転生したらスライムだった件 1

Rewarding if you are already a fan of the series

This is a review the series as far as I've read it, which is up to volume 12. I've spent a LOT of my time studying Japanese working with these books. I don't regret it, but its also hard to recommend to others. The main thing that made me stick with it is the audio books. They are done by Rumuru's voice actor from the anime, and I really like the Rimuru voice.

Entertainment: I loved the anime, and I really liked the books overall. If you've seen the anime, you know what makes it good. And if you want to learn about all the little details and the things the anime left out, the books can be very rewarding. But the pacing is slow, and if your not invested already then it may be hard to stay interested. It doesn't help that the series doesn't really pick up until volume 5. Volume 3 in particular, I honestly thought was a snooze-fest.

This series is full of world building and info dumps. It has big build up followed by big rewards. But as a Japanese learner who reads slowly, this is the kind of thing I usually avoid. I think that for learning, you want things that are consistently engaging and interesting from sentence to sentence.

Language learning: There are two major downsides from a learning perspective. First is the abundant use of katakana words. This is common in the genre, but this series seems to use even more than normal. Words are written in Kanji (to give meaning) but with katakana furigana (for the reading). As an English speaker, you are likely to recognize the intended word from the reading, and I don't think the kanji are worth paying much attention to. If you are using jpdb.io to study vocab, these words are particularly troublesome because jpdb does not recognize them as katakana words, and will teach them to you with normal/hiragana readings.

The second problem is the inconsistence difficulty. The dialogue and slice of life sections are not too hard language wise (though if you are not reading along with the audiobook, it can be difficult to tell who is talking in dialogue). But the info dumps are long and difficult, and I found often made me want to skip them...or just stop reading altogether.