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They’re books specifically created for beginners: Learn German With Stories: Café in Berlin - 10 Short Stories For Beginners (Dino lernt Deutsch) https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1492399493/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_M692X338DGSJCGW3VQPS
Have you tried looking for easy readers designed for language students instead of children's books? A lot of people think that because books are written for children, they will be simpler, but children's books actually use a lot of complex language. If you search for "German easy reader" on Amazon, you will come up with a lot of stuff designed for people learning the language. I would start there rather than with children's books. My colleague who teaches German uses a German easy reader in her classes, and I think it is this one or something very similar: https://www.amazon.com/Learn-German-Stories-Berlin-Beginners/dp/1492399493/ She said it was really funny.
I have some friends there yes. Most of them are europeans and not Germans so learning the language by speaking with them is gonna be a bit hard.
The fact that in german you pronounce the letters in a consistent way makes it easy to learn like Spanish.
I also got a book to read along with the German course I am doing and it helps a lot.
You should first finish your standard textbook learning like genki. Then you can start with something like parallel text books https://www.amazon.com/Short-Stories-Japanese-Penguin-Parallel/dp/0143118331/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1475586006&sr=8-1&keywords=japanese+parallel+text there are a few of them on amazon. Good for practicing your reading.
There is a series called Cafe in Berlin, they are really funny books, they use slang and are quite cheap on amazon. I found them really helpful.
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https://www.amazon.co.uk/Learn-German-Stories-Berlin-Beginners/dp/1492399493
If we’re going to translation, read Hasegawa’s A Routledge Course in Japanese Translation.
It touches on some aspects of translation in general, as well as many on Japanese specifically. For example expressing keigo in English or expressing ideas in one language or the other.
If you're really just starting out, books from the Dino lernt Deutsch series such as Café in Berlin are a good idea. My husband read those quite early on in his German-learning-journey. They're quite simple and short so you'll have quick successes and that'll motivate you to continue. My husband also quite enjoyed the little stories. And there's little quizzes at the end of each story (plus English explanations for certain words, I think) so you can test how well you actually understood the story.
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If you're a bit more advanced than this, there's the Easy Readers (DaF) series that takes popular German books/ classics such as Die Wolke and puts them into a simplified form so you can read the story but they'll use less and easier words. The books are fairly thin too so you'll again have a quick feeling of success and motivation. They also come in different levels depending on how good your German is.
You might like Le Ton Beau De Marot: In Praise Of The Music Of Language which is an entire book revolving around the fuzziness of language and the difficulty of translation, due to how polymorphic language is. Too bad it's Hofstadter's worst received book.
Me, I liked Metamagical Themas. It's a handful of short snippets into fun playful topics. Not as deep as GEB, but more playful and easier to digest.
Not an app but there is a book with kanji pictographs like that. My personal view however is that pictographs only work well with a rather small subsample of easier kanji, mostly in the beginning. If you are just starting out you might be thinking that this is way more useful than it actually is. I suggest the radical/primitive approach instead (RTK, Kodansha, Wanikani, ...).
This one
Personally I don’t think you need graded readers past N4 level, after that you can start consuming native content. There’s NHK Easy, which can be understood by anyone who is N4 level, and easier media. There’s also bilingual texts, you just need to know where to look https://www.amazon.com/Short-Stories-Japanese-Penguin-Parallel/dp/0143118331 (although this might be a little too hard for upper beginner). There’s plenty of easy manga out there too for example. And for a more traditional approach there’s textbooks like Tobira, Shin Kanzen Master and the Grammar Dictionaries.
Its not officially called learning material in many cases, but it works and I can say its way more fun to use native content than to bury yourself in boring graded readers.
>translating directly will give me more of a french perspective instead of looking at the language trough an english lense, am I correct?
No. The best way to get "a French (mother-tongue speaker's) perspective" is through doing the French as it is, in the moment, directly, without any kind of translation or intermediation at all. No English lens, no Albanian lens, no Swahili or Mandarin lens -- it's just what it is. That's true for songs, poetry, novels, or day-to-day speech.
If you really want to get into issues of philosophy or linguistics about translation theory, instead of just figuring out how better to speak and grok French, then maybe you might want to check out Le Ton Beau De Marot: In Praise Of The Music Of Language by Douglas Hoftstadter.
Take a look at this series. I think they are aimed for A1- A2. I picked up the first 3 to refresh my German a couple of years ago and I loved them. Easy read and some vocabulary explanations included.
I am nowhere near reading novels in Japanese but I bought a nice Penguin pocket for when I can that features Japanese short stories with the Japanese on one side of the page and English on the other. https://www.amazon.com/Short-Stories-Japanese-Penguin-Parallel/dp/0143118331
I'm currently about a third through An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese (similar level to Tobira, but a bit lower I'd think), and I find Yotsuba&! a bit too easy as well. Recently, I've been reading Naruto, which has been a pretty good fit for me (can probably assume that most shounen manga will be the same, so even if you don't like Naruto, One Piece or Dragon Ball or something might be worth looking into). It does help that I've watched the first part (= everything before Shippuden) of the anime though, but yeah. 小林さんちのメイドラゴン is also good, although a bit more challenging for me since I don't know the story beforehand. Death Note and 僕だけがいない街 seem pretty good too, but that's based on reading about a chapter or so at most, so they might get way harder later.
Honestly, another suggestion that might be even better is Japanese readers (not the ones with stories made for learners/kids, but the bilingual E/J ones with real short stories/essays by Japanese authors). I have a Penguin Parallel Text Japanese Reader that I've periodically looked through since I bought it, and I'm at a point rn where I could probably start using it. I'd like to finish AIAtIJ first though. There's also Read Real Japanese (which has a short story version and an essay version; I have the short story one and could probably start using that soon too), Breaking into Japanese Lit, Rapid Reading Japanese and a few others.
I love these short stories. They are perfect for beginners and I reread them frequently.
Both are tried and true paths.
I would recommend that as soon as you have a rough grasp on hiragana, start doing vocabulary cards.
Have "INU - dog" on one side and "いぬ" on the other.
When going through the cards looking at the alphabet side, write down the hiragana on scrap paper. When going through the cards looking at the hiragana side, read it out loud and translate the word.
Learning enough kanji to read street signs in general is probably a focused multiyear endeavor.
Consider deciding on which things you want to be able to recognize (dishes you want to try, ramen shop signs, karaoke signs) and build vocab cards for those. Use kanjidamage.com or something like kanji-pict-graphix book [1] to help with funny mnemonics.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Kanji-Pict-Graphix-Japanese-Mnemonics/dp/0962813702
Helen Fouche Gaines Cryptanalysis I think is probably one of the best out there. I did notice it get a nod in Khan's Codebreakers. It was written before enigma, so misses a bit on ADGFXs and Quagmires and such, but it's comprehensive up to its publication date.
Children's books might be helpful in a way. I think with just duolingo you might be able to start tackling stuff like "german learning" books. https://www.amazon.com/Learn-German-Stories-Berlin-Beginners/dp/1492399493
I own that book and it's very slow/simple. He also makes "choose your own adventure" books which I think are more difficult. I own one but haven't gotten into it yet.
There was also a post recently that had a bunch of resources in it https://www.reddit.com/r/German/comments/4symbk/82_german_youtube_channels_to_practice_listening/
Also get one of these if from EU or these if from NA.
Two good books:
1) Cryptanalysis: a study of ciphers and their solution by Helen Fouché Gaines
2) Codes, Ciphers and Secret Writing by Martin Gardner
Ooh! That one says it has mp3 readings of the stories, that might be perfect!
This is the one I'm working on now. I'm on the second story. I picked it because it has authors that are living now, so I thought I'd be less likely to accidentally pick up some arcane phrasing to later have to unlearn. But from what I can tell, the literary style is different enough from spoken Japanese that I needn't have worried about such a trivial thing.
If you can read at ~N2 level and want to start picking up on these things I would recommend this book
NB: This person who wrote this book wrote the above webpage on evidentiality and also is my 恩師
This idea has been around quite a while - at least for Japanese use of Chinese characters. I picked up Kanji Pict-O-Graphix over 15 years ago when I was starting to learn Japanese.
Also, her idea isn't actually new or revolutionary. I bought the book Kanji Pict-O-Graphix some months ago.
That book was published in 1992.
Do the codebreakers still use Helen Gaines' book for reference?
I saw a heavily dog-eared copy of this book on the shelf of one of my parish's priests. Expensive, but probably available at a library somewhere.
EDIT: There's a shorter version of this one meant for non-academic readers...