While I’m not an English teacher, I do research in (among other things) computer science education. In fact, I spent most of today and yesterday at a virtual (because Corvid-19) CS education conference.
While obviously not everything carries over, almost any educator will tell you that one of the biggest (if not the biggest) challenges in education is motivating students. Often this comes in the forms of making more interactive, gamified systems, and, relevant to this, creating learning environments that make students feel like they are making big accomplishments in early courses. In fact, someone gave a talk about this very thing at the conference. They not only had more student enjoyment while not lowering outcomes, they nearly eliminated plagiarism that was prolific in their lower level courses.
Do you work in education? Since I find it strange that material clearly meant to be elementary to be scrutinized as such. The point is to build confidence and motivation, not to act as a primary resource.
Thank you for the support!! And yes, we’ve put in around 5 years from concept to finished product (and still going!) and have invested a considerable amount of money. And while getting our money back would be nice, that’s secondary to just trying to help out the best we can.
I’m very interested in the making process of this manga, like how you contacted the mangaka, how you comunicated the ideas to him, etc.
Do you think you can make a a post or video explaining how it was to work on this project? Or you can post it here summarized if you want
We’re actually working on making a Patreon for exactly this topic. Just $1/mo and we’ll be posting our methods, the scripts we sent our artist, the drafts he sent back, and then the final draft.
But the summarized version is that we found him on the internet, we speak to him in Japanese, and he’s an amazing artist with an incredible work ethic.
I read the entire free portion this morning. I enjoyed it. Sure, it was too easy for me and below my level, and I have to agree with some of the criticisms here. I think this thread includes some valid constructive criticism for consideration as the series continues (even if it wasn’t asked for or the original intention of this thread).
Personally though, I like the goal here. My grammar understanding is perhaps my weakest point and I find reading anything outside of my textbook exercises to be a pain, although I do try. It was relaxing to read through a manga at a natural speed for a change. Sure, the writing feels a little stilted, and the plot is a bit corny, but I enjoyed it. I chuckled a few times. I like the narration boxes that keep stating the obvious. It does a good job demonstrating to the learner what you can do even with a severely limited vocabulary, and it wasn’t boring.
Also, props to the artist. When I came into this thread I was expecting some thrown-together afterthought art populating this manga, not some quality drawings. Good job there.
We’re happy you liked it! And yes, our artist Miyonescy is amazing! He’s an ex-pro manga artist and we love his art!
We’ll do our best to keep the quality high. We’ll have a free natural Japanese version out in the next 2-3 weeks, along with ebooks for people who’d like to download the chapters on their devices. Chapters 4&5 will be released together early Summer, 2020.
I did use graded readers and found them quite helpful. At the time I was at a point where I could understand sample sentences from Tae Kim, iknow.jp or whatnot, but longer texts were beyond me, so they served as a perfect stopgap!
I did buy too many of them because they rapidly became super boring to me as soon as I could read native materials, but you’re supposed to graduate out of them anyway.
I have no issue with the language being “dumbed down”, and to me it does make sense to not introduce the 命令形 this early on.
Reading a bit more, I think the 私は and あなたは stuff could be toned down a bit, but there seem to be a bit of implied subjects and topics going on, so that might serve to ease the reader into that guessing game part of Japanese… (I do think just using names instead of あなた would still be very intuitive to the reader while at the same time teaching them that this is the preferred way to address people, however)
Unfortunately I’m not really able to judge how I would react to this if I had just started out, but I do remember getting a such a kick out of reading my first graded reader, having been able to understand anything long-form in Japanese. Or indeed being super-stoked to find that something such as “simple Japanese” even existed for me.
I was more sceptical at first, but having given it a second look it seems like it might serve as that same kind of stop-gap that I was in need of back then. The sort of infantile dialog even started having its charm.
As a side note, I have been using native materials from the start with my subsequent language projects, and I’m more and more coming to agree with the notion of ignoring a lot of stuff you don’t understand just to get to the parts you can learn from, but this does take a bit of finding the right materials that don’t bore you (I guess there is also such a thing as being a beginner at a specific language but an experienced language-learner), which is where I think graded readers come in.
I have thought a little about the premise of this comic and have the following suggestion:
Why not release three versions with increasing linguistic complexity. The first version is good as it is. The second would be in simple, but natural language, like you are planning. And finally one with more complex grammar. I don’t know how feasible this really is with the same images and basic story but I would imagine it like so:
1# The monster goes to Karl! Karl uses the sword!
2# The monster turns to Karl. Karl draws his sword and prepares to attack!
3# After having attacked Bansomu, the monster suddenly turns to Karl. Karl prepares to defend himself with his sword.
Or something along those lines. Needs the corresponding guides, too.
This is not a bad idea, although at the moment the limiting factor is time. All four of us working on Crystal Hunters right now have day jobs and families, and making this manga is something we do in our free time. We are also continuing to make the story, and spending more time on chapters 1-3 and its guides means spending less time on chapters 4+. Not to mention, making a guide for a natural version of Japanese would end up looking like a full textbook, instead of the 40 page-ish guide that we have now.
The best solution we have come up with is to make the lowest level version w/accompanying guide(s), and then the natural version with no guide. This way the people most in need of support can slowly level up into more natural Japanese as the story progresses, and they’ll have accompanying guides for support for each release. In addition to this, we’ll have a natural version for people who want more challenging content, and while there won’t be a guide for this version, there will be the easy Japanese version so they’ll be able to check and get a gist of the meaning if they want, or they can just google the meaning if they get stuck.
We know that this isn’t the perfect solution, but again, we’re limited by time, and we still haven’t made any money doing this. We’re just trying to do the best that we can with what we have.
Actually I think you will find that various people need different explanations. I’m sure many people need this level of simplification. I personally get very confused and annoyed when I learn a ‘rule’ that turns out to not be correct or used all that often. I’d rather learn all the little complexities up front. I struggled to get out of beginner level grammar precisely for this reason. Even when the ‘rule’ is correct 90% of the time just knowing why it isn’t is tremendously helpful to me.
You are assuming a poorly made rule counts as a ‘rule’.
My critique is that the textbooks (Especially the beginner ones) are bad at giving useful rules. Im all for multiple ways of explaning a rule as long as it stays unaltered and actually works.
Everyone gets confused and annoyed when given a rule that is simply wrong and doesnt work.
the 9/10 cases is a failsafe for that, because you simply wont be able to learn all the nuances up front with more advanced topics, unless you plan on spending an unneccesarily long time to do it. (Not to mention, exceptions in language learning will always be exceptions)
Overloading on information is just as harmful as lacking it.
Thank you! And don’t worry, we’re just happy that you spent time thinking about us and the best ways to learn Japanese! We’re always happy to talk about either!
I’ve just finished chapters 1-3, and I thought it was pretty ace; so thank you!
For context, I think I might well be the target audience, and so would recommend it to people at a similar place to me:
I’ve been following the Tofugu path, which means that I know my Hiragana and Katakana and have been waiting until I hit level 10 kanji before branching out
So I have little to no grammar, and only the vocab Wanikani has given me
It was amazingly fulfilling to achieve reading something so early on. Sure it’s very “See Spot run. Run Spot run”, and I’m under no delusions that this represents real-life Japanese, or that a 40 page large print grammar guide is going to form a permanent under-pinning of all my future learning. But, for those of us who learn iteratively, it was a fun way to get a feel for things.
If I had any notes it would be:
Release a version without furigana - I can’t stop my eyes from wondering, even when I already know the Kanji
More seriously: I don’t think you need to split the vocabulary tables into chapters, it just makes it harder to look things up; especially because there’s a handful of words (あそく - for example is in chapter one, but in table three) that are in the wrong part, and it seems like you’re making more work for yourself then you need to!
Set-up a mailing list I want to know when the next chapters are out!
I used both techniques to learn English years ago. I got an English novel and started reading. My vocabulary was very limited at the time, to the point that I couldn’t understand a lot of the sentences at all. In those cases I underlined and looked up every single word I didn’t know in the dictionary. If I could understand the meaning of a sentence but didn’t know what a couple of words meant, I underlined them but didn’t look them up. Because I usually encountered those words multiple times throughout the book, I eventually figured out what they meant unconsciously, like, without connecting them to the equipment word in my native language.
I found that book years later and, needless to say, I knew what all of the underlined words meant.
I’m currently trying to do something similar to learn Japanese. It’s not as easy because of the kanji, which is why I started WaniKani, but it’s so slow (I know that’s good though, it gets you to memorize the kanji long-term) so in the meantime I look up the kanji and create my own mnemonics and Anki cards.
I don’t even bother if the sentence is way too complicated though. Like, if it’s very long and has 10 kanji that I’ve never seen, there’s no point.
We’re glad you liked it! It’s awesome to read reviews like this!
We have a furigana free natural version coming within the week, and chapters 4&5 will be released as a set in early summer this year.
You can see all of our updates on our website crystalhuntersmanga.com, but we’ll look into setting up a mailing list on our website! We will likely post the natural version here as well since so many people here have requested it.
I want to know when the next chapters are out!