Review: Crystal Hunters #3, by Nathaniel French
by
Stuart Holland
まだ日本語を勉強します (“I am still studying Japanese”)
The language learning journey continues with book #3 of the Crystal Hunters series! This time it does really reinforce the “adult audience intended” despite the simple language, as one of the characters is seemingly disfigured by a fire blast spell.
As before, this book tells a fun story with slowly expanding vocabulary that gives a new language learner something truly independently interesting that’s still simple enough to read. My Japanese has gotten better as I’ve been reading these and it has made it much easier. When reviewing the second book, I talked about how that one felt much more like reading than the first one had, and that’s once again the case here.
I also very much enjoyed the crossover with other vocabulary that I’ve picked up from other sources. I expect my actual studying to help, which it certainly does and that helps most often. But I also pick up things like 魔法 (which means “magic”), which I recognize from Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, rather than a language lesson. That distinction between how Japanese uses the word for magic when “casting” and English doesn’t actually makes the Japanese version of several sentences in the book more precise/easier to correctly understand than the English version (where characters just say “Fire!” and you can guess they’re using some spell, but that’s not directly explained in English).
Overall this series’ success as a language learning aid and a nice bonus story you can enjoy in a new language continues!
