Japanese for Kids

One obvious way to convert the manga habit into Something Worthwhile is to encourage your kids to learn a bit of Japanese.
Or maybe not. Japanese is not an easy language to learn; for starters, it has three different alphabets.
Helping to demystify this is Jimi’s Book of Japanese, which is actually two books, one on Katakana and one on Hiragana. Katakana is a phonetic script used for sound effects and for foreign-derived words like intanetto (internet) and risaikuru (recycle). Hiragana is another phonetic alphabet used for Japanese words. The Jimi books present both using kid-friendly examples from the worlds of fashion, fast food, and TV. They also discuss some oddities of Japanese culture such as schoolgirls in loose socks, salarymen, and robot pets.
I picked up these two books at a Japanese bookstore outside of Chicago, and at the same time we bought some girls’ magazines. The magazines were utterly impenetrable, but with the help of the Jimi books we were able to pick out a few words from one of the picture stories. I also translated everyone’s names into katakana. The kids loved it and couldn’t get enough. I’m not kidding myself that this will make my kids fluent in Japanese, but at least it’s a little less mysterious to all of us.