The Tongue-Cut Sparrow

Improve your Japanese reading with the classic folk tale 'The Tongue-Cut Sparrow' (舌切り雀). This app gives you a side-by-side bilingual reading experience — natural Japanese with its English translation, sentence by sentence. Follow the story of a kind old man, a cruel old woman, and a little sparrow who repays kindness. With built-in vocabulary lookups, audio, and furigana-style readings, it's a perfect way to practise reading Japanese while enjoying a timeless tale. Part of a growing collection of Japanese folk tales, drawn from the classic Gutenberg edition of Ozaki's 'Japanese Fairy Tales'.