What is やさしい日本語?

やさしい日本語 can be understood as Japanese that is easier for learners and non-native speakers to understand.

It is not childish Japanese, and it is not mechanical translation.

Good やさしい日本語 tries to do the following:

• make sentences shorter
• make information clearer
• make expressions more direct
• use fewer difficult and abstract words
• make paragraph structure easier to follow
• keep the feeling of natural Japanese

The Japanese Ministry of Education page on やさしい日本語 guidelines explains that the guidelines were created by the Immigration Services Agency and the Agency for Cultural Affairs based on expert meetings, with the goal of making information easier to communicate to foreign residents in Japan.

The official PDF guide also gives concrete writing advice: organize information, make sentences easier to understand, use simple words, avoid difficult and technical words, and avoid vague expressions.

These principles are very close to comprehensible input in language learning.

Lower the difficulty of understanding, but do not remove real content.

This is exactly the kind of bridge material many Japanese learners need.

A regular Japanese sentence might be written like this:

For beginners, this sentence has a lot of information and a long structure. In やさしい日本語, it can become:

The basic meaning remains, but the pressure to understand is much lower.

It does not make the story boring. It makes it easier for the learner to enter the story.