I have subscribed to a service called Box of Manga which ships you 4 mangas a month based on reading level. I picked intermediate and I recieved: two mangas I’ve never heard of!
I’ve started reading Shinryaku! Ika Musume and Its pretty much exactly at my level. There’s furigana for all the kanji in both of these manga. I find even without a dictionary I can understand the basic idea of the plot.
To get an idea of my reading level:
I can comfortably read an NHK news article in 5 minutes or so
I passed the N4 and found the reading questions pretty easy
I wrote the N3 and struggled (not sure if I passed yet)
I’ve read some easy mangas in the past
All that said, I have switched my subscription to easy because when I’m reading for fun I actually would rather read below my level. Also the cutest manga seem to be in the easy level!
Review of the service:
My first box of manga took 8 weeks to arrive (surface shipping takes between 1.5-3 months if you live in Canada). Much patience was required! But now that I have the first box they should start coming steadily.
I loved getting manga I’ve never heard of and never would have picked up myself.
With the current exchange rate the Canadian price is $42, not bad considering that includes shipping.
I dont have a large japanese manga collection so I’m excited to start building it this way.
Charles and Eri (owners) included a nice little Happy New Year’s note. However it was a photocopy and thus lost a bit of its handwritten charm. I cant complain too much though since this was an extra.
As someone who’s not too picky and mostly looking for reading practice I love that this takes the work out of ordering a bunch of individual manga.
Overall I’m very pleased with it so far and look forward to what next month has in store!
My collection of manga, light novels and other nerd parafanalia. I’ve had them for… almost a decade now but due to moving so often, they’ve stayed packed up until now that I have a chance to focus on learning 日本語.
Not sure if you have access or if you like ebooks but you can get a Japanese Amazon account rather easily and buy all of those for less than $20. You also get them immediately, and chose what you want to read.
What’s the quality like? I noted on their website they said that the used manga would probably be in very good condition because the Japanese tend to look after their books, and I just wondered to what extent that’s true.
Also, did you communicate with them in any way to indicate your preferences / previously read titles, or did you literally just select ‘intermediate’ and go?
I’m not the same person who made this topic(as you probably can see), but pretty much everything I’ve gotten has been in really good condition. One volume of manga even still had the advertising stuff that japanese bookstores seem to like to put inside books(or at least most books I’ve bought have contained some paper with some kind of small ad for something else) in it!
Nothing to do with this company, but that reminds me that I recently bought a used Japanese book and it still had that little… like, the little strip ads that Japanese companies like to put around the dusk jackets? That are all like “there’s a competition!” Or “there’s a spinoff!” Or “now an anime!”
I was shocked. It’s in bad shape, but the rest of the book isn’t, and I was in no way anticipating having it anyway…? I mean, I keep those things on my books, but I’m weird
I’ll take it off if it’s annoying me, but usually it doesn’t. Though, what does annoy me is the way that Japanese paperback book covers are usually two sheets of card joined only at the spine and outer edge, so when you open the book, the outside sheet curves differently to the inside sheet, making a bulge.
I don’t with English (American?) books, but the Japanese books I have, the covers are so… cardboardy, I don’t want to touch them with my grubby fingers and screw them up, so I leave the dust jackets on.