I have a few book proposals that might suit absolute beginners I am going to start working on…
今日から始める幼なじみ 1 / “Will you be my childhood friend?”
Summary
Kaede always wished for a childhood friend like in the mangas she reads. When she moved next door to her classmate, Kouhei, he said he’d do anything to help her out. So, she asked him to be her childhood friend! The two of them have fun adventures recreating all of the things that childhood friends should do! (Comickey/official Eng) (Natively lvl: 17 atm)
Availability
Personal Opinion
This is probably the first manga I read that I just looked at the cover and thought “That looks good, I’ll give that a try” and ended up reading the whole series of volumes available. The difficulty level and general grammar is right in the upper-beginner strike zone, where it’s not so simple you’re entirely reading hirigana but not so difficult you get lost as to what is going on. There is no furigana though, but I think it’s a pretty good easing-in point for reading without it.
Kaede in particular often operates according to tropes, so there’s a lot of familiar vocabulary throughout, especially if you’re into romcoms in the からかい上手の高木さん vein or anything involving childhood friends (at the very least you will learn 幼なじみ very quickly). But they’re also just regular middle schoolers, doing regular middle schooler things, so there’s lots of regular use vocabulary as well that you will see in other places.
Pros and Cons for the Book Club
Pros
- Relatively straightforward vocab and grammar
- Low-ish text density
- Art is adorable. Absolutely adorable
- First chapter is like 25 pages but subsequent ones are closer to 10-15 usually
- Light-hearted and easy read
- From volume two each volume has a crossover promotional chapter at the end where Kaede talks about another (real) manga based around childhood friends, which I think is very funny that there’s enough to support a consistent omake like that
- I tweeted about it and the author said thank you for making my manga your textbook
Cons
- No furigana - you will need to know how to look up words either with OCR or using handwriting recognition
- If there’s an actual romance going it’s a hell of a slow burn. Best to treat this more as a slice of life manga.
- Occasional middle schooler slang
Pictures
First Three Pages of Chapter One
The author posts a lot of chapters straight to Twitter. Here’s the first half of chapter one
Additional previews
Difficulty Poll
How much effort would you need to read this book?
- No effort at all
- Minimal effort
- Moderate effort
- Substantial effort
- So much effort my head might explode
- I don’t know
- I am an experienced reader, so this is not much effort for me
/Updated poll to template standard