Review: Crystal Hunters #4, by Nathaniel French
by
Stuart Holland
もっと日本語を読みました (“I read more Japanese” (past tense, as in, “I have completed reading additional Japanese”))
The language learning journey continues rapidly, following on my finishing book #3 of the Crystal Hunters series last week with book #4 today! The reason for this specific speed is that I set myself a target of reading three more books in Japanese by the end of the year and today is New Years’ Eve, so I made it! With just a few hours to spare!
This book itself is a lot of fun and again I can feel the language learning progress. It’s a much deeper story than you might expect from the extremely limited vocabulary that it keeps itself to. And the vocabulary has expanded again in this book, but still remained very approachable. I had to look up even less this time and often I was looking things up to grasp a subtlety (“Is he saying he can’t do this, or he won’t do this?”) when I did already understand enough in context to know what they’re saying in general.
Reading the two (books #3 and #4) mostly back to back also helped quite a bit as they share a lot of vocabulary that I’m not necessarily using elsewhere. 攻撃 (こうげき) shows up as a suffix quite a few times, meaning “attack” (like “sword attack” or “fire attack” depending on what it was affixed to, as you might see in a video game), and recognizing that pattern makes it easy to read a lot of pages.
This whole series is currently only available on Kindle, and I would prefer if that weren’t the case. A DRM free ebook download would be a big improvement and is my only real problem with the series so far!
Wholly recommend for any Japanese language learners looking for interesting things to read that are attainable early on in the journey!
