In These Words Manga Read Online Free English
Maren Ruminski
My first manga was Fullmetal Alchemist. A fantasy narrative with its own magic system based on chemistry and physics. Set in a world ravaged by war, where the characters discuss morality issues and philosophy.
Comedy can be incredibly difficult to understand, even for advanced learners! Not just because Japanese comedy uses a lot of word play, but because you often need to understand a certain aspect of Japanese culture to get the joke. You can read comedy manga if you want but watch out for puns.
Manga set in a working environment or about a subject you enjoy (like gaming) might seem like great places to start. However, these are often written for a more mature Japanese audience, which means no furigana, the readings written next to the kanji.
Stopping constantly to pick up your dictionary or the internet to check something disrupts your flow. It can also make you too reliant on dictionaries, as well as start to turn reading manga into a chore.
There are 271 unique words covered by WaniKani that appear in the manga. Due to repeated usage, these words appear a total of 755 times in all. (I do not have a count of overall total words.) Keep in mind, the following numbers are only for words covered by WaniKani.
Everything in this post should apply to the Japanese subtitled release of the movie as well. The only difference is that the subtitles also use 挨拶 (twice!), two more kanji not in WaniKani. The manga uses あいさつ for this word.
Rather than transcribe the whole book, I opted to downloaded Japanese subtitles for the movie. Since the manga includes all dialogue from the movie, this has been a useful shortcut to generating numbers.
For subtitles, I found a text file with the subtitles. I simple removed the timing information and that left me with all the dialogue. (I also have the transcript I downloaded years ago, but opted for the subtitle file since it exists.)
Thus, I should be able to read this line without trouble by the time I complete level 18 (with the exception that I learned 食べる in Japanese class waaay back when, and I learned 座る through iKnow a couple of years ago.)
The best part is that Studio Ghibli has a wide range of movies I love, going from simple dialogue with younger characters to more complex dialogue with older characters, and fantasy worlds that likely have world-specific terms.
When I lived in Tokyo, my friend and I would often take long meandering walks adventuring around the city and often ended up in bookstores. While he tended to gravitate toward the educational textbooks, I somehow always ended up in the children's section. Something about the shelves full of picture books just seemed so inviting to me.
However, just because children's books are for children doesn't mean they're necessarily easy to read for those studying Japanese as a foreign language. In this article, I'll discuss why children's books can be a great resource for Japanese-language learners, as well as some of the inherent challenges to watch out for. I'll also recommend some genres of books that adult learners of Japanese might enjoy and suggest where to find your own books.
When you hear "children's books," the first thing that might come to mind is the classic picture book. But there are also easy readers, chapter books, middle grade, young adult, and a ton of other related categories of books aimed toward early readers. For example, The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Harry Potter are both children's books, but they are quite different in terms of level, length, and the amount of pictures.
Beyond the welcoming atmosphere of the children's section, as a Japanese language learner I also enjoy reading children's books because they feel more approachable. If you're still not convinced, here are a few more reasons to try them out.
For one, you can't take it for granted that they visually make it more appealing and approachable. Compared to something that's text-only, pictures certainly lower the emotional hurdle of picking up a book and starting to read. Reading children's books doesn't feel like studying, even.
Pictures can also provide context to not only help you read, but read between the lines as well. In fact, research has shown that the combination of text with graphics like pictures or diagrams facilitates reading comprehension. 1 Images can help you understand words you may not know, and give you additional information about how to interpret the text. This means that pictures can also help you learn new words and phrases without translations. Learning through pictures is a more direct and intuitive approach than, say books with parallel translations. While learning new words through translation is a common approach for language learners (like flashcards), learning new words from picture books can help you gain a better understanding of their nuance, and provide concrete examples of how and when they're typically used in context, which is something direct translations can't always archieve.
But why all this talk about picture books when you could just go and pick up some manga? Based on this criteria, they should be perfect reading material, right? Full of pictures, perhaps a little longish but not too text-heavy, Japanese culture savvy, and of course super fun!
Don't get me wrong, I love manga. But manga can be difficult for a few reasons, and some of the big ones are related to the fact that the stories are mainly told through dialogue. Of course, this dialogue tries to replicate how people actually talk, and can be very informal and often colloquial. On top of that, spoken Japanese can require you to pick up on a lot of subtext, since things like subjects are often omitted. All of this together means that manga can generally be difficult for beginner and even intermediate learners to understand.
Thinking about Japanese culture in a broader sense, many Japanese children's books, either explicitly or implicitly, explain or teach children about Japanese culture and how to be a part of Japanese society.
Even if you were never a big fan of reading to begin with, or if you've developed an emotional allergy over the years of trying to read in Japanese, just like Harry Potter inspired non-readers to find the joy in reading, trying out Japanese picture books might be just what you need to jumpstart your journey into reading Japanese (again). So if it sounds like a fun idea, give it a try! It might be just what you need to motivate you to tackle something with less, or even no pictures, eventually.
Like I mentioned before, the children's book section beckons like the candy aisle of the bookstore. However, unfortunately not every Japanese picture book offers an effortless jaunt through candy land. So, let's quickly talk about some of the challenges so you're not surprised by a sour gummy worm when you're gobbling down on some sweet, sweet gummy bears.
While the overwhelming majority of Japanese picture books are written for children who are native speakers of Japanese, if you've spent much time around children you'll know that they have a vocabulary that may not be utilized in many contexts for adults or second-language learners.
For example, one of the most famous English children's stories is Pat the Bunny, but I couldn't tell you the last time I used the word "pat" or read it in a sentence that wasn't in Pat the Bunny. It's such a simple word, just three letters, but it's not even in the top 5000 words recommended for advanced learners of English by Oxford Learner's Dictionaries. 2
The same goes for Japanese picture books. For example, they often use onomatopoeia and other fun-sounding expressions that add good rhythm to the stories. ごっつんこ gottsunko, for instance, is a word used for when something bumps to something else. This is a fairly common expression for Japanese children, and while it may also be used by native-speaking adults, is not necessarily as well-known to second language learners. Learning these types of words can be a joy, but can also be a stumbling block, just like the relatively advanced grammar that might pop up.
So, this means that you might see more advanced grammatical expressions and verb tenses just casually thrown around, like the friendly trio causative, passive, and causative-passive. Oftentimes, even if there's some grammar you don't understand you can still get enough of the context to figure out more or less what a sentence means (this is exactly how I read a text written in classical Japanese), so don't get too discouraged!
Compared to resources like graded readers for language learners, which are categorized into levels of difficulty, it can be harder to find a picture book that's suitable for your level. Some websites like EhonNavi (which I'll talk about later) allow you to search by age, which can be an indication of difficulty level, but this can be limiting when the reading material is not tailored for language learners, specifically.
After learning about the benefits and challenges of reading picture books, I hope you are up for giving them a shot. Although "Japanese picture books" sounds like a specific category of books, it actually encompasses a wide variety of genres. In case you aren't sure what to look for, or where to start, I put together a few recommendations, focusing on genres that you can learn Japanese culture from, as well as ones that I think adults can enjoy. To find or instill the joy of reading, I think it's important to pick a book about something you love or that you're at least interested in. I hope you can find something on this list that you feel excited about reading!
For children who are learning all about new words and subjects for the first time, these are great vocabulary-builders and can provide deep-knowledge on a subject they find interesting, like bugs or fish. There are zukan and jiten of really anything, so you will probably be able to find one that's all about something you love. You might be thinking,"well, I'm not interested in any of the things children love." Okay, even though you might not be interested in dinosaurs or acorns, seriously, the variety of zukan and jiten is huge. And many have really interesting viewpoints that adults would find interesting and educational.
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