MyOwnLingo Japanese
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Daily story

One story for each level, told a short chapter at a time, by email each morning if you like. Each chapter brings in a few new words and keeps using the ones before, so the story grows with you.

How to read it

  1. Read at your level: you should know about eight words in ten. Pick the level where that's true.
  2. Look at the title and the set-up line first. They give you the scene.
  3. Read the whole chapter through without stopping to look things up. Just follow the story.
  4. Pause: what happened, and to whom? The questions help.
  5. Read it again with the help on: the words glossed, the English for each sentence, the notes.
  6. Keep going: the next chapter comes tomorrow.

Make a free account and the next chapter comes each morning, at your level and your pace.

Read the first chapter Create a free account

The stories

黒いねこ A1

The Black Cat

Hana has just moved to a small town to study. On her first morning a black cat is waiting at her door with a scrap of paper in its mouth, and on the paper is a number. Every morning the cat comes back, and every morning the number is different. Later, as autumn turns to winter and then spring, a newcomer's old photograph gives Hana and her friends a plan of their own.

47 chapters · complete

Read the first chapter →

約束の木 A2

The Promise Tree

Yui has a new part-time job in a small second-hand bookshop. In a box of old books she finds a photograph of two children under a big tree at a shrine, and on it a promise: next year, at the festival, meet me under this tree. The old woman who runs the shop says she has never seen them. Yui is sure she is not telling the truth. Later, when the festival is over and winter comes, the little shop itself is in trouble, and Yui has to work out what it means to her.

45 chapters · complete

向かいの店 B1

The Shop Across the Street

Aoi is twenty-four and runs a tiny ramen shop of her own in an Osaka shopping street. Her miso ramen is what everyone comes for, and the miso comes by post from Toku-san, an old maker in a mountain village. This month the parcel doesn't come, Toku-san doesn't answer the phone, and a big, loud chain ramen shop has just opened across the street with a queue round the corner and a young chef who seems to know far too much about Aoi's miso. Over the year that follows, a summer without customers, a typhoon in the mountains and an empty shop across the road test all of them, and bring a new face into the street.

45 chapters · complete

松井旅館 B2

The Matsui Inn

Nanami has taken a job at the Matsui Inn, an old hot-spring inn deep in the mountains, but she is not really there to work: her company wants to buy the inn, and her boss has sent her to find out what it is worth. From her first night things start going wrong, one after another, and always when it matters most. Someone at the inn is not what they seem. Then again, neither is Nanami. And when spring comes, a stranger with an instrument on his back gets off the midday bus, and the summer rains bring the inn a trouble nobody there can mend.

39 chapters · complete

時計の止まった町 C1

The Town Where the Clock Stopped

For half a century the clock in the tower of a small snowbound mountain town has stood at three, and the town lives on the story of why: on the night of the great snow, they say, it stopped by itself. Now the mayor has hired Shiori, a clock repairer from the city, to make it go again, and nobody in town seems to want her to. On her first night, the bell of the stopped clock rings once. In the second part, spring brings Shiori's father, a retired clockmaker of few words, to stay, and the town turns out not to have told all its secrets yet.

40 chapters · complete