I am currently learning Japanese in Duolingo. Which is a somewhat good starting point for absolute beginners like me. But I am wondering what would be the authentic material to study more in a fun way. Like I want to use the words I learned in Duolingo in those materials. I found that reading raw manga improves the Japanese but I couldn’t find the right one.
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I don’t mean to sound discouraging, but if you are learning with Duolingo then you are probably going to have a very hard time with anything written for native speakers, unless maybe if you are very far into the course. Having said that, you can search for easy manga here:
[https://learnnatively.com/resources/search/?type=manga&sort=level_asc](https://learnnatively.com/resources/search/?type=manga&sort=level_asc)
If you want a personal recommendation for a good beginner manga: [からかい上手の高木さん](https://learnnatively.com/book/9e1edcb4ba/)
Read the sidebar there’s tonnes of information.
Inb4 anyone gives you shit for using duolingo, I started exactly there and now I live, work and converse in Japan so do whatever you feel is helpful to your goals and be aware of when it no longer serves you. (I ended up abandoning it around the 4th checkpoint or castle or whatever several years ago)
Perhaps what you’re looking for are graded readers. They’re simple stories that scale with your level and help apply vocabulary and grammar and help disambiguate the more difficult to grasp concepts. [A good resource is Tadoku](https://tadoku.org/japanese/free-books/) good luck!
Absolute beginners should read something like the Tae Kim guide and memorize the basic grammar. I’m not so sure I’d recommend any manga for beginners, but stuff like [Atashin’chi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atashin%27chi) is probably pretty good. The [official youtube channel](https://www.youtube.com/@Atashinchi/videos) seems to have a lot of the animated version available as well.
You’re really early in, but I think video games are the best jumping in point! My biggest rec for a first game is Tomodachi collection. Lots of useful speech and lots of poorly voice dialogue. You’ll pick up a lot of food and item names and some greeting and such.
Download a Minna No Nihongo pdf and watch the YouTube videos that cover it page by page. This is free. It works. No tricks. No hacks. Just study.
Hmm duolingo is a good starting point.
Taekims grammar guide / japanese from zero
Can try Umi to learn from native content in an app.