Practicing reading with manga

Hey, I was wondering if there are any basic books for people learning japanese, kana and the kanji. Are there any manga specificly to address this, mabey with furigana next to some of the harder kanji to prompt the reader, if not are there any good childrens mangas I should look into. I think reading some stuff like this along with my course would really help me, thanks.

Hi lv426...

It's interesting that you bring this up now, as just a few days ago I was in my local Waldenbooks and noticed some really cool things.

First, they are now carrying (and prominently featuring) a shelf full of untranslated manga! I looked through a few and picked up one that has furigana for EVERY kanji, including the really easy ones. I don't know if it's because it's a special export edition, or what, but it really makes it easy to look up the meaning of the kanji on my Palm.

It can take me an hour to read each page of the manga so far (!) but I think it's really helping me a lot to see the kanji in context... plus, of course, it's a lot of fun! One potential roadblock is that the language used is all very informal with a lot of contractions, sentence fragments and "interesting" grammar. I think I would be missing a lot more if I hadn't read this book which explains some of the peculiarities of manga...

While I was there, I also noticed two cute little books called Kana de Manga and Kanji de Manga which try to teach kana and kanji through manga illustrations. They contain many example words and look pretty slick. Check them out if they sound interesting...

HTH,
Justin

P.S. Does anyone have any tips for looking up unknown kanji that appear without furigana? I have Kanji handwriting recognition on my Palm, but it requires that I use the standard stroke order, which I can rarely guess correctly. :/ Is it just a matter of learning all the radicals and components, or is there some shortcut I'm missing? Thanks

Cool thanks man, I have heard of Kana de manga before but not Kanji de manga have to check that out. What manga did you pick up with the furigana, I might be able to find it on YESASIA: Online Shopping for Japanese, Korean, and Chinese Movies, TV Dramas, Music, Games, Books, Comics, Toys, Electronics, and more! - Free Shipping if its any good.

lv426 said:

Hey, I was wondering if there are any basic books for people learning japanese, kana and the kanji. Are there any manga specificly to address this, mabey with furigana next to some of the harder kanji to prompt the reader, if not are there any good childrens mangas I should look into. I think reading some stuff like this along with my course would really help me, thanks.

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Pretty much any shounen and shoujo manga have furigana. So as long as you don't try importing something like Monster or Berserk, you should be fine.

It's a good way to practice reading, but it won't help for anything else. Buy from import sites like Sasugabooks.com or Animegamersusa.com instead of paying a premium at Waldenbooks. They charge like $13 for what I pay for $5-6.

Can you recoment which specific ones of the shounen and shoujo mangas I should get, I went on and there are alot with diffrent titles. Thanks!

How about ASAKIYUMEMISHI by Waki Yamato.
This is based upon Genji Monogatari, or Tale of Genji and is the only Shojo Manga I've ever read.

lv426 said:

Can you recoment which specific ones of the shounen and shoujo mangas I should get, I went on and there are alot with diffrent titles. Thanks!

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Well if I had an idea what genres you like and if you like any particular anime of any sort, I can recommend a large numbers of titles you should try. I think the last I heard there are over 11,000 different manga titles that have been produced and unlike American comics, they cover pretty much about any subject material. Just PM your interests to me and I'll PM my recommendations to you.

I dont know I guess, sci-fi, horror, action whatever. Samurai or ninjas are cool, I'll check out the ones mentioned!

Try Bleach. It's not about Samurais, but more about Shinigamis or Gods of Death. Though, how they are portrayed is very much like Samurai.