I strongly recommend Crystal Hunters to beginners

I’ve been learning Japanese for almost a year now, but I went pretty slowly, I was clearly not studying enough each day until a few months ago, and I think I’m somewhere between N5 and N4. The main hurdle I faced was not being good enough yet to read manga, which is something I enjoy doing and that would therefore make studying japanese for more hours each day a bit easier.

I saw someone recommend Crystal Hunters on this subreddit, went to check what it was about and now just finished volume 5, which is the last available volume at the time I’m making this post. (I’ve read the “Japanese natural” version, so I can’t give any insight about the other version.)

At the beginning, mostly for the first 2 volumes, it seemed a bit too childish, which might be a consequence of the self-imposed grammar and vocabulary limitations, so I was mostly reading it as I would read a story in a textbook, just as a mean of practice.

However I found myself actually enjoying the story itself once the story took off in volume 3. Though it still stays relatively simple, the characters are pretty likable and I ended up way more engaged than I thought I would.

As for the difficulty, it’s pretty easy throughout, but still gets slightly more complex as it goes, using more and more kanji and introducing new grammar structures. By the end of the 5th book, the mechanical sounding sentences found in the 1st one had almost completely disappeared, and it felt more like a regular (though very accessible) fantasy manga than like a learning resource.

Finally seeing my studying paying off, and going from painfully reading sentences word by word to reading them almost naturally was extremely rewarding, so if you know of other manga/novels accessible to beginners, please let me know. I’ve heard よつばと is pretty beginner-friendly, so I think I’ll try it out.

EDIT : Here’s the link if you’re interested [https://crystalhuntersmanga.com/](https://crystalhuntersmanga.com/)