Reading 1 · 第1課・第2課・第3課
Minna no Nihongo I, lessons 1 to 3
A reading chapter, not a lesson. Nothing here has been rewritten or reordered — these are the printed pages, line for line, with the book's own furigana. What is added is beside each line rather than inside it.
1.How to read this page
Every line carries two buttons and both start closed. That is the whole design: the value of a reading page is the moment you try the line yourself, before anything helps you. The words themselves are the third control — tap any one of them to hear that word on its own.
| Button | What it does | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| 🔊 | Reads the line aloud in Japanese | After you have tried to read it. Hearing it first turns the page into listening practice, which is a different exercise. |
| 会社員 the word itself | Says that one word | When the line ran away from you at a single word. The cut follows the book's own spacing, brackets and furigana — never finer, so a particle is always heard on the word it belongs to. |
| EN·AR | Opens the English, the Arabic with its transliteration, and a note where the line has one | After you have guessed. Press it again to close the line back up. |
| 🔊 inside the reveal | Reads the Arabic aloud | Every time — the Arabic is a second vocabulary here, not a gloss. |
| かな left edge | Slides out the kana chart, with hiragana, katakana and romaji on switches of their own | When a character will not come. It is the same panel the lessons carry, so it stays where your hand expects it. |
The furigana is the book's, including where it is incomplete
Minna no Nihongo annotates characters, not spoken words, so 地下1階 is printed with ちか over the first two characters and かい over the last — but the line is said ちかいっかい, because いち and かい collide. The play buttons say the whole line correctly, and so does the word — a numeral is the one place a reading is written out by hand rather than read off the furigana. Seven lines carry a numeral the furigana cannot voice — the two room and price lines, the two handwritten digits, 9歳, 408 and this one — and each says in its note how it is actually read.
2.The chapters
These pages need JavaScript — the lines, their audio and their translations are built from the book's text when the page loads.
3.Sources
- Minna no Nihongo I, 2nd edition, 3A Corporation — 本冊, lessons 1, 2 and 3. The text on this page is theirs; the translations, transliterations and notes are not. Read the book's own audio too: it is the one recording of these lines made by native speakers, and no speech synthesiser reproduces its pitch accent.
- Jisho.org, over JMdict/EDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0) — every reading, gloss and commonness tag on this page, checked 2026-08-13. It is what settled that 銀行員 is a built compound rather than a listed common word, and that 何歳 has no entry of its own at all.
- Lesson 11, lesson 12 and lesson 13 — the course's own versions of most of this vocabulary. The Arabic here reuses their wording deliberately, so a phrase you met there is the same phrase here.
- Question-word sheet — the こそあど grid that lessons 2 and 3 of the book spend their whole example sections walking through.
- NHK — Easy Japanese for recorded dialogue at this level, if you want a second voice saying the same patterns.