Genre Investigation 1

おすしパーティ (Sushi Party):In this story, the author is giving step by step instructs on how to put together a hand roll, including what ingredients you can use and how to prep said ingredients. This book's genre centered mostly around food, but I would also consider it to be daily life and a photobook with its use of photos. The use of photos and bullet points help separate information and repetition of common words help with memorization. 

私の子犬マオマオ (My puppy Maomao): This story is about the author's puppy, Maomao. It gives the puppy's background, like when he was born and his heritage, his temperament, the name of his favorite stuffed animal, Pluto, his love of tug of war, and some other events in his life. This book mostly fits into the genre of animals, but like the previous one, can included photobook and daily life. This book relied on larger pieces of text, more kanji, and photos.

 Reflection:

Both books I read for this assignment had a high usage of photographs to help the reader understand the overall message of the text around it, and I especially appreciated this in regards to the second book since it utilized much more kanji, larger, more complex blocks of texts and more unfamiliar information. Since I have previous experience creating sushi, it was very easily for me to understand what was going on in the first book, and I didn't really need to look up almost any words to understand what was going on: it was more of a direct understanding of certain kanji that made me look up words. On the other hand, the further I got into the second book about Maomao, the more words I needed to look up to really know what exactly was going on. For the sake of this first experience for the ethnography, I chose to rely more on the uncertainty of taking in the paragraphs as a whole rather than look up more than a few kanji. I feel like I could figure the majority of it out, however.

Since I do not have the memory of learning to read in English, the only comparison I have is to what I currently read, and I feel that the book on sushi was much more repetitive in nature than what I am use to or even the book about the puppy, but that might just be the reading level itself. I also noted that in the case of Maomao, they used the puppy's name rather than a gendered term more often than not and didn't discard it like what we were taught as older learners. I also found it much harder to figure out the information regarding the author and illustrator since there wasn't any 'same' kanji to immediately point it out.

References

1.田畑 サンドーム光恵, & 茜 サンドーム. (n.d.). おすしパーティ.

2.Yalu, Z. (n.d.). 私の子犬マオマオ .

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