Get Weekly Language Tips That Work!

Receive study tips, resources, weekly challenges, helpful articles and inspiring success stories. Many students use our weekly newsletter as an essential part of their study routine.

Beginner Japanese reading: Bam & Kero

To show Japanese writing

One of the biggest problems encountered by beginner Japanese learners is the lack of easy to read texts. Yes, there are tons of dialogues and short stories in Japanese textbooks but they aren’t particularly interesting, or even authentic. For this reason, I decided to review some of the more interesting free reading I’ve encountered during my study.

Bam and Kero beginner Japanese reading

Bam&Kero (バムとケロ) by Yuka Shimada is a picture book series immensely popular in Japan, the main protagonists being a dog (or is it a dog??) called Bam and his frog friend Kero (ケロケロ in Japanese is analogous to the English ribbit—the sound of croaking of frogs).

Type: Children’s picture book
Difficulty: Beginner
Script: Hiragana with spaces

These may not be the most interesting stories out there, but they are very simple, short, and the adorable full-page illustrations perfectly illustrate the sentences. It’s all written in hiragana, with spaces after each word, and the vocabulary is fairly simple. One also doesn’t encounter baby talk as often as it’s commonly found in some of the other picture books.

Learn Japanese with LinguaLift

Personally, I’m of the opinion that one should try to learn kanji as soon as possible, but one has to start somewhere and this is one of the best hiragana-only picture books overall. Three of the stories can be freely read online, the rest of the books can be purchased at Amazon.co.jp and at the official Bam&Kero online store.

バムとケロのにちようび
バムとケロのそらのたび
バムとケロのおかいもの

Try a free lesson with Lingualift today!

Free language Tips

Get your weekly dose of language learning tips by email

Receive our free e-book Language Learning Secrets