Thanks for sharing this ChristopherFritz. I was thinking about giving this a go but that quality puts me off a little - for others that read digitally, do you get used to it after a while? Squinting at furigana seems… tiring. I’m guessing it improves as you get better at automatic character recognition - if this was English my brain would probably skate over it and not notice.
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It does get better with time, in two ways:
a) there are only so many hiragana, so with time you get better at recognizing them even when they’re small and/or blurry
b) the more familiar you get with the kanji and vocabulary, the less you need to look at the furigana at all. even if you aren’t 100% confident on a vocab item, it’s easier to read furigana when it’s just reminding you of something you already know, rather than being your only way to understand something.
Also noteworthy:
If you absolutely cannot read the furigana for something and you also don’t know the kanji, you can still look up the word. I often use a two step process for this: first, I use google translate to at least figure out the kanji, either by using google translate’s handwriting function, or using the OCR/camera function on my phone. Then, I’ll back up whatever google translate tells me by looking up the vocab item in an online dictionary.
That being said, it certainly can be tiring at first, especially if you’re doing multiple lookups per sentence. If you don’t want to commit to buying the manga yet, all the digital samples (bookwalker, kindle, kobo) cover at least the first week of the reading and much of the second, too. It’s at least worth a try, I’d say!
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If you absolutely cannot read the furigana for something and you also don’t know the kanji, you can still look up the word. I often use a two step process for this: first, I use google translate to at least figure out the kanji, either by using google translate’s handwriting function, or using the OCR/camera function on my phone. Then, I’ll back up whatever google translate tells me by looking up the vocab item in an online dictionary.
To add to this, you can use the Jisho’s radical search functionality as a last resort. It’s a slow and painfully process to try to cobble together the kanji you are looking up, but it comes in handy sometimes!
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I can also recommend https://kankan.pt/ for looking up unfamiliar kanji (make sure you read the instructions under “What’s Kankan?”). It was developed by @simias btw, see KanKan: kanji-component-aware online Japanese dictionary
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Oh wow this site is awesome! Thanks for the link and thanks @simias for making it
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It’s time to enter the Kanto region with a fresh set of eyes and begin our Pokemon Journey!! Week One Thread is up Now!! We get started this friday, but feel free to post early if you like!! ポケットモンスタースペシャル・Pokemon Adventures Book Club || Week 1!
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Hello, everyone 
Quick question: for those who read ルックバック, is this one much harder? Cause the Natively level jumps from 18 to 23, that got me a little unsure 
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Read ルックバック but only one chapter into the new one. So far it seems like on average the pages are tougher just from like a density perspective but I imagine if you managed through the news report part of Lookback you won’t have problems with this. It’s longer and more dense, but the language is relatively simple. Maybe some people who have read before or ahead can chime in too!
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I’ve started my reading! 捕まる was a really easy word to understand from context, but I didn’t think it would come up very often outside of Pokemon.
Then I started watching Chi’s Sweet Adventure and it came up very quickly since Chi loves to chase things. Nice!
It’s a good sign to be picking up useful vocabulary so quickly 
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Thank you so much! I’ll give it a try 
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Chapter 2 thread is live!!
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I’m a bit late, but I’m joining this as my first club!
I’ve been thinking about joining a book club for a while, but I made up my mind when I saw the current pick. I read a few volumes of Pokémon Adventure when I was a kid. I hardly remember anything about the story now, so this will be a good opportunity to refresh my memories. 
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