If you were looking for something cute and interesting to read in Japanese, here is today’s recommendation, picked from one of the many free sources in The Dollygram Resource List.

This is a story about the real life of a wild fox family in Japan. The writer is an excellent photographer, and the story is illustrated with lots of photographs of the real fox family in the wild and on the margins of human habitation.

It is suitable for intermediate Japanese acquirers. You can use Rikaisama for “furiganizing” where necessary. As usual I recommend turning off definitions or putting Rikai into Sanseido mode. Sanseido mode gives simple Japanese definitions, and you may be surprised how often, even when you don’t know a word, you can manage with the Japanese definition on the fly.

If you need to make the text bigger – and you do need larger text in Japanese for the same reason small children need large-print books – remember that in Firefox you can set the zoom to adjust the size of the text only – without messing up the pictures.

Go to the 表示 menu (“View” if you still have your Firefox in English), scroll to the ズーム (Zoom) popout and check the last item, 文字サイズのみ変更 (のみ is written-instruction-speak for だけ), which will be “Change character size only”, or something like that, in English.

You can then zoom the text size up and down without affecting anything else on the page and making everything look like a mess!

Here is the story:

The Fox Children (子ぎつね、こんこん、ロリこんこん)

Note: this is a longish story, so if you aren’t used to reading a lot of Japanese at a sitting, don’t be afraid to take it in smaller  chunks and make it a daily treat!

Happy reading!