よつばと! 1

It's so boring

I've tried reading it many times and always ended dropping it. It's boring, full of slang and the lack of kanji sometimes makes it hard to understand for a beginner.

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

STORY

Incredibly funny slice-of-life manga. We meet Yotsuba, a little girl full of energy and creativity. We follow her everyday adventures and those of the people around her.

GOOD ASPECTS

• The story is very entertaining and engaging.
• The artwork is great and I love the hilarious expressions.
• Each character is so unique.
• As Yotsuba learns the language, so do we.
• Yotsuba is so funny that it makes me wanna have kids.
• The grammar used in this manga is around N4-N3.
• Most Kanjis come with furigana.

BAD ASPECTS

• It has very colloquial language, and it might be difficult for beginners used to "Neutral Japanese".
• Yotsuba speaks entirely in ひらがな, and trust me, the absence of Kanji can throw you off sometimes.
• I didn't get some of the jokes at first and had to ask GPT for clarification.

DO I RECOMMEND IT?

Most certainly.

Even though I mentioned some “Bad Aspects,” I do think it is an easy read and a great bridge between textbooks and native material. The comedy is quite "smart" and I think it will be appealing to most readers.

FAVORITE CHAPTER IN THIS VOLUME

第３話・地球温暖化

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.

Quite funny and enjoyable. In some ways more difficult than a lvl 25 novel

Yotsuba is completely in her own toddler-like world, and greatly enjoying it, regardless of what's going on. It's funny to see the adults having to deal with Yotsuba's whims.

In terms of difficulty.... The content is super simple, but the phrasing and slang will be brand new to anyone coming from a textbook. Beyond that, I sometimes found words a bit more difficult to parse than when reading a novel, due to the lack of Kanji. For example, there was a bubble with the following:

はっ

しーん！

Due to the lack of Kanji (combined with my lack of experience), this looked like two sound effects, or nonsense. I later found out that it's 1 word, and a word I would have recognized with Kanji... But you need to become familiar with this type of writing/speech if you're getting into manga.

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

Cute simple read, but it still can be difficult

A lot has been said about the よつばと! series that I agree with, although I think it's more difficult that a lot of people make it out to be. While a lot of the subjects are simplistic and often spoken in plain Japanese, there's still a lot of Japanese that you'll have to know to understand the full story. The series is quite an easy read for me at my Japanese level, but two things that often trip me up are Yotsuba misremembering words (and me taking a few seconds to realize that, yes, that is actually nonsense she's saying) and that Yotsuba speaks in hiragana only which makes her speech more difficult to parse than everyone else's. I would still recommend the series to someone early in their reading journey, but honestly probably not as their first manga series.

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.

cute, charming, and childish

Yotsuba was a very cute slice of life manga. You can kind of come and go as you please since most chapters are independent of one another. Yotsuba is young so adults in the story often help correct her Japanese or naturally explain concepts to her. I thought this was such a fun way to learn! I recommend not looking words right away (if Yotsuba is the one talking) since she might be saying them wrong. This and her childlike way of speaking may add to the difficulty especially if you aren't used to the way Japanese children speak. The story overall is very charming but I can understand why many people might find it boring or repetitive. I could read multiple chapters without looking words up so I think that's why I was motivated to continue reading.

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.

Entertainment:

Not sure what to say here. Absolutely fantastic. The story is so cute, touching and funny all at once, i never got bored reading this. The entire dynamic all the characters have is fantastic and the art is super nice. Especially moments and expressions are captured very well. By far my favourite moments / arcs were the bicycle arc and the Tokyo arc.

Language Learning:

Well, it is often recommended as a first or at least very beginner Manga, and it is indeed very easy. But it also has a lot of Hiragana, weird fonts and colloquial and child like language. It isn't easy always, and i did not understand a lot of parts of it, but i usually understood most of it, which makes it still good, and i think just for how much fun this Manga is it is definitely worth it.

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!