That’s the one. Thanks.
Core 10k on Kitsun has the kana tags there, so you can hibernate/suspend all the other cards and binge on the kana ones. There’s also a 4500 katakana words deck there worth checking.
I’m somewhat more interested in something I can use yomichan on, but I guess it’s not to bad if there’s furigana (and there usually are), so lookup isn’t too hard.
I’m debating between Shirokuma Cafe, Chii’s Sweet Home and Jaku-Chara Tomazaki-kun (the manga adaptation). Probably will try the last one first 'cause I think that’s what I have most interest in? The other two because of the Absolute Beginner Clubs here.
Oh, and I haven’t really read mangas, no. Maybe like one issue of Yotsubato and Chii. No more than that.
時をかける少女 is available on that link I shared. So you can use yomichan on it. If you find it difficult then I suggest you try manga’s
時をかける少女 is really easy but also not very good.
Also, if you’re in doubt, you probably shouldn’t post it.
Hehe
I thought it’d help them, so posted it :tehepero:
@greasyButter, @seanblue How smart would you say is reading a manga without furigana? I’m interested in Tsuredure children.
Depends on how much you can tolerate looking up words by stroke/part/etc. It also depends on the style and general language of the manga. For example, I’ve read some of ご注文はうさぎですか and it often uses difficult kanji, even at level 60. Plus the language itself is difficult because of the jokes and puns. But I’m also reading 放浪息子, and the language and kanji usage in most chapters is relatively easy. Maybe just give it a shot and see how it goes.
That’s what I’ve been doing the past 15ish minutes and… I’m not sure. I think it’s my OCD to know/checkup everything might be getting the better of me. I think I have a problem of rather checking than trying to remember on my own. But I have a plan to solve that! Read on my phone. Lookup is more tedious there, which will force me to just read instead of fuss all the time.
Tsuredure children is a pretty easy first read, since it falls under the banner of comedy/slice of life/romance etc.
Don’t think you will honestly find much unusual Kanji either since it uses alot of generic manga/anime vocab you hear/see a lot, since even i can read it fine with my current limited knowledge.
If you’re reading on your pc, you can solve the issue by using the app called Kanji Tomo. It’s a dictionary built in with an auto-detect OCR function, and hovering over words gives you a list of potential results. It’s good enough for a fairly uninterrupted reading, even when looking up a lot of words.
I was just wondering if something like that existed. I’m not sure where I’m gonna read it in the end, but both mobile and PC are options.
@OhKieran, too, thank you both for your input! I noticed that I know pretty much all the kanji, but I think it’s the kana words that’s I’m still struggling with. Gotta check out Torii, asap!
I kinda disagree that vocab is 80% of a language, perhaps 80% of your time would used learning vocab but without that 20% you won’t be able to use much of it.
Having a firm foundation of grammar will allow you to look up words you don’t know that you hear or read, or even ask if you are talking to someone. Vocab takes a long time to build up because you need to know 10s of thousands of words. This isn’t meant as a discouragement, I just suggest that you balance learning vocab and grammar and once you learn basic sentence structure you can look up words you hear/read in anime/manga and slowly build your vocab while having fun.
Best of luck!
If your anime has subtitles in Japanese, WK will help a lot with listening, but you might not see significant help for quite some time. You should manage your expectations accordingly. You will get good at what you practice, so if reading kanji is what you focus all your energy on, you will only get good at reading kanji.
Some anime tends to use speech patterns that will be difficult for beginners to latch onto, in addition, speech can be very fast and slurred. I don’t personally watch much anime (I’m not in the demographic), but I do like the Ghibli films a lot since in addition to be very well done, they tend to be easier to consume.
Hmmm… Feel like I started to see results maybe as early as level 6-7ish?
Like just seeing kanji in anime and being able to read/understand it.
listening to anime is a different story. Yes, you might be able to understand some stuff just from wanikani but, you’ll definitely need some grammar study under your belt, along with understanding casual speech patterns, slang, vocabulary, etc.
I’ve been studying japanese for about a year and a half (Wanikani for 289 days) and only now does understanding anime seem achievable. FAR away, but achievable none the less.
Like the others said, you won’t get the results you’re looking for with just WK.
If a sentence in your manga says “put the apple back on the table” you’ll understand apple and table maybe recognize a form of ‘to put’ but that’s about it. All the glue that keeps the sentence together is grammar and speech patterns that you’ll have to aquire elsewhere. TaeKim’s Guide, Youtube and Bunpro/Bunpo are things you could look into.
For a typical manga volume, expect to see about 2,000 unique words. More or less depending on how much text the manga has. And once you’ve learned roughly the 2,000 most common words in Japanese, expect to find surprisingly little overlap between what you know and what appears in a manga.
It also depends very much on what you read. If you were reading the first volume of ご注文はうさぎですか, which @seanblue mentioned, you’d recognize 50% of the kanji by level 17, but that doesn’t mean you’ll have learned all the words containing those kanji, and many will be compounded with higher-level kanji. You have to reach level 35 just to attain 80% kanji recognition, and even once you’ve reached level 60 you’ll find nearly thirty more kanji in the volume not even covered in WaniKani.
As a comparison, if you went the Studio Ghibli route, which as @lsh3rd noted can be easier (depending on the movie), you could read the となりのトトロ cinema manga and you only have to reach level 10 to be able to read roughly 50% of the kanji. You get up to 80% right after level 26, and the entire comic’s kanji will be known by the end of level 52, if not earlier. (Excepting for a single kanji not covered by WaniKani.)
Regarding grammar, here’s an example of a panel using only a single kanji learned in level 3:
Click/tap to view panel.
Knowing the meaning of 切る through WaniKani will not (necessarily) help at understanding the dialogue. Aside from the words used, you’ll need to know a few different points of grammar to understand it.
Here's one more example.
Assuming you have no grammar knowledge, come back to it after you finish level 4, and you’ll feel as if you can almost grasp what’s being said. The more kanji you can read, and the more vocabulary you know, the more you will feel the need to learn more grammar (again, assuming you have no grammar knowledge).
Starting to learn Japanese may seem like taking the first step on a long journey, but you’ll soon find with kanji, vocabulary, grammar, reading, listening, producing, learning culture, and more that it’s actually many long journies, many of which you will take at the same time, and find yourself crossing paths on. You can go slow and steady, taking your time. Or you can rush ahead and risk wearing yourself out. Since it’s not a race, you get to find your (learning) pace and enjoy the scenery =)
This is very cute and very simple, language-wise:
It doesn’t have a lot of kanji, or a lot of words even, but what is there is easy to look up and not very tiring. (It helps that each ‘chapter’ is just 4 panels …)
I remember, I think it was Naphthalene mentioning that?, dunno what happened to it, as in, why I didn’t read it? (Though I’m pretty sure it’s somewhere among my big list of Japanese resources links). Maybe I was just not as interested in reading native material yet back then? In any case, thanks for reminding me. I think I’m set on Tsurezure Children and that little VN for now, but this might as well be the next after that.
I recommend it being before them, because it’s a very gentle entry into reading native material that you can stop at any time when it gets too much. You can also do it parallel with whatever you’re reading – each page requires very little time compared to what a Real Involved Manga and a VN would.
(I’ve been reading it before it got mentioned on the forums, but I very much agree with whoever recommended it!)