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(4.70/5)The language in Akebi-chan no Sailorfuku is pretty simple. Despite the rural setting, there's very little unusual accents or dialects. There's a bit of furigana for less common words. There's more drama and conflict than you might expect, and I find that's usually noticeably harder than slice of life iyashikei.
Be aware that text can get pretty small at times, often making furigana and handwriting really hard to read. Additionally, there's a significant amount of variance in terms of how much text is in each volume of this manga, with some volumes having almost twice as much as others, by my estimation.
The anime adaption of Akebi-chan is excellent. It's very faithful to the original manga, which is EXTREMELY impressive given how meticulous and detailed the manga is (e.g. drawing complex movements millisecond by millisecond). I'd recommend trying the anime first, and then reading the manga if you liked the show.
Very cute story of a bunch of girls going through middle school, having fun and coming of age (I'm reading vol 4 rn). The large ensemble cast somehow doesn't feel overwhelming, and the characters are all enjoyable. The story overall feels very organic and easy to relate to. My only complaint would some unnecessary fetishy and fan service-y panels or scenarios (the author definitely has a foot fetish, and sometimes a very strange idea of clothing physics). Sometimes there's a contextual reason or narrative purpose for those sort of shots, sometimes not. It's easy enough to read past though most of the time, and I've definitely seen much worse. As a point of comparison, see オレが私になるまで, which features a similar setting and demographic, but doesn't have these elements.
That aside, the art style is very beautiful and expressive, without being overly loud or crowded, and really good at portraying all sorts of emotions, and a lot of physical motion sequences are done in a very cool almost shot by shot manner. There's some great occasional use of color as well.
Overall very enjoyable
Disclaimer: I think the manga was a bit over my abilities (which will be relevant later). Also, there was 3 year time gap between me watching anime and reading manga.
Middle school slice of life, spanned over a scatter of episodic and longer plotlines alike. Certainly a cohesive title with little to be said against it. A few non-chronological chapters make it sometimes harder for language learning readers to follow, which contrasts with easy to read episodic stories. That difficulty overshadows even lack of furigana, which only appears for the hardest of words and character's names. Long spanning stories make the difficulty curve raise in later books.
As usual for a slice of life, it is readable in smaller chunks, but because of the difficult long plotlines it might be best to read everything without long breaks.
Anime has a more straightforward plot, (which adds even more chaos to the whole experience for readers that experienced both), picking and choosing whatever it likes but at least in chronological order. Despite that it is also a coherent piece, but a slightly different experience, apart from the prologue. The team surely had a lot of freedom animating and constructing it the way they wanted. There are quite a few new scenes and a full new episode. More on that can be found here. Also I must say the artworks in the opening and ending are one of my favourites.
Considering related works, there is also a special (and hard to find) volume 友達100人できるかな？特選エピソード集, that collects friend related chapters from the main work. I am almost completely positive that all of them are copied from the main work. Maybe apart from some panels on the cover, but I think those are copied as well? It is certainly an option for people that want less long form structure/development (if at all available). Maybe it would be good to mix it with anime or first couple volumes. The main work will be still readable afterwards, just with a few episodes to be skipped here and there.
Coming back to the original work. Later volumes/chapters are getting way more convoluted. I think the current natively rating (of course in subjective and relative sense) is correct for the first few volumes, but too low considering the last few. It seems to me that this vagueness is deliberate but not aimed at language learners — however that might just be my low language comprehension. It mostly comes from the multitude of smaller plotlines, amount of different characters and the chronological chaos. The leisurely pace at which everything develops also gratifies reading at a dynamic pace. All that subtracts from the experience even for readers that can read the first volume just okay.
There are also light-novel-like almost fully written parts, which are not insanely long, but might pose major difficulty for readers that get a lot of context from drawn panels. They are, however, not essential to the story. But does one not read slice of life exactly for the not-essential stuff which could otherwise be skipped?
I must say, that the anatomical part of the art style does not fit this book in my opinion, but it is something to get used to. Like a well behaving girl that has this one habit that is just a little gross, but hard not to notice.