ドラえもん一年生 学年別ドラえもん名作選

Easy manga that’s worth a read

Language-wise this manga is not too difficult, but the main challenges will be lack of kanji and some casual speech. Luckily there is a book club on Wanikani to help with any grammar questions.

I felt that this manga was worth reading because of the cultural popularity of the Doraemon character; I always like reading foundational works for this reason. The episodes were pretty cute, but I probably wouldn’t go seek out more Doraemon volumes to read.

You’re likely better off reading a normal manga

While I enjoyed the cute and short bite sized adventures in this book, I initially picked it up as I saw it was targeted at first years and I wanted an easy read to get into native material. The reality is though, as a foreigner learning Japanese, my Kanji knowledge is way higher than that of a first year in Japan, but my understanding of the language and its grammar are way, way, lower. This made for a really more frustrating experience, as often I would know a word but have a hard time parsing or recognizing it written in hiragana, especially when it was surrounded by a grammar point I hadn’t covered yet. While knowing/recognizing words without kanji is a good skill, for beginners such as myself, kanji often actually help parse text, so I wouldn’t recommend this book to other learners. Just take the plunge on something slightly more “difficult”