Learning Japanese Through Manga

Comic books are fun. Fun things are usually frowned upon in schools, especially public ones. But why does this have to be the case? 

It doesn’t.

One day when I was churning out pizzas for meager pay at my dead-end customer-service-oriented part-time job, I was listening to a conversation between a mother and her son. She asked him when he was going to read this weekend, to which he replied, “I won’t. Weekdays are learning time. Weekends are fun time.”

This highlights a fundamental flaw in compulsive education. Teachers and parents are ingraining a very backwards and dangerous way of thinking into students’ heads. When did we start polarizing “learning” and “fun?” Why can’t one have fun while learning? On the contrary, I daresay it is impossible to learn without having fun.

When learning Japanese, manga is a great way to get past the boring scholarly things and develop an interest of your own. It is said that there is a manga for everyone, as the range of genres is so vast. But if you’re trying to learn Japanese, any manga can be for you.

Starting Out

Manga isn’t easy to read. Despite the shame placed upon children from mothers and teachers for reading comics, these vividly-illustrated books are often chock-full of complex words, unusual colloquial vocabulary, and, most importantly, fun.

The hardest part about choosing a Japanese manga to read is finding a good balance between level of challenge and interest. You don’t want to read a manga that will confuse you with things like techno-jargon and indecipherable old-style Japanese, but at the same time, you don’t want something so easy that you don’t learn any new words.

I started with a manga called Azumanga Daioh. It was the first physical manga I ever owned, and I’m still quite attached to it to this day. Truth be told, however, it was a little over my head at the time. I had just barely finished my first semester of Japanese, JPNS 1010 at Utah Valley University, and I didn’t even know what kanji was. Azumanga Daioh has no furigana, so I felt overwhelmed, but I really wanted to read it.

The Fun Factor

This is an important part of learning, in my opinion. If I had bought some kind of scholarly book, like another book I own, Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication, I would have been bored to tears at the time. If I had bought a “real book” from a respected novelist, such as Haruki Murakami, I’m sure I would have given up.

But I chose a comic book. And I really wanted to read it. It looked so funny, and cute, and the characters seemed interesting. I could tell, even without reading it, that I would enjoy it if I read it.

So give manga a chance. Give fun a chance. If reading is fun, than all week can be fun time. All week can be learning time.