How to Use Manga to Study Japanese in Japan

For students studying Japanese in Japan, finding materials to use to practice Japanese outside of the classroom is important and, depending on how you go about it, fun. Ideal for practicing spoken Japanese is, of course, a Japanese friend, but you can also study on your own by watching TV or movies, listening to music, or reading, especially manga. I find that manga are ideal for studying on your own for a variety of reasons. Manga, for those who are unsure, are Japanese comic books. You might be familiar with Pokemon, Dragonball Z, Naruto, or the Gundam series as popular manga that have also been turned into anime cartoons and gained an audience in America as well. In Japan, manga are everywhere and their readership spans all ages and both genders.

Manga are much shorter than books, and the writing in them appears in shorter bursts than full paragraphs or pages. In manga, you are mostly reading dialog. Although slang can make deciphering what the spiky-haired hero is saying challenging--since the phrases and contractions used often cannot be found in dictionaries--this can afford you great opportunities to ask your Japanese friends, host family, or sensei to explain.

It is also easier to concentrate on manga than on textbooks or novels. They are full of pictures, action, and drama. Many popular manga have an anime counterpart, allowing you double exposure to what you have been studying: you read the lines in the manga, and hear them in the anime. Granted, anime are not scripted verbatim from manga, but there are often word for word quotes scattered throughout. Manga and anime are a good way to give yourself a break from serious studying while still exposing you to Japanese.

My method for using manga as a study tool revolves around repetition and review. You begin by reading as far as you can, looking up every kanji or word that you don't know. Once you define a word, write it down, kanji first, hiragana second, and English definition third, on notebook paper. Continue on to the middle of the paper, making only one entry per line and leaving the right side of the sheet blank. Once you have filled half a page with new words, stop reading. The next day, begin your study by reviewing and practicing the words you learned the previous day. For each word, practice writing the kanji or hiragana, filling up the blank space on the lines that you left the day before, while saying the word in Japanese and then in English. Once this is done, rewrite the new words, one per line, to fill up the bottom half of the page, but this time, do not write the kanji. Write only hiragana. Then, read the section of the manga that you read the previous day, noting that you should be remembering many of the words you just studied. This is all, for the second day.

On the third day, things begin to move faster. Once again, begin by writing the kanji of the new words, but try to do so without looking them up. Once you are done, write the words, hiragana only, on a new sheet of paper, as always, one per line. However, those that you were able to remember the kanji for without any help may be omitted; you have, for now, learned those words. This should leave you with several open lines before you reach the half-page point. Once again, read the manga, from the beginning. This time, go further than you did before, again looking up and writing down the kanji, hiragana, and definition of new words below your other practice words until you reach a half page. At that point, stop. The next day, you will repeat the process of practicing the words, keeping on your list those that you couldn't write from memory, but dropping those that you remembered. That way, you will always have new space to go forward a little more each day, without overwhelming yourself. It is important to read the manga from the beginning each time, so that you are constantly reviewing the words that you already learned. If at some point later in the manga you come across a word near the beginning that you have forgotten, add it to the list again.

This method may seem tedious, but the repetition is well worth it. You will read the manga faster each time you pick it up and the Japanese will become internalized with frequent exposure. Furthermore, by reading, writing, and saying the words aloud, you are practicing three of the five parts of language study. As mentioned previously, you may find an anime or even anime soundtracks that allow you to practice listening to the words you encounter, the fourth part of language. As for active conversation, you will probably have ample opportunity to practice your Japanese as you ask your friends for help understanding words or phrases or grammar points that no dictionary could help you understand.

There are manga in every conceivable genre. You can read about school sports clubs, ninja or samurai, ordinary people, ordinary people who suddenly get thrust into magical or dangerous circumstances, giant robot battles, and more. The options are endless. Before buying a volume, be sure to flip through it to check for several important points. First, do you like the artwork? If it looks boring, you won't want to put much effort into reading it. Next, check the Japanese. Is there too much writing for your tastes? Too little? How about the amount and frequency of the kanji? You'll probably want to make sure the manga has furigana, the small hiragana or katakana beside the kanji to help you with pronunciation, because that will save you time looking up the words in a dictionary.

Finally, some advice on where to buy manga in Japan. Any regular bookstore will carry quite a bit of manga, usually, but you probably won't want to buy it there. It will be more expensive to buy new than used. In the large cities, there are famous stores such as Animate, Mandarake, and K-books. These stores carry much more than manga--they usually have anime, CDs, cards, action figures, video games, and other goods. Many towns may also have small, local used book stores. In Okazaki, where I studied, I bought most of my manga used at Bookoff. Each volume was between 105 and 300 yen (roughly 1-3 dollars). If you can't find manga used, though, you'll be happy to know that, even new, manga is cheaper in Japan than in the US. Volumes usually sell between 350 and 800 yen (3 to 8 dollars, give or take).

You'll quickly find that words you learn from reading will jump out at you in other places: in class, in conversation with friends, or on TV. I've also discovered that I remember words that I've learned from manga better than vocabulary I've learned from textbook memorization, because there was a visual correspondence and an invested interest in understanding the manga. So, find a series you enjoy and stick with it!