Best manga for people around JLPT5?

I am almost level 10 and would like to have some real world practice. It seems most manga are too complex for me still but I know there are some easier to read ones out there. Any recommendations?

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The 4chan manga. (よつばと!)

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Just ordered it, thanks.

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If you’d like a comprehensive answer to your question, please check out this thread:

Also, our book clubs might be interesting for you! It’s fun to read books and manga together and to help each other understand them, and even after the club is over, you can still read the threads and ask questions.

Specifically geared towards your question is this thread:

It has reviews and recommendations of (most of? all of?) the book club picks.

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Was it made on 4chan or something?

4chan was founded soon after よつばと began.
よつば is 四つ葉, so four leaves.

The mascot of 4chan since the beginning was the main character from よつばと and the logo is also based on it (you can actually see it when you get a 404 error for a missing thread).

Hence I call it the 4chan manga.

Ah, and also 2chan is ふたば , and 4chan was based on it, so in full the name is actually よつば chan.

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Oooh yeah i remember seeing her on there now. I always wondered what that was about lol. Also cool to know the meaning of the name

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I bought Yotsuba and Shirokuma Cafe a long time ago because they get recommended everywhere. But as a beginner I found them very hard to read, Yotsubas language was often too casual and Shirokuma Cafe was sometimes hard to understand because of the absurd humor.
I can read them now but to be honest I don’t really like these books.

Instead I read a lot of childrens books form authors like Kazuo Iwamura or Gomi Taro and rewrote them with kanji.

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Yes, I think everyone makes different experiences and I don’t want to argue with you. I am just surprised that Yotsuba always gets recommended. For me personally books like かんがえるカエルくん by Kazuo Iwamura are definitely more fun to read and in my opinion not only for little children. :blush::v:

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Ojisama to Neko is pretty good. We have a book club for it as well. There’s a little neko-ben (cat speak) and much of the vocab is based around raising a cat and cat life experiences, but it’s pretty good for beginners.

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I’m roughly N4 level (should have been taking the exam this December) and I’m really enjoying the こぐまのケーキ屋さん series. I had to import the books from amazon.co.jp but you can also find (minimally) animated version of them on YouTube.

I’ve found them really accessible as a beginner because they’re almost entirely in ます/ですform, so very similar to textbook Japanese, whereas a lot of manga tends to be more casual. The stories are also very short and self-contained so if I don’t understand one, it doesn’t matter and I can move on without losing the thread of the whole book. Also it is very very very cute.

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The problem with Shirokuma Cafe is that you’re gonna have a hard time getting it in paper version for some reason. Same problem as Chi’s Sweet Home (another recommendation).

I just got a used set of Shirokuma Cafe for ~$50 on eBay. (Shipped from Japan to USA)

But I was having trouble finding Japanese subtitles for the anime.