about kindness and greed for centuries.

Learn Japanese with Stories 6: Yuki-Onna, Anchin and Kiyohime turns both classics into a complete listening course for upper-beginner learners. Every story is taught in seven passes, so your understanding builds one layer at a time.

Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Match Girl" is not a Japanese folktale. It is Danish, first published in 1845. But Japan took it in well over a century ago, and generations of Japanese children have grown up with it. That makes it unusually good material for study: you probably already know how the story goes, so your attention is free for the Japanese.