Reading Japanese doesn't have to be painful!

Reading Japanese isn't hard - the people I see every day enjoying newspapers and novels are walking proof. But while reading is possible with a limited knowledge of Kanji, it can be a jarring experience.

Maybe you'll read the material from your textbook, or some graded articles you stumbled across on the internet, but the content is so contrived that it bores you to tears?

Or maybe you'll pick out a book which looks like it matches your interests, but there are so many specialty-specific kanji that you spend more time looking things up in the dictionary than you do actually reading?

It feels like the road to reading something enjoyable is paved with years of unavoidable hard slog, but you know it shouldn't have to be.

Surely there are some popular Japanese books written at a level which you can understand - after all, there are even Japanese people who can't pass JLPT N1. Kids, for starters.

But how would you find them? It is difficult enough to pick out books you feel you might want to read, and even then you won't know if it matches your level until you've already spent a good deal of energy.

But now you don't have to weigh up books yourself - this list will do it for you!

Read Your Level automatically rates the difficulty of amazon.co.jp's popular kindle ebooks, both free and paid. Books near the top have the least difficult kanji, while books near the bottom are choc-full of them.

Once you've found a book title which strikes your fancy, just click it to get a breakdown of the frequency of any Joyo kanji in the first 5000 characters. Then, when you're happy with your selection, follow the link to Amazon to get it!

Have a book you'd like added to the list? E-mail me at Let me know and as long as I can access it, I'll add it for you, for free!

Would you like to hear about new books which match your level? Sign up for our newsletter to be the first to discover new books and learn about improvements to our system which will super-charge your Japanese level!

Don’t miss out on books you want to read! Drop your e-mail in the box.