I'm looking for a manga to train my very modest (I just started learning Japanese a few months ago) Japanese skills. It should be something for children that is easy to read and without much kanjis, preferably about an everyday topic so I can learn some common vocabulary. Thanks

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This has already been asked more than once, try this thread http://www.mangaupdates.com/showtopic.php?tid=35912&pa ge=1#post561330

Yotsubato! is suggested there and i think it fits the everyday category.

Yotsubato sounds good, thanks. But not much else usable from that thread so I would like some other suggestions. Maybe something even simpler than Yotsubato.

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Well how about Asari-chan it has 98 volumes and is ongoing on top of being a Kodomo manga (Genre that should exist in this site btw), you have much to read if you want and it's about the life of that girl so everyday things should pop out.

Also, Doraemon Plus since it has the advantage of being fully scanlated if you need to compare with an English translation.

Asari-chan looks good, but I can't find raws for it :/
Same with Chibi Devi, another kodomo manga. Unfortunately there's no raws for it either.

So the task should probably rather be: name me a kodomo manga that fits here and has raws available on the internet...

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There probably aren't raws for many/any kodomo manga available, though someone will undoubtedly prove me wrong. As a learner, though, it's a good idea to pick up a series you love. When I started teaching myself Japanese, I just picked up a series I was reading and looked at the raws. The benefits were twofold: I could understand more than I might otherwise because I was familiar with the characters and the storyline, and I had also read the volume in English, so looking at it in Japanese helped me to understand the structure of the Japanese language.

Secondly, IT'S JUST REALLY FREAKING FUN. If the series is something you enjoy, it skyrockets your motivation to learn. Starting with something a little above your current comprehension capacity is also good, since it gives you something to shoot for.

As is, I'd suggest a slice of life manga. If you happen to be reading a slice-of-life and are really enjoying it, see if you can find it raw. You'll probably run into a lot of everyday vocab in there, too. Make sure it's shoujo or shounen (so that it's more likely to have furigana).

If you can, download WAKAN. It's a desktop dictionary. It sounds like you can read at least hiragana and probably katakana, so you can decipher the pronunciation of words. If you look those up when you encounter them, you'll remember them more easily, especially if you're reading something you enjoy. I know a fair amount of kanji, and I can still clearly remember EXACTLY what panels I learned a lot of them from. If you can't download Wakan, try Jim Breen's online Japanese dictionary. If you type "wwwjdic" into google, I'm pretty sure it will be your first result.

Sorry for rambling.

Happy learning!

Edit: On a random note, if you're not already familiar with most of the commonly-used particles, try to learn one or two a day. (I'm sure you're already familiar with a lot of them, like wa, ga, wo, ni, no, de, etc.) You will see them on a regular basis in any manga you read, and that, too, will cement your learning.

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Thank you for your post. I just downloaded WAKAN and it looks really good. And I guess I take your advice and start with a manga I've already read first. Still taking suggestions though ^__^

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I agree with Alaena, reading a manga you love and already has an English translation is a great way to keep your motivation, challenge yourself, and check your translation, but I would advise caution in what you pick up. My first choice when I started using manga to learn Japanese was Banana Fish, however it is a 1980s, seinen manga about street gangs, so the language in it is very masculine and rough. It was interesting to read, but not so helpful in daily life.

In terms of improving your general ability, I would check out Tae Kim's grammar guide. It makes learning Japanese grammar really easy. http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/

For vocab I use both Kanjibox http://kanjibox.net/ and Memrise http://www.memrise.com/home/

For kanji, I strongly recommend using Heisig's in conjunction with this site http://kanji.koohii.com/

If you want a textbook, Minna no Nihongo and Japanese for Busy People are pretty useful. Another thing I do is write a diary every day to practice. If you don't know a Japanese person, you can get corrections on http://lang-8.com/ pretty quickly.

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The pen is mightier than the sword...and considerably easier to write with.

After trying to read a number of manga in Japanese I found out that Tsuki Tsuki! and Maga Tsuki are fairly easy to understand. Both of those are ecchi harems and not stuff with great potential, but that's probably why the vocabulary is easy to understand. You do need to use dictionary to read those, but you can find almost every kanji by furigana alone (I really rarely had to redraw the kanji in ime pad). Tip: Try writing down kanji (and words containing kanji) that appear often and are simple to draw or which are made of other simple kanji characters.

Most of the manga I do want to read and are untranslated are still beyond my 1,5 year worth of learning Japanese. For instance Kaibutsu Oujo (of which I did manage to read one chapter but with some difficulty) had much more complicated vocabulary than the two I mentioned earlier.

Making yourself familiar with various grammar forms can help a lot too. Once you make yourself familiar with one, you'll start noticing it in manga and anime and it helps really learning it.

P.S. There is a freeware OCR called Tesseract which can recognize japanese characters, but you need a 3rd party GUI to really use it. I tested the OCR on some LNs using gImageReader GUI and the results were quite good, but the GUI has a few flaws (one of them is a bug which prevents copying text).