Our approach
Textbooks teach you sentences. Stories teach you a language in motion — how people speak, feel, and think. LITIM Japanese is a place to read real Japanese literature, one story at a time, with just enough help to keep you going.
This is the idea behind extensive reading (多読, tadoku). Instead of studying a short text word by word, you read many stories that are within your reach, and you keep reading even when a few words are unclear.
The more you read, the more the same words and patterns come back — until one day you no longer need to tap them.
Complete short stories by writers like Akutagawa, Dazai, and Miyazawa, exactly as they wrote them, with the furigana from the original editions. These are the real thing: the voice of the author, unchanged.
Some of Japan's best-known works are long, or written in language that is hard even for native readers today. Our digests retell them in easy, natural Japanese, split into short parts you can finish in one sitting. Every kanji has furigana.
Learners who have finished the basics — roughly JLPT N5 to N4 and up — and want to start reading real Japanese. If you can read hiragana and katakana and know some basic grammar, you are ready for your first story.
The short stories come from Aozora Bunko (青空文庫), a free library of Japanese works in the public domain. The digests are our own retellings of public-domain classics.
