I've been getting into Japanese lately and I thought manga would be a fun way to keep up with it, so I'm just now learning that it's easier to find them online in English apparently.

Anybody else run into this problem and have suggestions? I don't need to find manga per se, but otoh I'm not interested in reading the news (which is what I usually get redirected to). I also only know about 400 漢字 so far, so I'm avoiding super-complex stuff for now.

Really I am just trying to find ways to maintain my Japanese without draining all my free time, so anything fun that keeps constant exposure with the language would be very appreciated.

Last edited by Flumen at 2:54 pm, Jun 29 2014

Maybe you could join a scanlation team(s) as a translator? That would give you access to Japanese raws.

Reading manga raws, playing games in Japanese, watching anime in Japanese without subtitles. You could also try translating Japanese into English for manga, doujinshi, fanart, websites, blogs, videos, CDs, or games.

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1. Read shounen or shoujo manga since they have furigana (400 kanji is insufficient otherwise, you'd spend too much time looking them up).
2. Most popular manga have raws that can be found through google. E.g. google "yotsubato manga raw" and download. (For some reason, Yotsuba gets recommended to beginners all the time.)

Last edited by cmertb at 9:18 pm, Jun 28 2014

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Active translations list
Completed translations list
Dropped translations

Thanks for the suggestions guys! I'll be sure to look into shojo and translation teams.

What I did, was download raws with furigana and translate those. Try looking for mangas that you really want to read but the escalators dropped. In my case, it was 9 Banme no Musashi. Clean raws, furigana, not too complicated. Not much to complain about. At the time, I barely knew how to read hiragana lol. Pure memorization, and having a chart beside me. XD

Well... I cheated a bit though, since I still read kanji as Chinese sometimes.

Last edited by reanseih at 10:00 am, Jun 29 2014

If you're weak on kanji it's a good idea to start on mangas aimed at children, that's why Yotsubato! is often recommended for beginners. These types of manga avoid slang, tend to be more slice of life with common vocabulary, and usually give furigana for almost everything which can be a big help.

Shounen Jump mangas can be very difficult for beginners, having to always consult a dictionary or being stuck on complex grammar gets boring real fast. And the vocabulary in fantasy/sci fi which plagues them tends not to be that useful in RL.

So with that in mind here are a few recs :
Chii's Sweet Home
Doraemon
Crayon Shinchan

You could also try children newspapers like Kodomo Asahi (http://www.asagaku.com/) or Kodomo Times (http://www.chunichi.co.jp/kodomo/)