よつばと! 1

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.

I loved Yotsuba! It's the first manga I've finished in Japanese, and though it took me some time, it's because I was lazy. Really recommend it for beginners (N5~N4)! The first chapters where harder and I had to look up a LOT of words, but it got easier the more I read, and looking up words did not make it any less enjoyable. It does have a lot of colloquialism and Yotsuba not talking properly sometimes, but you get through it.

Really entertaining and funny. :)

A very good beginner Manga, but...

Overall it is a pretty easy beginner manga, with easy grammar as well ( N5 - mid N4 level). Once you get thru the first chapter, the rest of the book will went pretty smooth with a use of dictionary.

The story is surprisingly interesting( I wasn't expecting this, and Yotsuba is so cute!)

The only problem is Yotsuba sometimes do not speak properly, but you can usually identify this from other character's reaction.

Ok story, but good for learning

There’s not much of a story arc to yotsuba. It seems like something new is happening every few pages, so I didn’t really get sucked into a story to see what would happen next. I’m halfway through the series and it’s felt more like practice than an enjoyable story. Probably because it’s written for kids.

But since it’s written for kids the vocab is limited, the grammar is simple, and it’s about ordinary Japanese life so there’s no specialized vocabulary - perfect for a first manga.