How to Choose Japanese Manga/Books for Studying
In an ask recently, a user asked me what reading materials I recommend to study with.
I’ve covered the standard textbooks here, and today I’ll talk about how you can determine whether an authentic material is suitable for your studies. All of this advice is based upon my studies in SLA (Second Language Acquisition) and TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), as well as my personal experience learning Japanese.
What’s an Authentic Material?
Authentic materials are print, video, and audio that are not classroom materials, but are things made for Japanese (or any other target language) speakers. A mock advertisement in your textbook is not an authentic material because it is not made for a Japanese person, but an actual Help Wanted ad in a Japanese newspaper is an authentic material.
Authentic materials can be just about anything audio or visual. Manga, light novels, newspapers, magazines, jpop songs, anime, news broadcast, etc.
Today I’m just going to focus on visual authentic materials, but if there’s interest I could make a future post about audio materials too.
1. Decide Your Method of Reading: Intensive or Extensive
When reading to study a foreign language, there are two different ways to go about it, intensive reading or extensive reading.
Reading and looking up every single word you do not know, even words that aren’t essential to understanding the main points of the story.
Pros: you learn a lot more vocab
Cons: it takes considerably longer to make progress
In order to do this method effectively (and by effectively I mean “resist chucking your book out the window in a fit of rage”), you must comprehend ~70%* of the content.
Basically what you do when you read in your native language. You read each page, and even if you come across a word you don’t know, you keep going. You only look up words that keep coming up, or that hinder your overall comprehension of what’s going on.
Pros: you cover more ground and get a bigger sense of accomplishment
Cons: you can miss out on smaller details
In order to do this method effectively, you must comprehend ~90% of the content.
Neither reading method is better than the other. Choose which style suits your personality best. Personally, I’m one of those people that has to know every last morsel about everything, so I only do intensive reading.
2. Determine How Difficult a Material Is
Up above I said you had to be able to comprehend either 70 or 90 percent of the content depending on the method you want to go with.
In extensive reading, you need to be able to understand almost all the words because you can’t stop to look up a ton of stuff. If you have to look up 15 words on a page because you can’t understand what’s going on, you’re not doing extensive reading–you’re doing intensive reading.
Now, as for the 70% I put on the intensive reading, there’s a bit of give with that, depending on how patient you are haha. If you’re okay with a crawling pace, the comprehension could be 10% if you want. But if you’re like me and you’re a bit hasty, you’re going to want to be able to comprehend around 70-80% of the vocab.
So how do you figure out how difficult the content is? Pick a random page and the first 100 words on it, and count the words you didn’t know. Subtract the words you didn’t know from 100, and the answer will tell you roughly how much you can comprehend of the text. Easy, right?
3. What Makes a Bad Material
I’m betting that anime/manga is what got most of us interested in learning Japanese, and there’s probably that one really nostalgic manga you’re dying to read in its original Japanese format.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but just because you love a series doesn’t make it a good learning material.
Things to Avoid in a Material
Lots of technical, scientific, or military jargon
I know that this wipes out a large swath of series, but the point of reading this is to learn Japanese, and there’s a good chance that most of the vocab you would learn would not be usable in conversation. Why waste the time learning 白刃取り (catching a blade between two palms) when you could be learning something more practical?
Period works (Edo Era and further back)
Many (but not all) period pieces contain a bunch of obsolete words, and the last thing you want to be is one of those gaijin that uses “gozaru” unironically. I tried using the expression 村八分 (ostracism) and got laughed at by my coworkers just last month because that just makes people think of villages in the Edo period.
Particularly if you’re doing the Intensive Reading method, it’s important to give yourself a sense of accomplishment. It took me an hour to read one page of a book for one of my classes, and 30 hours to read ONE chapter. It was the most frustrating and endless experience I’ve had to date. Pick manga (because chapters are short) or short stories. (I really recommend Hoshi Shinichi’s “short-short” stories.)
Don’t be like poor Kagome
4. What Makes a Good Material
I have saved the most important condition for your material until last.
Make sure it’s something you like!
I know that this is so basic I shouldn’t even have to say it. But listen, for one of my Japanese courses in uni, I had a semester to read one of Haruki Murakami’s novellas. It was the most difficult and frustrating semester I had because not only was it super hard for me vocab-wise, it was boring as hell. I didn’t enjoy the story, and the ending was so
It’s been 6 years and I’m still triggered. It was awful, and it made me feel like all of this toil, all of this suffering, had been for nothing. I thought that I hated reading in Japanese. But actually, when I pushed myself to try reading a manga I liked, I learned that I didn’t hate reading Japanese–
–I just hated reading Murakami.
If you find a material that is the right difficulty level and is appropriate for your purposes but you don’t find it interesting, it’s likely that you’ll get bored of it and quit halfway through. But if you like a material enough, even if it is too difficult for your current level, your love for it can give you the extra boost of motivation you need to push through it.
My favorite manga series of all time is Rurouni Kenshin. It was the first anime I ever watched, and it kinda started me down the road I’m on. So I decided to read the manga, and oh man is it a chore. I’ve read 14 volumes and have looked up 1,577 words as of today. It has a bunch of obsolete Japanese, it has so many sword words holy bejeezus (this is where I learned 白刃取り, btw), and it can take me hours to get through a chapter sometimes.
But I love that series with everything I am, so I don’t care how long it takes.
Really, what matters more than anything is that it’s something you are really invested and interested in.
5. How Soon Can I Start Reading Authentic Materials?
Did you know that the average native Japanese person cannot read a newspaper until they are a freshman in high school? That is how hard Japanese is. For the native speakers.
I hate to be a Debbie Downer here, but I would recommend you wait to use most authentic materials until you are N3 or N2. I finally began feeling comfortable reading stuff in Japanese around when I passed the N2. I understand that Chi’s Sweet Home is popular for beginners, so that isn’t to say that there are no authentic materials to be found for new learners, but they are very hard to find.
But hey, if you are determined enough, there is nothing that can stop you from reading what you love, and nothing worth having is easily won. Ganbatte!
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