MAR 1

Great Intro Manga for typical Shounen vocab

For context on the rating, I've just registered to take the N3 exam this December. I bought this entire series from Book-Off back in 2011 on my last day of my short trip to Japan. I had just finished my first year of Japanese classes at university and remembered seeing this series on Toonami back in high school. Since it was only 15 volumes, and looked a whole lot easier than Yu Yu Hakusho, I carried the stack to the counter and clumsily asked the employee if they took an American debit card. (I'd already spent all the cash I'd converted on food, clothes, and trinkets.) Two more years of university classes did not prepare me to read manga, or really any native material that didn't come with an attached vocabulary list. (A sidenote to say: I was not a very good student by any means. It's a miracle I got through 3 years of university Japanese without much studying. But I was young, a first-generation college student, and I had no idea how to learn). But I finished my formal classroom time with Japanese in disbelief that this manga series I'd bought two years earlier was still outside my reach. Then I got busy and had almost no interaction with Japanese for about 8 years.

But in March of this year, I started studying again. And in 5 months of self study (YouTube, Anki, podcasts, some poking around in textbooks) I have finally gotten to the point where I was able to read this manga in three sittings with only a handful of dictionary lookups per chapter.

The story is typical Isekai Shounen fare and I would probably place it on the younger end of the audience spectrum--but its a shounen manga. So you're going to come across all the typical fighting vocabulary and speech archetypes. Many of the characters are based on fairy tale archetypes (Jack and the Beanstalk, Wizard of Oz, Snow White) but there's some interesting liberties the author takes with their characters/powers.

I loved the first volume (mostly because I can FINALLY read it!) but I'm sure others have different takes. I'm positive the level would be below the current 25(??) if others graded. I know I'm not that proficient yet.