I have toolbars on my PC that can help me define and pronounce a word if I scroll over, but the toolbars don’t help me read many manga sources. For those of you who learn Japanese with manga, how do you get around this? If this is not a thing on PC, is there a way to read manga on iOS and do the same kind of thing?
29 comments
Is it your only source of learning? What are you trying to read?
Ive done genki 1&2 as well as other study and i can read quite a few manga just fine without supplementary aids. If its a manga with really specific or niche subjects, then i need to pull out a dictionary but even then it will generally just repeat those vocabularies.
Your best bet would be an OCR like KanjiTomo or Yomiwa or something. There’s a bunch if you Google “Japanese OCR”.
That said…
I haven’t tried using one for manga but I wouldn’t be surprised if they have significant issues recognizing portions of the text. Especially the “background” dialogue that’s normally written in chicken scratch or the weird wavy text that are sometimes used when someone is scared or something.
Probably the only surefire way is to just push through while stopping every 10 seconds till you are good enough to not need to stop every 10 seconds.
I suffered through it. The more you learn, the less you have to stop. Also at some point you want to switch to using native J-J dictionaries instead of J-E ones as it greatly improves your understanding.
Ways to look up words:
– Handwriting on phone keyboard app
– Handwriting on Google Translate
– Radical search or handwriting on Jisho
– OCR
Edit: See comments regarding what is meant when people say “switch to J-J”. It doesn’t mean you should abandon J-E/E-J resources but rather start to use J-J more and more, and only use J-E/E-J as necessary to aid your understanding of the native definitions of the word, or if you are translating something and are wondering what a close English equivalent might be. Just don’t fall into the trap of giving too much weight to J-E translations, as these are merely glosses and don’t always capture the meaning of the Japanese word accurately. Think of them as options for translating the word that apply in certain circumstances but won’t necessarily always apply. It’s not an ideology or rule that you have to follow, just do what works for you. Bilingual resources have their uses. Knowing when (and when not) to use them is a skill you should acquire.
there’s also the no-lookup method, which i’d try sprinkled in with other techniques. literally skip over what you cannot read, get whatever you can out of it, attempt to guess from context (which is it’s own skill that requires practise, too), perhaps circling words you don’t know. then look up the words at the end of a chapter or section, spend some time memorizing them, and go back and re-read. repeat a handful of times and then move on.
Best way is probably just to find simpler manga with furigana for now. Makes lookup much faster than trying to draw out the kanji or pick radicals every time. I found out that Nagatoro has furigana a little while ago so I think I’m gonna make that the first one I read in Japanese whenever I get around to it. I had hesitated at reading it in English before because the high schooler language and dialogue is such an important part of the show’s vibe and the couple scanlations I looked at just didn’t recapture it at all.
It sounds like you need to work on your vocabulary or the manga (edit: not mango) you’re reading are too hard for your level
So one option is to use a website that allows Yomichan to work on manga like https://bilingualmanga.net/
There are also OCR tools like Kaku which help with reading on your phone though I’m not positive it’s on iOS.
I’m currently reading Yotsuba as my first manga, which has furigana and pretty simple language. The WaniKani book club for it has links to a pre-made vocab list that I keep open as I read, which is faster to use than a dictionary. I imagine I’ll switch to a dictionary eventually but for now it helps me keep going with the content.
do you mean something like [this](https://streamable.com/8f0r9d)? You can OCR manga with Mokuro and review it with jpdb-browser-reader
Edit:
Related:
(WIP) Steps for extracting text from manga to use with JPDB using Mokuro:
https://hiddensystem.github.io/Japanese/Tutorial/Extracting%20Manga%20Text%20For%20JPDB.html
I want to build muscle, but I don’t want to experience muscle soreness. Any suggestions?
As others have suggested, get simpler material with furigana. Although I will say that if you just power through and just guess what the meaning of the kanji is, you will end up learning it more solidly. Especially if you actually do look-ups and frequently look it up. I remember being very frustrated at first but over time I just accepted I would be slow and meanings ambiguous but I ended up memorizing a ton of kanji from repeated look ups and frustration. I did make it a point to memorize all of the kanji radicals to help speed things along.
Aside of apps where you can handraw Kanji or use OCR, there’s no real way around it at first. Manga with furigana are easier to read in the beginning as well.
Though from own experience, you’ll just have to push through this phase until it gets better regardless. Especially manga, depending on genre, has a big repetition in vocab so it will get easier.
Keep pushing through!
There’s something called dictionary. Just find the word there 🙂
For iOS try the Kantan manga app, much easier than using a dictionary for looking up words (you can just tap the word for the definition/reading)
You get around it by keeping on reading. Soon you’ll be stopping every 20 seconds, then 30 seconds etc etc until you can read through something without needing to stop.
Will you still come across words that you don’t know? Sure, but that happens all the time even in your native language. You can either workout what it means through context or you spend 5 seconds looking it up in a dictionary.
Mokuro and yomichan is the easiest way. I’ve read things way above my level like vagabond and berzerk using this method.
Most of the other methods listed in this thread take more time (not going to say inefficient because it depends on what your goal is). But you can grind through things like Tokyo revengers and before you know it you won’t even need mokuro or yomichan to read it.
I have been using Google Translate/Lens with Japanese games on switch, but if I want to translate just single word, it takes far too long to stay in context and I need to copy-paste to another application if I wand pronunciation or alternative translations, and if I use it for whole lines it either works, taking away the actual reading exercise, or doesn’t translate the parts I need help with. Anyone have good camera-OCR to dictionary for Android?
You don’t get around it
Work harder
Read a bunch of light novels first
Read Crystal hunters!
I use Mokuro and Mokuro2pdf to convert manga into PDFs with selectable text that can be read on browsers with pop up dictionaries. It takes a little bit of set up but It’s a much more fluid experience
I can’t recommend Kantan Manga enough. It’s an app that uses OCR to look up the definitions and readings and it’s extremely accurate and user-friendly. Just import your manga and you’re good to go!
Also natively.com has a manga section ranking by difficulty, it’s super useful to find things on your level.
Apart from what everyone has suggested, you could also try using jpdb.io beforehand. They don’t have pre made decks for manga, but if what you’re trying to read has an anime adaptation, you’ll find pretty much identical dialogue anyway.
Look up Mokuro OCR. By far better than anything suggested here so far.
Heres a demo
https://kha-white.github.io/manga-demo/
Mokuro.
Youre welcome
You could try reading Crystal Hunters. It’s a manga that teaches Japanese. ❤️
For light novels, Amazon Kindle reader will allow you to highlight a word in-place on the page and pull up a dictionary reference.
Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like that works with manga. On the bright side, many popular manga i can think of have LN versions (or were adapted from an original LN work in the first place), and I consider manga generally easier to read, so maybe you could study using LNs for a while and then go back to the manga with better reading comprehension
Manga is a learning aid. But not something to use to learn itself.
If you wanted to learn calculus, you wouldnt just take a bunch of numbers and figure out what they mean abstractly and attempt to construct formulas. You would learn the language of math.
If you wanted to learn Japanese, you wouldn’t just try and arrange unknown kanji and words on a page to get their meaning. You would actually learn the language first. Then apply what you learned by reading.
TLDR:You are struggling because you are attempting to use a resource that’s good for applying what’s learned, to do learning itself.
OCR Reader