Crystal Hunters: A manga designed for people learning Japanese!

It seems like I got Leebo’d ^^
Here’s what I wanted to write:

I prefer the way Cure Dolly (and I think Dr. Jay Rubin? I haven’t read his book “Making Sense of Japanese: What the Textbooks Don’t Tell You”) explains は and が - that は always marks the topic and が always marks the subject. And that in a sentence like 私は見る。, the subject marked with が was just omitted, because it would be unnatural to say 私は私が見る。, and not that the は in this case transforms into a subject-marker.

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And yet, sometimes when you would think that you could use either to be both “topic” and “subject”, only one is considered correct for different situations. I wish it was that easy, but it’s not.

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But that is a matter of style and “feel” of the language, and while you cannot teach that, you can still impart a much better understanding in beginners by teaching it the right way rather than just dismissively saying “its too hard to explain” and tell them something that isnt true.

Overall the guide didnt sit very well with me and just felt like it lacked structure, didnt even have a table of contents.

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Pardon me, it just really struck a note with me xD

It can be taught, here’s a good breakdown of most of the differences between は and が. Although yes, native speakers are definitely doing it by “feel”.
https://yousei.arc-academy.net/manbow/index.php/term/detail/1031

That said, we made a conscious choice to go for the easiest possible route to reading a manga in Japanese, and explaining the difference between topic and subject was not a detour we felt was necessary to understand the manga.

And yes, we don’t have a table of contents, I’m sorry that doesn’t sit well with you. Different strokes for different folks I guess, haha.

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Come on, that’s extremely oversimplified. I think “は is the topic, が is the subject” is a very good model for guiding learners but it’s by no means the end of it. There is actual lenghty linguistics papers, even entire book about those subtleties, you can’t sum them up in just one sentence, unfortunately :confused:

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I feel like (assuming everything is true, which I believe is considering what’s been said,) the guide wasn’t really a guide so much as a small start to Japanese grammar. Sure, some points made were a bit complex or misleading for a complete beginner, but it taught the fundamentals to at least understand the story (or as much as I’ve read so far). After all, it literally starts by teaching kana, so it clearly is going off the idea of someone who doesn’t even know what Japanese is. They taught the simple stuff, then built to more complex stuff while reinforcing previously taught concepts, and then combined it all at the end.

I’ve heard of this for a short while, as I have a friend who told me about it when she first discovered it. However, I haven’t had the time to actually read it and engage with it, considering how life is at the moment. I can’t personally say I love it, as I’m not a huge manga reader and I’d prefer a more… organized story? (I prefer children’s books is my point :p) I know my friend really liked it. I’m intrigued by this more “natural” version of the manga coming out; I may wait to read it until I see that come out.

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A rhetorical question then, do you just want it to help people read your manga, or do you want to give them a head start in learning japanese ?
Making it as easy as possible is gonna work for just reading your manga, but are you certain its helpful in the long run ? What happens next ?
Just a little something to consider moving forward.

And that is exactly the point, you want to give learners guides and introduce correct practice, not make it harder for them in the long run. which being vague about は and が most certainly will.

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Good questions! A good discussion is always fun!

So you bring up a very good point, and one that many language professionals agree with, which is that its best to teach the true fundamentals of a language as early as possible. This is Japan’s philosophy on learning English actually.

However, Japan is notable for it’s poor performance when learning English as a whole, and in our opinion, the problem with this is that it doesn’t account for learner motivation. Yes, it will help them with their grammar if they continue studying, but there are many many situations where students give up because it’s too hard, it’s not fun, or both. Couple this with the fact that there are already many textbooks to learn Japanese but not many materials for people who just want to enjoy the Japanese that they’ve learned, and this lead us to make the conscious choice to make a manga in Japanese that was as easy and as fun as possible. Yes, it might lead to additional difficulty later on, but at least they’ll be more likely to still be learning or to have started learning Japanese.

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I just read the first part of the manga. I like that you have a noble cause for creating this for Japanese learners :smiley:

My complaints not with the Japanese

But the lack of characterization in dialogues (Boys and girls of different ages talk the same way?) and a lack of compelling story right from the start might be an issue (for continuing reading this). The lack of sound effects is not manga-like too I think, and the narration boxes are sometimes redundant with the manga itself.

Before I have an issue with the unnatural Japanese, I have issue with the story and the structure of this manga. I’m not an expert in manga, by the way, but if you have an aspiring Japanese learner who learns Japanese for the sake of reading manga in JP (like me) and who has been reading manga, that person might find this a little bit weird.

I find that its worth noting the poor performance is recorded in a school setting whereas people that wish to learn japanese already have a different attitude towards it since they arent forced into it in the same way and should therefore have a higher motivation tolerance by default, so they are more likely to stick with it through some initial “structure rules”.
Japanese people are also at a disadvantage from their limited phonetic range, so the difficulties in pronunciation are a demotivating factor aswell, because its not just schools, its japanese in general that are considered unskilled at english.
I am danish, and have a large phonetic range from my native tongue, english pronunciation was a breeze for me, which i certainly think contributed to my motivation for staying immersed so i could reach near fluency.

Its a fair point that the teaching method doesnt fare too well in Japan because of motivation, but i would be hesitant to dismiss the effectiveness of the teaching based only off that.
(Not to mention the plethora of things that are generally ineffective in the japanese school system)

I dont think your idea is bad, but i feel like you took it just a bit too far, and through that ended up with a manga that seems a little unnatural and counterproductive in order to make it as easy as possible.

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You’re right, this definitely does not fit the flow of a traditional manga. I mean where’s the declaration of the main character’s goal in the first ~50 pages or so. That would be the standard of Japanese manga.

But, we’re only using 87 words, and not going to lie, it’s really hard to write something interesting in 87 words. And it’s nearly impossible to make an interesting declaration of a main character’s goal in 87 words, at least we don’t know how to do it, lol. That said, this type of story-telling style, where the characters get fleshed out as the story progresses, is rare but not non-existent in Japanese story telling. It does tend to be in anime more often though. Good examples of this can be found in Eva and Cowboy Bebop.

But yes, totally correct critique, we just don’t know how to get there while keeping the language this low. :sweat_smile:

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I won’t disagree with you, but I think if you look around you’ll see that lots of people have started and quit learning Japanese because it was too hard.

And we’re totally not dismissing the effectiveness of teaching the fundamentals of a language, we’re just saying that we believe that it should be supplemented with fun now and again. There are plenty of ways to learn fundamentals though, and we’re letting textbooks handle that.

We also hope that learners won’t only be reading us. The dream is that other people start making their own stories in different levels of Japanese so that people can have fun stuff to read at any level of Japanese.

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Thank you so much! We hope you like it!

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oh my gosh yeah I imagine there’d be a butt ton of phonemes in danish. Does Japanese really have a limited phonetic range?

This is undeniable, but i personally feel that this problem stems from textbooks being bad at structuring and explaining the initial concepts clearly enough, meaning its not because japanese is difficult but rather theres been done a poor job at explaining the rules as simply as they can be.

Math is also difficult right up untill someone explains it simply enough to make it applicable.

To my knowledge that would be the case, indicated by things like:
japanese generally uses more syllables per minute, the usage of pitch accent, the limited size of the japanese vocabulary.

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I’m going to go a bit theoretical on you here and ask “What is simple?” Is it something that is “easy to do” or something that is “easy to continue doing”?

I honestly think it’s a little of both, with different people leaning more towards one side or the other. We’re definitely aiming more for the “easy to continue doing” crowd, although we did try to make the manga as “easy to do” as possible. We definitely aren’t as thorough as most textbooks though.

This… this is exactly what we’re trying to do!!!

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Oh my god I find that so true. Out of all the subjects, maths I think has the highest dropout rate. Not necessarily because it’s hard (everything is hard until you learn it, then it becomes easy), but because there’s such a steep learning curve to get to the point where it clicks and you understand a concept. With other subjects you can have a partial understanding of something and mostly get away with it but with maths it really is a matter of either you understand it or don’t.

I just looked it up and japanese only has 22 phonemes while english has 36, and arabic 34. Danish has 52! :joy: Seems to be only surpassed by lithuanian.

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I think it would be better if you can start this manga with something that introduces the setting. Like (昔々)あるところに、剣を使える男がいました。その男は剣がほしがっています。(to pattern with the words the manga uses) similar on how they do in children folk tales. Then proceed on his adventure and why he wants his sword or something like that. It was pretty confusing when there’s no context from the start, at the least.

I understand that it is hard to make interesting stories with few words, and its a refreshing idea to do a character-progresses-with-story type in manga, but this is really hard to appreciate with such limitations I think?

I agree with this. I think a lot of textbooks assumes the reader know something about the content despite claiming in their preface that they were written for beginners (specially in the sciences, I just give up with some textbooks).

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Just taken a quick look, and have two comments, two questions, and a suggestion…

Comments:

  • My initial thought looking at this was “wow, where was this when I started learning Japanese?” It might be a bit easy for me now, but still it is brilliant. What little Japanese I have, I learnt from reading here in the WK bookclubs, so I know a bit about about learning from manga, and I love how yours is designed for just that. I love how you repeat vocab (I just learnt the word 剣 quickly and without effort) and the story seems compelling enough to keep me reading. Really, for a beginner, especially for someone whose aim in studying Japanese is to read manga by reading manga, I can think of no better start.

  • My other comment is simply to congratulate you on making your manga as unlike a textbook as possible. I’ve learnt my Japanese from only reading because I hate textbooks, they are boring and often really patronising. The worst kind of manga you could have produced would have been a story about an English guy who goes to Tokyo and is amazed by Japan and has to learn how to put out the rubbish and gets lost in Shinjuku station and takes a trip to Mount Fuji and so on and so dull. Utterly boring rubbish. You’ve gone for something much more interesting and closer to something authentic, and I absolutely congratulate you on it.

Questions:

  • Are you offering this up for free? Or do you have plans to make future editions for sale? It would seem like a good idea!
  • Will a paper version become available? Personally I don’t like reading on screens, but if a physical copy were available I’d seriously consider buying one.

Suggestion:

  • This thread is very good, but how about setting up a Crystal Hunters bookclub in the reading section?
  • I don’t know if you are familiar with the bookclubs here, they are totally amazing and a great place to study. I can really see a bookclub around CH designed for those at the very start of their reading journey. That would be great!

Anyway, once again, thumbs up! Really nice work! I wish you lots of success with Crystal Hunters!

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