I'm interested in the Japanese language and so I studied a bit. So far I learned Hiragana/Katakana, the 214 Radicals, a bit grammar, a few patterns and some common words.
Now I wanted to learn Japanese throw an easy Manga, something like romance and look up every unknown word (although all of them would be new to me) and learn them.
Also I would learn grammar through Genki 1/2.


Is it a good idea?
I know that it would take ages to "read" the first few volumes, but I would use native material and also learn with context, rather than just doing something like Core 6k and doing it for months before even touching native material.

You might want to get a copy of Learn Japanese the Manga Way. Perhaps you could also get a copy of the manga in your native language (English?) since you're already planning on looking up the words.

Quote:Now I wanted to learn Japanese throw an easy Manga, something like romance and look up every unknown word (although all of them would be new to me) and learn them.

This grammar guide is founded on that idea. Highly recommended.

Spoiler alert: it's insanely hard at first. Very fun, though.

If it's fun and makes sense to you, then yes it's a good idea no matter what.

I can't give any specific tips though, since I AM the person who did "Core 6k and doing it for months before even touching native material" hahaha but now I am reading manga with a fair degree of success.

The one thing I would ask you to consider is beefing up on grammar a lot before you give yourself any high expectations (like reading manga straight off the bat instead of working your way up there with graded readers or something).

Unless you already speak a language with similar grammar structure, Japanese is going to be REALLY different, and sometimes it's hard to even recognize where words end and where others begin, and which bits of kana are grammar and which bits are legitimate words. Before I finished Tae Kim's grammar guide, that was a problem I had myself. I couldn't really figure out WHAT to look up, because everything was just a jumbled mess of kanji and kana to me. So even with a dictionary, everything was confusing and hard.

I agree with Tashippy, though. Find the manga in a language you already understand and study them side-by-side! 頑張って！

Edit: howtwosavealif3 (below) brought up a good point. If you're not careful, you might learn words with the wrong pronunciation if you're not using any audio at all. That could be a bit messy to fix later on. So maybe be sure to listen to a recording of each word you study. This dictionary has audio for many words. (Make sure to select Romaji if you're searching by romaji.)

Don't look up every unknown word. That's a waste of time as they don't remain in your brain for long. I personally skip them and wait until an unknown word repeats three times before I bother to open the dictionary and look up the meaning.

DrJones Wrote:Don't look up every unknown word.

This doesn't really work if every word is unknown. You won't even remember words long enough to remember which ones you've seen before. Besides, it's hard enough to figure out what a sentence means (or why it means what it means, if you can deduce its meaning from context) if you know all the words...

do song lyrics if you want it to be less painful unless you don't mind reading manga for little kids??? or a manga that is really boring? it is possible for a manga to have simple language/limited vocabulary and be fun to read but personally for me that's not enough for me..

p.s. it's sorta difficult to remember words if you only read them. it would make more sense to also hear them which is another incentive for song lyrics or anything else that's not manga. there's more to japanese than just the sounds. for example there's intonation which is very important if you want to up your listening compression and your probability of being understood by a japanese person.

also song lyrics are very useful for learning how to read kanji/hiragana/katakana and you can also test yourself by trying to read it before the singer sings it. but by all means if your reading is slow then you can freeze it every 3 seconds or so lol. i remember learning from lyrics and having to pause every3 seconds with a ballad song because my reading was slow. now a days i read japanese novels so it's all about improvement.

there's rikai-chan, rikai-sama, and all these other useful plugins and whatnot. and if for some reason you really want an english translation to help you out i'm sure you can find a song with a english translation. if there isn't you can request for one here or lang-8 or chiebukuro or whereever.

Oh come on, you can't be "learning in context" when you can't understand even a single word. Its nonsense and would be unbelievably painful.

It gives the impression you just don't like studying and want to skip that bit, but at the very very beginning you just cannot. You don't have to do tons of study before being able to attack Manga anyway, a few months spent going through Genki I and II should get you to the point where you can start your plan reading manga and just looking up everything unknown.

NightSky Wrote:Oh come on, you can't be "learning in context" when you can't understand even a single word. Its nonsense and would be unbelievably painful.

It gives the impression you just don't like studying and want to skip that bit, but at the very very beginning you just cannot. You don't have to do tons of study before being able to attack Manga anyway, a few months spent going through Genki I and II should get you to the point where you can start your plan reading manga and just looking up everything unknown.

Agreed. Basic vocabulary and grammar is absolutely necessary to start reading manga. I was about 1/2 to 3/4 through Japanese for Everyone and tried to read a shoujo manga, and even aided with what I had learned, it was still incredibly painful and not at all fun. Trying to read manga without having studied the basics sounds like a recipe for a headache.
Working through a basic textbook, and at least the Core2K (if you're an Anki user) would be a good preparation before jumping into manga.

Out of curiosity, what kind of manga are you hoping to read? From what a lot of people here have said, shounen manga is a bit tricky for beginners, whereas slice of life manga are pretty easy. Yotsubato! is the standard recommendation around here for good reason. It's funny, cute, and uses every day vocabulary. I'd also recommend Chi's Sweet Home for those exact same reasons.

Learning Japanese by reading manga and looking up every unknown word might sound like a good idea that would be fun and engaging, but it isn't really. It's boring, it's painful, and it makes you (well, me - I am talking from experience) want to stop reading altogether. Keep reading enjoyable, so that you do it outside of dedicated 'study time'.

The good news is that you don't need a whole lot of Japanese to read (easy) manga. When it comes to simple school drama/romance stuff - all the vocabulary is pretty much the stuff you learn first - but learn it first, then use it.

If you want to use native material to study instead of textbooks and such - subs2srs will give a lot better results than looking up every word you don't know while reading.

@Aikynaro: agreed. Long ago, I tried to read LNs too early, and it was really painful. Now it's no biggie, but looking up every other word is just as bad as not knowing half of what you're reading. If you can't read most of it, put down the book and either a) study or b) read an easier book. (I agree about the "see a word 3 times, look it up" rule, but only if it's the only word I don't get. If it's every other word, I might as well study.)

For Manga, make sure you LIKE it before reading it. I had a few teachers say, "Oh, you should read Doraemon (or some other boring manga for little kids)." It was about as fun as reading a textbook. So I read more textbooks, and then found manga I liked.

As has been said in other threads, it's *almost* impossible to a) not like Yotusbato and b) not be able to read it at a beginner level. It's easy stuff. REALLY easy. Good enough to get going and build some confidence. (Wasn't there a whole thread on this where we gave ratings and everything?)

I also second the JTMW book. It's an awesome book with excellent grammar explanations-- better than Genki IMO at explaining things clearly. Mangajin... is okay, but not nearly as awesome IMO. There's another manga-based series in EN that's also very "meh." But JTMW is a solid, well-written book, even if some of the examples are a little old.

[s0apgun]

I highly recommend reading manga that you like along side the textbook Japanese: The Manga Way. I've been reading Attack on Titan, Fullmetal Alchemist, & Space Brothers in Japanese with the help of KanjiTomo OCR. Finding the RAW manga scan online makes lookups way easier.

I went through Tae kim's grammar guide slowly, at my own pace, while exposing myself to native material. I don't know if I'd recommend jumping straight into manga without knowing what even simple particles mean (though there are people who have done it).

What I will say though, is that as I got towards the end if Tae kim's guide, I had already learnt some of the verb conjugations and grammar points simply by hearing and seeing them in native materials.

The stuff that's easiest to acquire (e.g. with the most meaning) in grammar books is often left out towards the end. I'd recommend doing both at the same time, but you shouldn't feel as you "have" to plough through to the end of a textbook.

I know people say that looking up every single word can be painful and boring, but the textbooks can be equally painful and boring too.

Thanks for all the replies, the nice tips and the links you gave me.
I think I'm gonna give it a try and choose an manga whose anime I already watched and read the translated manga at the same time, while studying grammar.

I think that I'll have a very hard time, but I also think that it will be fun, which is the most important thing while studying.

And zurisu I apologize if what I wrote sounded maybe a little bit aggressive. But I'm one of those persons who just can't wait, although Core 6k is really nice with all the audio etc. it provides.

Novel13 Wrote:And zurisu I apologize if what I wrote sounded maybe a little bit aggressive. But I'm one of those persons who just can't wait, although Core 6k is really nice with all the audio etc. it provides.

There's no need to apologize; you didn't sound aggressive We all indeed have our own learning styles. I'm the type of learner who likes to tackle one thing at a time, so doing Core6k all at once made sense to me, but it's certainly not the right fit for everyone ^_^

I went straight to manga (and Tae Kim) after skimming through Genki I. At times I barely managed to understand what was going on. As you'll need to look up lots of words, which greatly slows down the actual reading, it's absolutely essential that the material itself is interesting. I started with the manga corresponding to my favourite anime and was at times still bored because I had so much trouble understanding the dialogue. However after a short while it became very tolerable. Plus I've learned lots of words; as I use anki solely for kanji this was my only source of vocab (I have since then moved on to LNs which proved to be far less intimidating than I expected, using rikaichan).

A few general pointers regarding this approach:

http://www.kanjitomo.net/ is very useful but note that it may fail to recognize longer expressions correctly. When using this tool or just an ordinary dictionary, always try to consider the words past the one you are looking at, as there are many fixed expressions. E.g. 気を付ける means to be careful or to pay attention, which is not perfectly clear when looking at the individual parts (spirits - attach?).

Japanese has relative clauses and the likes always come first, which I found to be the greatest hindrance to understanding what was going on. It took me several months to get used to that. When encountering longer sentences the first few verbs are almost guaranteed to belong to a such a clause, so keep that in mind.

Additionally, don't read too much into sentence ending particles. They are pretty random at times and you can't really look them up in a dictionary either, so don't get stuck there.