よつばと! 1

Great read for starting your journey with manga

This is the first manga I've read and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Pros:

• Easy vocabulary (compared to other mangas)
• Interesting story, enjoyable for adults and youngsters alike
• Fun and likable characters especially main character Yotsuba

Cons:

• contains some slang expressions that can be puzzling

Silly girl has silly antics

• easy to digest and break down
• even if there were sentences/words I didn't know it was still easy to understand the meaning through context
• yotsuba is an interesting character to read about, and plays her MC roll well
• overall really good manga for beginners

Idk my actual Japanese level I feel like im relatively lower N4 (my guess)

The story is cute and hilarious. It's currently my favorite manga series because reading it just makes me happy.

It is also great to read as a beginner to Japanese (JLPT N5/N4). The slang is the most challenging part, but overall it's the easiest manga I have found so far.

A must-read for everyone

The number 1 must read manga for anyone learning Japanese. You'll not only pick up useful expressions, expand your vocabulary and practice your Japanese in a very natural way, but also learn and see a lot of what the everyday life in Japan looks like.

Fun but not necessarily the best first read for a learner

Yotsuba's antics are funny and the chapters are mostly independent, meaning you don't have to read everything at once.

I managed to learn a lot, but the first time I tried picking it up all the casual language and contractions were too much for me, so I decided to go for something simpler and came back to this later once I had improved.

Another good thing about this manga is its popularity, meaning there are a ton of resources around it.

Harder than it looks

The content of this book has nothing to do with the written Japanese from textbooks - slang, hiragana everywhere , contractions , missing particles, missing kanjis, you’ll have to look up quite a few things. Now, it’s still funny ( especially if you have children ), and you end up learning quite a bit. Much to my surprise, I found this very enjoyable.

Tip : if you’re stuck, ask someone, or ChatGPT to break it down for you. There’s only a limited number of patterns you’re missing.

Overrated starter material

Slice of nothing happens with children´s speech, abbreviations and full of hiragana. All of which makes this manga actually harder to read than others.

An excellent first manga

The plethora of resources available for this manga make it an excellent introduction to reading. Reading packs, vocab lists, and the WK book club mean that when you get stuck (and you will get stuck), you'll be able to get help.

This was the first manga I ever read, and it was fun to get through. The content was entertaining, and I never struggled too much with anything.

If you're around N4, then I would highly recommend this as your introduction to native content

Easy & wholesome

It's a breath of fresh air when one's used to reading more serious stuff. As the titles goes, it's pretty easy to read (unless you have a small vocabulary, you won't be able to get many new words out of it) and wholesome. I'll definitely give the whole series a shot. I guess it's probably good to get used to reading manga; I don't know if it'd be enough to jump straight into novels, though.

not too bad

I have around 1k words learned and some basic grammar. Could read this without having to look up every word. Was kinda nice :)

I started this series because I see it's one of the most commonly recommended first manga series to read in japanese. There is good reason behind it, it's a really cute, entertaining story that uses fairly limited vocab that represent every day life.

A word of caution though to learners is many of the children in the story use little to no kanji in their speech. If you rely heavily on kanji like me then you'll struggle parsing a lot of their speech.

Extremely enjoyable

This was such a fun read! The premise is simple but with Yotsuba's funnily cute everyday antics you won't be bored.

It's a slice-of-life type of manga so the vocabulary is pretty much just everyday stuff which is really good for a beginner getting eased into reading in Japanese. That said, the manga poses some challenges too because of Yotsuba's child-like speech and majority of the language spoken is casual.

Great for a First Read

The story is really easy to follow, and there isn't much confusing grammar or unknown kanji (especially considering I believe it all has furigana). However for someone who might only have used textbooks or without much experience in actual spoken Japanese, there are some things that can be difficult or confusing. For example すげぇ instead of すごい. There are small colloquialisms like this all through the book, but if read aloud, these problems should resolve themselves!

Great for beginners

I'd gauge myself around N4 level and was able to complete the book without to much trouble. There are some colloquial terms but it's mostly Yotsuba and it's not that bad. All in all it was a great learning experience and to make things better the stories were much more entertaining than I expected going into it. Highly recommend.