ONE PIECE 1

One Piece is a great story and a good read for language learners.

Pirates, hopes, dreams, fighting are all staples of One Piece, and this first volume is where it all begins. It is a good beginning to a great series and the story itself is not something I will focus on.

For language learners One Piece can be a bit of a mixed bag. While it does contain full furigana and generally excellent layouts, the speech itself contains a fair amount of slang and this can be difficult to handle. Reading it aloud will help clarify a significant portion of the slang. I distinctly remember non-Joyo Kanji appearing in this first volume which can easily be handled with a dictionary look-up. Overall, the vocab is fairly simple, and the speech is even more simple. The work itself is accessible and generally a fun read.

If you are high N3 or low N2 level this good for extensive reading. Most of the action and ideas are conveyed well with illustrations, but denser text can cause you to stumble. One Piece is a manga that you can go through and re-read later on to gain a better understanding or a better appreciation of the unique styles of speech from its characters.

Do not worry about getting full comprehension on your first pass through. This book (and the series itself) serves as a decent candidate for a learner become comfortable with reading Japanese manga and is worth re-reading again in the future.

Okay, I'm biased, I do love One Piece. It's story about a goofy pirate world where everyone is trying to find the "One Piece". It's got awesome fights with cool special abilities, incredible world building and you might be surprised at how amazing the character writing is (there are some truly tragic character backstories, you might even find yourself tearing up!).

If you are OK with moderate amounts of slang or have read a bunch of other shounen manga before this will be an easy read. There's furigana for everything, so no trouble looking up words. If you aren't too confident with slang then you might find yourself struggling a little as there are some characters that talk in unusual ways. As far as vocab goes there's nothing too complicated here, obviously there's a fair amount of nautical terms thrown about.