帰り道
The Road Home
The same road for ten years. An N3 essay about what changes along it, and what does not.
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道そのものは変わらない。けれども、道の両側は少しずつ変わっていく。
The road itself does not change. But the two sides of it change, little by little.
- Vocabularyそのもの
- the thing itself; itself
- Grammar〜ていく
- change (and go on changing) — a shift continuing away from now
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Reading gives grammar somewhere to live
A grammar point studied on its own is a rule you have to remember. The same point met inside a sentence you wanted to understand is a solution to a problem you actually had. That is why the explanations here are attached to the text rather than collected in a reference — the context is what makes them stick.
What is worth reading at your level
Native news is written for people who already know the language, so an intermediate learner meets a dozen unknown words per sentence and stops. Graded readers solve that but often read like exercises. These articles are written as real pieces of prose, then levelled — so the Japanese is worth reading, and the support is there when a sentence is beyond you.
How this differs from reading the news with a dictionary
A pop-up dictionary tells you what a word means. It does not tell you why the sentence is built the way it is, which reading is correct here, or what the particle is doing. Those are the things that decide whether you understood the passage, and they are what a paragraph guide explains.
Using it for JLPT reading practice
The comprehension questions follow the shape of the JLPT reading section: a Japanese passage, a Japanese question, four Japanese choices. Working through a levelled article and then answering them is close to what the exam asks of you. This site is not an exam simulator, and it does not claim a score improvement — it is reading practice with the explanations included.
Common questions
What level is JapaneseReading for?
Roughly N5 to N1. Every article carries a JLPT level, and because each word is annotated you can read a little above your level without stalling. The one article published so far is N3.
Does every article have vocabulary and grammar explanations?
Yes. Every word that is not punctuation has a vocabulary entry, a grammar explanation, or both. We check that before an article is published, so you will not tap a word and find nothing there.
Are the questions the same as the JLPT?
They follow the same format — a Japanese prompt with four Japanese choices, about the passage you just read — but they are written for this site and are not past exam papers.
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Words with more than one plausible reading are replaced with the reviewed kana before the audio is generated, so the audio uses the same readings as the furigana on the page. Each article says whether a human has listened to the result.
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