Hi guys! I am usually the kind of person who enjoys reading threads rather than starting one myself, but since I didn’t find any previous mention of this manga in the Reading section, I thought about posting
So I found this manga today called 猫と竜 by アマラ, with a cute cover full of cats and a dragon so I thought… this can’t possibly go wrong. It MUST be good!! I couldn’t resist, even though I tend to avoid buying manga because I get frustrated easily and don’t finish them… I have the full FMA manga collection as proof, unfortunately.
But I feel more hopeful after reading the first pages of this manga because it doesn’t seem as overwhelming as the usual manga I’ve attempted to read before. Of course, there are many words I need to look up on every page, but I can understand almost every situation or meaning that the author wants to transmit, and also the artwork is amazing! At least for me, a huge cat lover /ᐠ・ᆽ・ᐟ \
Has any of you guys read these series? Would anyone be interested in reading together and sharing thoughts as we go? If so, let me know! It would definitely help me to stay committed to it!
You know, this really does look good! I kinda love dragons . And I’ve checked out the preview at bookwalker and I’m surprised at how well I can read and understand it - much better than most other mangas I’d given a try so far. I’m not much of a manga person, either, but this one might be it!
(Book 1 is one sale at bookwalker, I only paid 2.38 €.)
Oh, no, it doesn’t, sorry.
I use the app Yomiwa on my phone and ipad. It’s a dictionary that let’s you draw kanji, so you don’t need to know the reading in order to look up vocabulary. Maybe that could be helpful?
Oh hey I’ve downloaded that but not really used it yet. Yeah, could be helpful but I’m not sure I’m ready fo this level of book yet anyways. I really should finish out my graded readers before I try to read anything serious
Sounds good! The cat-and-dragon-book will be around for a while, I’m sure
I can recommend Yomiwa, I use it a lot. It let’s you create vocabulary lists, which can be really helpful, and has plenty of example sentences and other pretty useful features.
Those were exactly my first thoughts about it! ^^ I’m glad you liked it too.
I hope I can actually finish reading this one. It has been a while since I last tried to read manga, and it’s true that my WK level has increased since then so that surely helps! Or maybe it’s just the cats and dragon combination
Any reading material without furigana was a no-no for me too, but I realized that it was also a huge distraction for me. Whenever furigana is available, I tend to read it before the kanji and sometimes barely read the kanji at all, which is not the best for learning.
As Maharetina mentioned, I love Yomiwa and use it mostly on my cellphone for drawing kanji I don’t know. That way, you don’t really depend that much on the furigana
But graded readers is great too! Keep it up!
I love cats and dragons, so this looks perfect for me.
Sadly I think it’s too difficult for me as well. I feel like I don’t know half of the kanji here.
Not sure, but my impression is there are some quite difficult/rare kanjis in this, so no furigana is a problem. I agree that furigana can sometimes be a problem, but trying to draw all kanji in an app seems like no fun to me as well.
There is only an English subtitle, like a number of Mangas do (Attack on Titan), only that there is one extra sentence. The book itself is Japanese only.
Cats and dragons? Sign me right up, I’d love to read this
If not being able to understand kanji is an issue for people, I’ll recommend using an OCR like Copyfish to grab the kanji and then look them up in your online dictionary of choice (probably Jisho) - it’s probably the most painless way of doing so out of the options in my opinion. Also I’d recommend pairing this with putting words into an SRS like Anki so you learn them for future (probably needs a bit of judgment as to which words you put in though)
. And I’ve checked out the preview at bookwalker and I’m surprised at how well I can read and understand it - much better than most other mangas I’d given a try so far. I’m not much of a manga person, either, but this one might be it!
