#please feel free to reblog with your own tips or manga recs!

[mahoubenkyou]

Studying with Manga (my method, anyway)

I only just recently started using manga as a study tool because honestly, it’s intimidating to crack open a book and realize just how little you actually know.  I wish someone had told me earlier that it doesn’t have to be a terrifying jumble of grammar and kanji I haven’t learned yet, because it’s been a great tool!  So I wanted to write a little guide for people who aren’t sure where to start, hopefully this helps someone!

Knowledge you’ll need: Ability to read hiragana & katakana, mid-beginner level grammar and vocab (if you find yourself struggling with every single speech bubble, maybe come back to this method later)

Some benefits to studying with manga:

★ You’ll get exposure to more casual and natural text than what you might find in a textbook

★ You’ll pick up a lot of genre-specific vocab

★ Illustrations make it easier to follow what’s going on based on context if you’re not quite sure about the text

★ It’s fun!  And you absorb information better when you’re enjoying yourself :)

And some cons:

★ Speech might be more colloquial than you really want.  Make sure you understand the context before you go repeating the dialogue

★ Said genre-specific vocab might not actually be useful, depending on the genre (I know SO MANY yu-gi-oh related words that I am NEVER going to need...)

★ Manga doesn’t care where you are in your textbook, so it’s on you to figure out the things you haven’t learned yet

Picking out a series

The main points to look for is that the language is relatively simple, the kanji has furigana attached and the genre is relevant to you (both because it won’t be very interesting otherwise, and because you’ll be picking up vocab as you go and it’s more useful if it’s vocab you can use in life).  Yotsuba&!, Chi’s Sweet Home and Nichijou are some good examples.  They can be purchased pretty easily on Amazon.co.jp for about $6 a volume.  If you’re impatient it’s not particularly hard to find raw scans online, but please support the artist by buying the manga too :)

Let’s study!

I like to take it one chapter at a time and read each chapter 3-4 times, focusing on different things each time

First read: simply read through the chapter straight through- take your time to understand what you can and make notes of the pages where there’s something you’re unfamiliar with as you come across them, but don’t get hung up on them.

Second read: Go back to the trouble pages and look up any vocab and kanji you don’t know.  Write them down along with their translation (if you do flashcards, add them to your deck for later review too!)

Third read: Go through one more time with your newfound vocab knowledge and see how much you can get this time.  Look up any grammar you’re struggling with as you go along.  Also, take any sentences you understand but had trouble with and add them to your flashcards as well (why & how you should study full sentences via flashcards)

Fourth read: if you have access to the English version of the manga, go through and compare your understanding to the official translation, see if you were wildly off anywhere and figure out why.

Go through each chapter like this and by the end of one volume you should have a ton of kanji and vocab to study, as well as a better understanding of how certain phrases are used and possibly some new grammar points!  Neat!  And hopefully you had a good time doing it, too :) this is a great way to make studying feel like less of a slog and break yourself out of you textbook comfort zone.