Japanese books and lingq

Hi everyone! I just joined Ling about a week or so ago, and am just getting the hang of things here. Anyway, in some of Steve Kaufmann’s videos, he mentions using audiobooks with LingQ, so I decided to give that a try, as one of my major goals with learning Japanese is reading books by Murakami Haruki and other Japanese authors. Unfortunately, I discovered that such audiobooks don’t really exist in Japanese (even as someone currently living in Japan), and even the selection of ebooks (at least on the Kindle store) is less so than in the US.

I wound up purchasing an ebook from a different author, but much to my chagrin discovered that it had copy protection that prevented tampering with the Calibre app for importing into LingQ.


So my question (sorry for the rambling):

Do people have some suggestions for some good sources for reading with LingQ? So far I’ve just been going through and reading whatever content I see in the feed or the library on LingQ that might be on a subject that I’m interested in, but it would be nice to really get some meaty content to dig into, like stories by Murakami etc.

Anyway, this is a really fantastic app. Such a useful way to access content in foreign languages.

1 Like

Yeah, unfortunately audio books aren’t really a thing in Japan. For novels, the best option I’m aware is Aozora Bunko (青空文庫) which is a large database of literature that has entered the public domain. Audiobooks for these works are often available. I recommend Dazai Osamu (人間失格, 斜陽) and Akutagawa Ryunosuke (蜘蛛の糸、羅生門).
For something more current, I recommend this channel 白犀(びゃくさい)チャンネル - YouTube. It’s a guy who reads 怪談 stories from the internet. If you google the title(s) in the video description, you can usually find the text verbatim.
For example:
田所君
Audio: 朗読BGMシリーズ 名作選 【田所くん】 怖い話 【怪談】 - YouTube
Text: https://matome.naver.jp/odai/2146987176242306201

3 Likes

Thanks a lot for the recommendations!

I probably should not, but here you go https://www.ebook-converter.com/

1 Like

febe.jp has a wide variety of audiobooks in Japanese. I am using these books currently.

日本語を勉強しましょう!

1 Like

Thanks!

oh that’s great, thanks for the info! Do you have any suggestions for interesting titles?

億男 looks good. I am mainly reading 映画化 books, so if you search 映画化, you will be able to find books that have movies as well.

1 Like