Learning enough Japanese to read manga.

January 1, 2016 12:27 PM

I'd like to start reading manga in Japanese. I don't know any Japanese. What's the best way to learn it?

I have no plans (or money or time) to travel to Japan. I have no plans to talk with or write to any Japanese people. I just want to read their comics, though it would be a plus if I could understand Anime without subs or dubs.
Free and not too time consuming would be nice.

posted by signal to Writing & Language (13 answers total)

I sort of half-heartedly tried learning Japanese last year, and ended up deciding I didn't have enough time. So I'm not exactly an expert but I have some experience with trying to learn.

Learning to read Japanese will be much harder than learning to speak or understand it, I think, because the writing system is much more complicated than english. That is, assuming that manga is usually written in kanji, which I sort of assume it mostly is. (Aside: Japanese uses 3 major writing systems. The first 2 are hiragana and katakana, which are sort of one-syllable-per-symbol and therefore pretty easy to learn, and kanji, which is more like... one symbol per word, of which there are thousands, and it's something that the typical japanese child spends years and years learning)

The most recommended book is "Remembering the Kanji"

I tried Rosetta Stone and found it very useful at first, but with increasingly diminishing results.

There was an online japanese program that I used some, it was OK but I found it somewhat frustrating. Sometimes it would want you to answer questions by typing the answer in japanese, and the exact answer it was looking for was often not very obvious, to me, or somewhat ambiguous. For example, it would have you practice writing english words in katakana. There may be a "canonical" way to do this, but it's a bit interpretive to me and I couldn't always figure out what was the "right" way to do it, if such a thing exists. I'm trying and failing to think of what it was called...

There were some programs I found useful. There's a kind of flash card system called "Anki" which was very helpful. I learned all the hiragana and katakana in no time with it. There are windows and phone versions, and they sync to a server so that you can practice anywhere. It uses a learning system, callled, um. Spaced repetition? Something like that. The idea is, it gives you the stuff you have trouble with more than the stuff you don't, and it gives you more of the recent stuff than the old stuff (but it mixes old stuff in too, so you don't forget it)

You'll probably want to install methods of doing japanese language input. Windows has some, they're pretty easy to use. Typically you just start typing the romanized japanese words and as you go it'll convert those to hiragana or katakana. Sometimes it'll replace common words with their Kanji. It's a little like autocorrect on phones, it gives you things to choose from. There are japanese keyboards for phones also, they work pretty similarly.
posted by RustyBrooks at 12:45 PM on January 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

An expansion on reading and writing. Once you learn katakana and hiragana, which honestly you can do in a week or two, then you'll be able to
a) phonetically read both
b) turn words you know into either
that part is pretty easy. So stuff that is written in them is no harder to read than learning any other language, you just have to learn the words and grammar.

Kanji is a whole other ballpark though. I was never got to the point where I really tried to learn it. I was mostly interested in speaking and listening to japanese though. I was similarly motivated (I wanted to watch anime in it's native language) so reading wasn't the most important part to me. So there is probably a lot about learning to read that I don't know.
posted by RustyBrooks at 12:48 PM on January 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

I suggest Wanikani.com for learning vocabulary. Learning vocabulary, for any language, is going to be difficult. It's important to start reading actual materials as soon as possible to supplement vocabulary acquisition (so perhaps look for some graded Japanese readers), but one of the cornerstones in my experience has been use of spaced repetition software. These programs are basically flash cards that are given to you on a scheduled basis based on a complicated algorithm such that you're quizzed less often on a particular piece of vocabulary that you have been having a lot of success in remembering. This is a more efficient manner of memory formation, not just in that it's more time efficient, but that it's better for your memory to try to recall things it's on the verge of forgetting after a couple of days versus going over it once a day ad infinitum.

Anki is a popular piece of software that handles this, and you can download Japanese vocabulary decks from other users, but specifically for Japanese, and starting out, after having learned Hiragana and Katakana, I recommend WaniKani. It takes you through the kanji in a methodical manner. For instance, it teaches you 人 (person) and 口 (mouth). Then it'll teach you word 人口, which means population, providing an explanation (sometimes serious, if there's some logic behind it, other times it can be a silly explanation) as to how to remember that those two characters combined create the new meaning, in this case it says: "The amount of people with mouths (that you have to feed) is the population that you have to feed."

You can also see indications of what it'll teach you: https://www.idigtech.com/wanikani/#data/freq

So for instance, get through the first 25 levels, and you'll know 95% of the 2500 most used kanji in writing.

Also, I find that vocabulary formation is aided by WaniKani in that I have to type in correctly the meaning and reading of the kanji in order to proceed, and that I don't have to rely on myself reporting on whether or not I got the vocabulary correct, nor how well I remembered it.

Of course, grammar is important too. I haven't begun looking at the grammar too much, but just glancing at the materials out there it doesn't look as complicated as other languages. Japanese is certainly very different from English, which makes for its own difficulty, but Japanese doesn't appear to be complicated in the manner that, say, Ancient Greek is, with an overwhelming amount of declensions and conjugations. So, at some point, pick up a grammar book or two. But I'd definitely recommend starting in on the vocabulary asap. That's going to be the thing in terms of time that holds you back.
posted by Dalby at 2:10 PM on January 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

(Woops, totally read the chart wrong. At level 25 you'll know 95% of the 500 most frequent kanji. At level 60 (the final level at the moment) you'll know 80% of the 2500 most frequent kanji. Keep in mind two for context, that 2500 kanji is not equivalent to 2500 words since kanji can be strung together to create new words than just the kanji by itself.)
posted by Dalby at 2:46 PM on January 1, 2016

Other than WaniKani, there's the site Read the Kanji, which I used for a long time. I was an early user, and got a grandfathered account, but it is a pay site, though I think the katakana and hiragana are free. It tests by JLPT level, and has a pretty nice (and pretty) heat map sort of system letting you know which kanji you've figured out and which you've struggled with. It's a flash card system with sets of maybe twenty or thirty cards, and the ones you get right are discarded, the ones you miss are put back in the deck, and you can't finish the set until you get all the cards right. The cards you struggled with are weighted to show up again more frequently.

I used it pretty heavily for about a year, when I had a lot of free time at a pretty dead end job. The thing is, though, I've lived in Japan for about fifteen years, and embarrassingly, reading a manga is still beyond me. I'm passably fluent when it comes to speaking and listening, but I suck at kanji, having never really studied the language in earnest. As a former EFL teacher, I can tell you that trying to learn the language without being in or surrounded by it is going to be a challenge. I've seen students struggle mightily simply because outside of the time they study, they are surrounded by their own language, which is intrinsically easier for them, and that ease of use makes diving into the difficult study of a foreign language more difficult. Having a set goal is a good thing, and will definitely help in the long run, but it is going to be a very, very long run.

Start with learning the kana (hiragana and katakana). With a decent amount of studying, you can pick them up in a week. For me, I learned katakana (usually used to write words borrowed from non-Japanese languages) from pizza menus here in Japan. Context really helped with that (ペパロ二is much easier to figure out when you know ペ and ロ and you're looking at the toppings for the pizza). Hiragana is also pretty easy, and there should be a decent amount of stuff online. Another thing you can work on is vocab building with post it notes. Get a dictionary (I use imiwa, an iPhone app, it's fantastic, and has its own testing section. The dictionary, though, is the best feature) and figure out the Japanese words for everything in your home. Write each word on a post it note, and cover your home with post its. Constant repetition is a key for learning a language. Seeing the language around you is definitely going to help build your vocabulary, which you'll need for reading.

And finally, if you're going through all this effort, don't sell speaking and listening short. Obviously, your goal is to read, but if you're going through all the work to get there, why not aim for all around use of the language? I've known a couple people here who can read fluently, but can't speak at all. It's pretty odd to have to help them with daily interactions while having much, much lower understanding of the language than they have. And best of luck. It's going to take a long time. Don't get discouraged.
posted by Ghidorah at 3:18 PM on January 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

Seconding SSF's warning that there's no way to learn Japanese that's "not too time-consuming". Fortunately, it doesn't have to be difficult or expensive. I first learned kanji by playing Slime Forest Adventure, which teaches you to associate an English meaning with each kanji in the tongue-in-cheek trappings of an old-school JRPG. This method has its drawbacks, and you don't want to take the game's official "English meanings" too seriously, but it's the easiest method I have come across for getting familiar with lots of kanji. The game will also teach you common readings associated with each kanji, which is enormously helpful for looking up words you don't know. (The game has other modes for teaching vocabulary and grammar, but these are all terrible and should be ignored.) The full version, which covers the roughly 2,000 "standard-use" kanji, is $20, but as a beginner you can (and perhaps should) get by on the 1,000 elementary school kanji taught in the free version.

You'll definitely want to learn grammar, because a lot of things will be very confusing if you haven't been warned ahead of time how they work. Tae Kim's Guide to Learning Japanese helped me out a lot when I was starting out.

Eventually, you'll want to start reading real text. Rikaichan for Firefox and its clone Rikaikun for Chrome are dictionaries that provide instant pop-up definitions and readings whenever you hover over Japanese text, which is enormously convenient to say the least. Jisho.org is a clean and powerful dictionary that lets you look up kanji by their individual components, and lets you search through corpora of example sentences. Using those two tools, and a knowledge of grammar, you can puzzle through the meaning of most sentences you see out in the wild.
posted by J.K. Seazer at 3:42 PM on January 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Honestly the absolute most efficient way to get started is a class at a community college or something. The thing is that to read manga you also need to understand colloquial spoken Japanese (moreso than if you wanted to read, say, books about technology) so there's no way around that. Actually speaking sentences and getting feedback will really help, and paying money for scheduled classes will help keep you on track. (And of course this absolutely can be supplemented by WaniKani and so on). Good luck!
posted by No-sword at 3:57 PM on January 1, 2016

I started reading Japanese to read manga and got to the point of being pretty fluent.

I know that you've gotten a lot of suggestions about how to learn kanji. But my experience is that

(1) a lot of manga don't require too much kanji knowledge, because the kanji all have furigana (small kana written beside them to tell you how to pronounce the kanji)

(2) it's very easy for beginners to focus a ton on kanji at the expense of things that are ultimately more important like sentence structure.

My personal recommendation is to get a textbook like Genki, and work through that; work through Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese (linked above); and there are a couple of 'casual speech' things that are really important but often don't get covered in textbooks (the -chau verb ending, the way that words that end in 'ai' and 'oi' sometimes get slurred to 'ee' in casual speech -- so 'itai' turns into 'itee' and 'sugoi' turns into 'sugee.') I don't know of a great resource for those, but maybe try Japanese in Mangaland.

I don't really like Remembering the Kanji because the order in which it teaches kanji doesn't prioritize the ones that are most common or most important, and teaching you just an English keyword for each kanji isn't ultimately that helpful in learning to read the kanji in context. I'm more in favor of focusing on oral fluency, and kana reading, for a while -- and the nice thing about manga is that you can do that and still be able to read a lot of manga.

The manga "Yotsuba to" is the one that I most frequently see getting recommended to beginners, and it is indeed pretty easy. But there were all kinds of things I was mostly able to read within my first couple of years -- as long as they didn't have too much technical or science-fictional vocabulary, or complicated plots.
posted by Jeanne at 4:01 PM on January 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

The Japanese in manga is surprisingly difficult for the perceived level. There's lots of slang and implied meaning. It's also pretty easy to just skip reading and look at the pictures. In other words, there's a lot of distraction from the words. A lot of manga has specialised vocabulary, depending on the kind of story. Stuff like high school words or baseball words.

I started out trying to read what I thought was easy manga (Crayon Shin-chan) but found I was only able to read it well after separate study. The separate study was all the normal Japanese study: verb forms, adjectives, vocabulary.

I think the problem of using manga as a study tool is that often it's just too far above a beginner's level to give the right balance of challenge and repetition. If you want to learn enough to read it, concentrate on the tried-and-true methods to get your understanding up to intermediate. Genki is a really popular textbook. I used Minna no Nihongo.

Forcing yourself to actively speak will make it stick much quicker and could be the difference between staying with it or quitting (when it seems that nothing is being absorbed). The awful truth, though, is that you're looking at hundreds of hours work just to be able to read the simplest of stories. The easiest route will be simply to find some scanlations on the Internet.

Other than manga, I'd also recommend finding some anime at a beginner level, making sure that it has Japanese subtitles. Translate it as best you can, then rewatch it multiple times, reading along with the kanji on screen. Anime will teach you the same style of Japanese that's used in manga and provides more context for understanding.

I wouldn't recommend Remembering the Kanji at this stage, but I'd absolutely recommend Heisig's other books for Hiragana and Katakana.
posted by nevan at 4:26 PM on January 1, 2016

The good news is once you've learned the hiragana and katakana, you can sound out all the onomatopoetic sound effects drawn in, which is fun.
posted by ctmf at 7:21 PM on January 1, 2016

The manga "Yotsuba to" is the one that I most frequently see getting recommended to beginners, and it is indeed pretty easy.

This student of Japanese laid the original volume 1 of Yotsuba next to the English translation, and was baffled -- so many more English words than the few bits of nihongo, in the original!

Anyway, my recommendation to anybody interested in learning a second language is to take a class, somewhere. The structure is logical and the schedule will force you to study. And since you want to learn Japanese from manga, I was going to go on at length about the magazine published in the 90s for just that purpose -- but in the usual, inexplicably coincidental way of MetaFilter, a mere seven minutes after this question appeared, KokuRyu posted this FPP all about Mangajin.
posted by Rash at 8:43 PM on January 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Oops, I misread the date on my browser -- that post is actually 3½ years old. Very useful, though.
posted by Rash at 8:58 PM on January 1, 2016

Seconding that reading manga presents lots of challenges due to the slang - and also to the handwritten style of the characters, which I've found much harder to read than printed text.

However, I strongly second Rash's recommendation of Mangajin - those 30 issues of Mangajin are a GREAT starting place! If you like what you see there, I highly recommend Japanese the Manga Way, which is an enormous collection of manga excerpts organized and explained, word by word, to give you the grammar and cultural context. It's the successor to Mangajin. I'm not all that interested in manga, but I love this book for its clear explanations of the text and the great index which lets me look up grammatical concepts. It's one of my favorite references.

I'd also suggest checking out some audio, because - while your focus is on reading - it's easier to learn all that vocabulary with the sounds of the words in your head.

Finally, be sure to check out your local library. I've found lots of great free resources at mine, from Pimsleur CDs to teach-yourself books.
posted by kristi at 9:11 AM on January 5, 2016 [2 favorites]