Practice reading Japanese with simple Hiragana stories

Well done!

You have learned to read and write both Hiragana and Katakana...but now what? Ready to attack the multi-headed beast of Kanji? Ready to have a conversation with a native Japanese speaker? Probably not. You really should Practice reading Japanese with simple Hiragana stories.In the Dr. Moku apps we include reading practice but these are just individual and isolated words. These practice words are perfect for complete beginners but if you are serious about learning Japanese then you need to boost your reading comprehension and listening skills.That’s why we decided to create a new series of videos called Hiragana Read Along Stories which include both Japanese and English translations. Big thanks to Japanology Translation for providing the Japanese translation and proofreading services  for these animated videos.

Simple Hiragana stories for Japanese Beginners.

Our first video in the Hiragana Read Along series is ´The Miser and the Gold´Although these videos are intended for newcomers to Japanese, it will be interesting to see if native Japanese speakers will also watch these videos stories. JapanesePod´s brilliant Oni No Pantsu video was ostensibly created for beginners looking to practice reading Japanese but if you look in the comments you will see that many viewers are from Japan. Makes sense!

How to sync colored text to audio

If you are an Adobe After Effects user you may be wondering how we synced the audio to the animated Hiragana text. For this first video, I manually keyframed a mask for each line with a black version of the text beneath and it was very time-consuming. Then I discovered an easier way to sync the colored text to the audio, kind of like a karaoke singalong.I am now using the native Typewriter text effect and it is still a lot of work but it is much more reliable.