With how many words did you felt like you could enjoy reading a manga?

12 comments

1. I started orange when I was done with mnh1(n5 basically) and had like 1-1.5k vocabs down.

   You can start right ahead, but i would personally recommand to get atleast n5 and ~1k words down.

   Also everytime you then start a new Manga, you’ll always “struggle” at the start, because there are many new Manga specific words(in orange it were words like 約束 and 後悔 that were used in like every pannel) so dont get demotivated if you struggle at the first few chapters. After a while you will not only see your reading capabilites increase, but as your manga specific vocabulary increases, you will gradually have more fun reading through a series. After that you will start a new series and the circles starts again :D.

   I highly suggest orange, its quite easy and i enjoyed it a lot back then. the only “hard” words were written in katakana, so it was easy to know what they meant.

   Edit: Oops I forgot to answer your main question :D, as I said, theres always certain series specific vocabs that you most likely wont know(atleast at the start) so I wouldnt fuss that much about a certain ammount of known words, personally I would suggest 1k+ words as long as you wont be starting some more complex/adult manga

2. If you learn the vocab that shows up in the manga before reading it, ^(For example, Girls Last Tour and Yostuba both have vocab lists/Anki decks), then it’s just learning some grammar.

   So for a slice of life manga, about 100 words per chapter (less as you go on, as many words repeat).

3. I was at like 2k vocab/almost done with genki 2

4. Never read any. I preferred Nikkei Entertainment, Trendy, or Car & Driver. 🧠

5. I think I read yotsubato when I had roughly 900 words

   Note that I had to use the dictionary a lot.

   I would probably recommend more like 2k words though.

6. Around 5k

7. I read Girls’ Last Tour after Genki/Tobira and about level 40 on Wanikani.

8. I just started reading some shoujo manga. I’ve previously done an anki deck which covered both GENKI 1 and 2 + another anki deck for Tobira’s vocab for the first 8 chapters (I don’t know how much they helped me reading manga). I’ve recently begun using jpdb instead of anki because of the easy interface and the premade decks. I made a deck with the 2500 most common words from Jpdb’s database (which I felt were much more relevant to me than the vocabulary in the core decks, as I’m looking for vocabulary that’s often used in media like anime and manga instead of words from the news, newspapers and novels). I’m approximately 900 words in and also started a deck for a light novel and an anime. I haven’t registered all my words from anki to jpdb yet, but I would say I’ve got approximately ~2.5k vocabulary down as a whole (stuff from anki, jpdb and words I’ve picked up elsewhere).

   The manga reading is definitely fun, but it’s really daunting to start. I wasted so much time looking for the perfect manga to start with, but the scariness of jumping into native material subdued after reading one or two volumes of manga. I’m still religiously using a dictionary though, but that doesn’t stop me. You can check out the website learnnatively to get an approximate difficulty level of some manga series.

9. It doesn’t work like that, you could know 10,000 words and not understand anything even though you studied a bunch of grammar points. If you don’t understand the context, culture and meaning behind it, you won’t get much even though you technically might be able to decipher some words.

10. Not your exact question, but I started reading novels and manga around wanikani level 12. They recommend level 20 to read more comfortably. But I just pushed through.

    I’m wanikani level 55 now and still stumble across kanji I don’t recognize. But I’m glad for the foundation! (Took 2 years, I took my time.)

    But I’ve learned 1,800 kanji according to the app. And about 8,000 kanji/vocab/radicals

    Focusing now on Grammar. And adding vocabulary as I read using JPDB.

11. Tldr: Crystal Hunters manga, from a few hundred words. Now at 1k words, and beginning of Kimi no Na wa is comfortable enough (with some dictionary usage).

    —-

    https://crystalhuntersmanga.com/ is very accessible if you’re on the lower word count. It’s made for learners, and has free vocab packets for each volume. Unless you’re at a very beginner level, I’d go with the natural JP version, instead of the Beginners version (Vol 1 is free for both). I’ve read it on and off, since a few hundred words.

    I know around 1,000 words rn. I just read the first 22 pages of Kimi no Na wa, and it’s relatively comfortable. I know most words, and can piece together some of the ones I’m iffy on. It helps that I’ve read the English version before. I still have to look things up.

    When/Whether you’ll enjoy reading also depends how much you can tolerate constantly looking things up. I have a good tolerance for that, if it’s content I’m interested in. Also the more you read (anything in JP), the less exhausting reading becomes in general. That makes as much difference as vocab, imo.

    It’s a good idea to find manga with bilingual versions (there is/was a website called Bilingual Manga, and many manga are printed in multiple languages). This way you can have something to check against, and refer to when you’re stuck.

    If you’re on the earlier side of things (but not super early), you may be better off trying out the easier stories on Satori Reader. They’re all text, but have narration, definitions, curated grammar notes, the ability to toggle furigana based on your known kanji, and srs).

12. I personally did the JLPT Tango N5 deck which is a shared deck on anki. After this I could read relatively simple texts with a pop-up dictionary. I imagine I could read manga as well with the use of an OCR (optical character recognition) like KanjiTomo.

    This is how I use numbers. My main method of learning a language is reading with a dictionary. According to [Paul Nation](https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1044345.pdf) you need to read about 3 million words in English to build a vocabulary of about 9000. It’s not Japanese but I’m sure it won’t be off by too much. According to [this](https://www.quora.com/How-many-pages-of-an-actual-book-does-one-chapter-of-a-manga-relate-to) calculation a manga chapter is about 2 pages of a novel so it has about 500-800 words so let’s say 650 on average. This means you would need to read about 4600 chapters to get to this level.

    I personally like tracking actionable things because it holds me accountable and makes it able to set very specific time based goals. New cards on anki could be this actionable thing but I’d rather dip my balls in battery acid than use flashcards again. My preferred method is counting pages of books that I’ve read. I then take 300 words per page as an average and count that towards my long term goal. This way I know exactly how much I need to read on average to read a certain amount by, say, the end of this year. It also makes it possible to rate my progress based on the work I’ve done which makes it possible to set new goals that are attainable but realistic.