Vocabulary Through Snacking Pt. 2

A while back I made a post about a chocolate-flavoured snack that has English-Japanese translations on the back of the box. Well, I’m making another post with a similar snack, except this time it’s animals instead of fish.

This snack is by the same company that made the sea creature snacks, except these animal crackers are butter-flavoured. I have seen other flavours of these animal crackers, but they don’t come in the box that has translations, so they never caught my eye. Just like the chocolate snacks from the same company, they are sold at most places where you would find snacks.

There are a couple of things I noticed now that I look at these snacks through a photo. First, if you’re learning to read kanji, this snack doesn’t teach the kanji for any animal, just the hiragana. I also noticed a difference from the aquarium version of these cookies: there’s an extra English conversation included.

This exchange isn’t particularly useful in learning Japanese because a complete beginner in kanji probably won’t recognize the kanji used in the Japanese translation (if the reader notices the tiny print at all) and anyone more learned in the language would probably not need to know this particular set of Japanese. No, I think this is more useful as a teaching aid in the sense that you can see the kana pronunciation of the English and be able to build off that knowledge into other words.

Anyway, give these snacks a shot. It’s quite interesting to learn Japanese names for animals via food, and I imagine much more so for the kids these snacks are aimed at.