Outside of the Book Club picks, what are the easiest manga in your opinion?

These two threads are helpful:

I’m just wondering for those of you who have read manga outside of the Wanikani Book Club picks, what are the easiest manga you have read? Of those, do you personally recommend any?

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Just to back up Radish’s opinion, I agree that Aria the Masterpiece is a good pick for a beginner.

From outside the bookclubs, both 放浪息子 (no furigana) and やがて君になる (furigana) were really good and relatively easy.

(I also really love ご注文はうさぎですか, but it is far harder than the other two I mentioned.)

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I found 惡の華 to be pretty easy to read. Difficulty aside, it’s also a pretty good story so I’d totally recommend it.

Same thing with ハピネス which I recently finished. Edit: Actually, ハピネス might be easier than 惡の華.

I suspect most of Oshimi Shuzo’s work is easy to read, but I haven’t read everything else so I can’t be too sure.

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The easiest I’ve encountered thus far as been 「レンタルおにいちゃん」, which is making its Absolute Beginner Book Club debut soon.

One I find similar in difficulty to 「よつばと!」 is 「三ツ星カラーズ」. I’d say 「よつばと!」 has easier easy chapters and harder hard chapters than 「三ツ星カラーズ」.

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One of the first manga I read was “working”. It’s a slice-of-life manga set in a family restaurant, so situations and vocabulary are really easy to grasp.

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Do you know if any of the Aria series is not super hard to read? I found Aria Blade for pretty cheap but itd be a waste if i wasnt able to read it anyways. but the masterpiece was a little too pricey for me right now

The beginning of Aqua was really difficult for me because it gets a bit technical in its world-building. After that, it becomes fairly easy, in the sense this thread is concerned.

Note: For the original release, the first two volumes are under the name Aqua, then the rest of the series is under the name Aria.

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Here are some sample pages I quickly snapped from Aqua 2, to give an idea on the difficulty:

Sample Images

For me personally, I wouldn’t have been able to make it very far when I started reading native material just over a year ago because it would have been too heavy on text. I’ve upped my reading stamina a bit since then.

By the time I started reading them, recently, I’ve owned Aria in Japanese for a number of years now, and recently bought Aqua in Japanese (slight oversight in not having it before). I simply wasn’t ready to read them until I started out on easier series and learned a lot of grammar.

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What’s the motivation for wanting to know about manga outside of the book club picks? Are you just looking for more recommendations, or are you looking for things which are easy even if you don’t have the support of a club…?

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I like the book club picks, and I own them. It’s just a small selection, and the Comparison of Book Club Picks thread is very short – not many people besides you actually doing comparisons.

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Ah okay. I just wasn’t sure what you were actually looking for, that’s all.

I’m afraid that even where I read something outside of the book clubs initially, if I liked it I would usually nominate it :sweat_smile:

You could look at the nominations which haven’t yet been picked, if you haven’t already? In general people tend to nominate things they like a lot themselves and/or know are likely to be popular, so a lot of the “classics” do get covered. And of course the manga which the Absolute Beginner Club have tackled aren’t covered in my comparisons thread.

I picked up おじさまと猫 after somebody nominated it there. The cat says にゃ wherever it would normally say な, which isn’t ideal for beginners, but otherwise it’s fairly simple and the chapters are super short. Much less obnoxious cat speech than Chi’s Sweet Home, I think, where Chi’s speech is also very childlike.

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ahh ok thank you :slight_smile: