しばいぬのあたちたち 1巻

Very easy beginners 4koma

This is the first manga I read all the way through in Japanese and I thought it was really cute! A lot of the 4komas, especially at the start, don’t have any text at all except for the title, which I found made for really nice breaks between trying my best to read the pages that did have text. This is especially helpful later on where there’s a big section with a lot of text, and then a bunch of textless cute 4komas afterwards. I was able to get through it all in a couple of days because of this, despite the lack of experience.

There’s a bit of handwritten text, all of which you can get by without reading. It does make for good practice if you want to try and read it, though!

あたち speaks in a very cutesy and childish way, since they're a dog. There’s also occasional kiddy-words or slang, which I had trouble finding in a dictionary, but looking at the google photos results cleared up any confusion.

The only tricky parts, for me, were the occasional 4komas from the owner's perspective, since there was a lot more kanji. I mostly skimmed them, to be honest.

This is definitely not a book to learn from if you’ve already read two or more manga. But if you’re a beginner and you want to gain some confidence from being able to think “I read through a japanese manga on my own!” this is the book for you. (or if you just want a cute and easy 4koma about the daily life of a dog with an adorable art style!)