Just finished level 10 last week and now starting level 11. I’ve passed the N5 exam and am currently studying for N4, but have never picked up any manga to read. Any recommendations?
I generally recommend Aria the Masterpiece since it has full furigana and is on the easier side. It has sci-fi / fantasy elements, but is mostly slice of life. You may want to get about halfway through the N4 grammar points before starting, but as long as you’re willing to stop and look up unknown grammar points as you go, that should be enough to give it a shot. We also have an old book club for Aria, where some of your questions may already be answered, and if they’re not you can ask and many of us are still around to answer.
Another good option if you prefer romance stories is やがて君になる. It also has full furigana and is probably about the same difficulty as Aria. Personally, it’s one of my favorite series. It seems like maybe there was also a book club for this (incomplete though?), but since I didn’t read it with the book club I don’t know how thorough their grammar discussions were. Either way, I’m sure you could ask for help somewhere on the forums and people will respond.
A series that’s a bit easier than the ones recommend above is からかい上手の高木さん. This has a WaniKani book club so you can get some help there.
Overall though, that website has a good filter function so you can find easy manga, and even lets you know if it has a book club on WaniKani, so if you’re not into any of these, you can try searching for things there.
I recommend Yotsubato! (ofc), Flying Witch (has some dialect and magic terms), Chi’s Sweet Home (has baby talk), and Aho Girl (she’s too dumb).
Can’t go wrong with Doraemon! A classic, simple language, and loved by almost everyone in Japan so it gives you a starting conversation point.
Also any sports manga - Haikyu, Kuroko’s basketball, etc. - should have pretty easy/repetitive language (plus with sports it’s a lot of descriptions of movement so nice verbs to know)
Thanks for the replies. I’ll make sure to check out those titles as well as the thread mentioned. The sports titles sound fun to read.
You might find Natively useful. It aggregates difficiulty ratings from lots of different people, so it might give you a better idea what manga are considered the easiest on the whole.
足芸少女こむらさん.
I started with this manga at the same level as you. Comes with vocab and grammar sheets and is aimed at language learners but it’s still a good read. Go for the Japanese (natural) editions if I were you.
I checked what it was on Bookwalker and saw that the first 3 books are free, I don’t know if it’s a limited offer but I grabbed it and added them on my to-read list, thanks for the recommendation:)
Oh ok cool. Was intended to be a joke, but cool.
Hahaha really? Well good that it was for free. What’s the joke?
learnnatively
there you can check manga based on JLPT and if you check wkstats you can see at what level JLPT vocab and kanji you have learned so far.
But I remember that on lvl 11 I barely could undertand around 50% on nhk easy news.
Just the bizarre premise of the manga. I only ever see people talking about it as some kind of oddity. I am currently reading it myself though.
I agree with the user talking about Crystal Hunters. Japanese version is easier and the guide that goes along with it has vocabulary list and grammar explanations. The Natural Japanese version is the harder version and the guide only has a vocabulary list. It unfortunately doesn’t not have grammar explanations.
Both versions of volume 1 are free to read online so you could read both to see which version is best suited for you then buy the rest of the volumes in that version. (I have volume 1-5 of Crystal Hunters Japanese version.)
The story of how the manga was created on thir Patreon is really worth a read https://www.patreon.com/crystalhuntersmanga/posts?filters[tag]=history .
EDIT : and once more I clicked the wrong Reply button…
Oh yeah I have read all of their blogs on their Patreon.
Slightly harder than the above recs, but totally worth it if you like sports series and/or have already watched and enjoyed the anime, and also has a book club on WK:
Love that anime and have the first three volumes literally 4 metres away AND there’s a book club. And yet for some reason I can’t bring myself to try reading it. I think because I like it so much I want to enjoy the experience rather than slog through it! I’ll give myself a while longer to level up.