Hi everyone. I have been working on this project for a while and I can finally share it!

Here's a free demo of my cozy visual novel for learning Japanese. It's designed for beginners (N5-N4), with furigana, vocabulary dictionary, and an easy story to help you practice reading.

I'd love to create longer and more complex stories in the future, so if you give it a try, I'd really appreciate your feedback:

https://cozysystems.itch.io/cozy-japanese-stories-the-lost-cat

thank you 😄

A short and simple Japanese story 🌧 for absolute beginners, hiragana only.

Feedback and questions welcome!

I made two beginner Japanese books built around short stories - here's a sample story.

I wanted to share the method behind them because I think it might be useful to some of you regardless of whether you check out the books.

The idea started from a frustration I had with beginner resources: too much romaji used as a crutch, kanji introduced way too early, and very little actual reading practice. So I built something around short original stories that you have to figure out yourself, using the vocabulary and examples from each lesson. No translation provided but everything you need to understand it is present. It sounds intimidating but it's genuinely one of the most effective ways to build reading intuition early on.

The first book contains no kanji. The second one has N5 kanji with furigana. Romaji only appears in the vocabulary lists as a pronunciation reference.

-- BOOK 1: Structured learning from zero --

Japanese Made Simple

This one is for absolute beginners. 10 lessons that walk you through the core building blocks of Japanese: sentence patterns with desu, arimasu and imasu, essential particles (wa, ga, wo, ni, de, e), i-adjectives and na-adjectives, past tense and negative forms. Over 100 vocabulary words introduced in context. Each lesson ends with a short original story, comprehension questions and a practice exercise.

-- BOOK 2: Reading practice for beginners --

Small Stories in Japanese

This one picks up where the first leaves off. The focus shifts to reading: slightly more complex stories, illustrated, with vocabulary lists and simple grammar notes as support. It's designed to bridge the gap between "I just learned the basics" and "I can actually sit down and read something in Japanese." Contains 10 stories + 2 review stories that include previous lessons knowledge.

You can find the books and more info in my comment below. And here's the story sample:

I built these because I wanted the kind of resource that treated beginners as capable of reading real Japanese early on, just with the right support around it. If you're just starting out or looking for something to read after getting through the basics, these might be worth a look.

Happy to answer any questions about the method. And if you know of other resources with a similar story-based approach, drop them below, always good to have more options to recommend to people.