Reading readiness
When you start reading for first-ever native Japanese material, it may be the hardest thing you’ve encountered yet in learning Japanese.
It won’t even be reading, as you’ll find yourself deciphering the material.
Before you dive in, it’s good to assess your readiness.
ひらがな
Being able to read ひらがな without trouble is perhaps the biggest requirement. The majority of the text in manga will be in ひらがな (unless you are reading manga without furigana).
If you haven’t mastered reading ひらがな yet, but choose to move forward with reading no matter how many grueling hours it’ll take each day, expect to find your recognition and reading speed gradually increasing over time.
カタカナ
Are you decent at reading カタカナ?
You may be surprised at just how often it gets used.
Loan words from English and other language appear in カタカナ, but so do certain Japanese words from time to time.
漢字
The biggest hurdle to reading manga is 漢字.
A single manga volume may include anywhere from 500 to 1,000 (or more) unique 漢字.
Thankfully, many manga include ふりがな readings beside all 漢字 in text boxes.
When deciding on your first manga to read, I highly recommend selecting one with ふりがな.
It’s not a requirement, but it lets you focus on vocabulary and grammar.
Vocabulary
Do you know many vocabulary words yet?
Reading words you don’t know can be a real drag. Here you’re just trying to understand a simple sentence, and you’re needing to figure out each. word. you. come. across.
Even once you know the meaning of a word, your brain isn’t prepared to smoothly read words it’s only encountered for the first time. You simply have to accept this fact and keep going.
The more you see a word, the better you’ll get at recognizing and reading it.
The best way to keep seeing common words is to keep reading.
For less common words, you may want to use SRS software to force repetition to increase recognition.
If you have access to a frequency list for the manga you plan to read, be sure to use it to pre-learn the most common words you don’t yet know.
Grammar
Before you dive into reading your first manga, it’s recommended that your grammar knowledge is around “N5”, the lowest level of the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test.
It’s not required.
You can start reading with almost no grammar knowledge.
But it’ll be hard.
I mean very hard.
On each manga panel, you can spend hours reading up on grammar, trying to learn it as best you can, in hopes that you’ll at least vaguely understand what’s going on in a scene.
Deciphering at this pace, it’s very easy to lose all motivation.
What if you’re the type of person who can’t learn grammar inside and out from a textbook?
That’s actually not a big issue. What’s most important is initial exposure.
Rather than trying to understand the grammar-teaching material, aim to expose yourself to the material.
A shallow understanding will get you a wide breadth of knowledge, increasing the chances you’ll recognize grammar when you see it, even if you don’t yet understand it.
It gives you a greater scaffolding, from which you can refer back to lesson material later and you can build your understanding up from that.
Four weeks is all you need to expose yourself to the basics.
Will that make reading your first native material easy?
No.
But you’ll feel you have a fighting chance.
Resources and pacing
If you want to start reading manga, but don’t have any grammar studied yet, schedule out a month of exposing yourself to grammar.
Do you own a textbook, such as Genki I?
Read through one lesson every two days. Don’t worry about understanding everything. This is all about initial exposure. Depending on the length of your textbook, this pace may be enough to get through the whole book within a month.
Don’t have the cash for a textbook?
Tae Kim’s grammar guide is free. Work your way through a Basic Grammar chapter every two days, and you’ll be ready to go.
Are walls of text not your learning style?
Check out Cure Dolly’s fully-subtitled Japanese From Scratch video series. Go down the playlist in order, and watch at least one video every two days. Even better if you can get in one video each day.