3月のライオン 1

Language Learning

In general, I think this Manga is a fairly good learning resource. The vocab used is, on the whole, pretty common due to its slice of life nature. But, there is still a fair amount of Shogi-specific terminology.

The difficulty is also not very consistent throughout. The character, 晴信 (Harunobu) likes to adopt a kind of antiquated speech style at times. And the difficulty goes up by a whole notch when you get to the Shogi one-page columns. These are interspersed in-between some of the chapters (there are four in total) and are written by a professional Shogi player. They introduce some aspect of the Shogi game or culture. I found them, by far, the most challenging parts of the Manga but I actually really enjoyed slowly picking them a part to decipher the meaning. You can, however, skip over them if you like because it's not part of the main story - just background context.

Entertainment

The story isn't particularly gripping but it's slow and thoughtful and I like it. I also didn't expect this going in to reading 3月のライオン, but I found reading about Shogi so fascinating. I got to learn about an interesting slice of Japanese culture whilst improving my language skills at the same time - win-win!

content: This manga has an anime adaptation. If you read this there is a good chance that you are farmiliar with the anime. If not, its easy to find a information about the series in english. So I won't say much about the content.

This is not a shogi sports manga, though I imagine if you know or like shogi, that's a plus and there is a lot of talk about shogi and lots of actual moves. I have no idea how much of that is just for flavor or if someone who knows the game would actually be able to follow along.

The manga is very much about people. Mostly about the protagonist Rei, who is an orphan and young shogi professional, as well as three sisters he befriends. But there are also many arcs that focus on other shogi players, mostly Rei's opponents, giving us a window into their lives and thoughts.

anime: The anime adaptation is very much 1:1. Almost every episode corresponds to two chapters in the manga. So if you want to watch the anime and read the manga in parallel, that's very much possible

language: You have the following type of content:

• Slice of life scenes. Those are typically very simple.
• Drama with actual plot. Not terribly complicated, usually.
• Lots of scenes where people geek out about food or shogi. Those tend to have a good amount of technical vocabulary. But it's not really important to understand much.
• There is a lot of internal monolouge. Shogi matches are spend almost completely inside one of the players head. Those scenes are more literary and usually make heavy use of metaphor.

opinion: I think I'm pretty terrible with words, so I don't want to write much about how much and why I like this series. But it feels wrong to write a review witout mentioning my own opinion on wheter its any good or not. It is good. I like it quite a bit. The characters are very likeable and interesting.