Learn Japanese with Manga: How to Use Migaku’s OCR to Boost Your Reading Skills

Manga isn't just awesome: it's also an awesome way to learn Japanese.

Whereas normal books contain very long sentences and potentially complex descriptive language, comic books skip a lot of that fluff. You see the story playing out, so the only thing you actually have to read is dialogue. It's this quality of manga that makes it an incredible resource for people trying to learn the Japanese language.

With Migaku’s OCR (Optical Character Recognition) feature, you can also start reading manga from pretty early on in your Japanese studies. More on that later.

Without further ado:

What is manga?

Just in case you don't know, and are too afraid to ask: manga just means Japanese-style comics.

That out of the way, let's move on to the more important question:

Why is manga perfect for learning Japanese?

Learning a language will present you with many challenges, and the first challenge is one of patience. There's a lifetime of cool stuff just waiting for you to get your hands on once you get to the intermediate stage... but, you know, you have to get there, first.

Standing between you and all this Cool Stuff™ is:

And you're going to get through all that—don't get me wrong, I have nothing but the utmost confidence in you—but it's going to take time. And effort. And it's not always gonna be a whole lot of fun.

And that's why manga is so great.

Manga has pictures.

Pictures.

To explain why that's such a big deal, just take a moment to admire this opening scene from Crystal Knights, a manga created especially for beginning Japanese learners that we're going to talk about a little bit later on in the article.

Here it is:

Like—you can just see that. You don't need to do any work. You don't need to read an entire paragraph about a burgeoning medieval city scape, a dirt road lined with houses adorned with thatched roofs, the spired castle looming in the distance. You just get to see that, appreciate it, and get on with the story.

As a beginner, this gives you a major leg up.

There's a massive amount of knowledge that stands between you and fluent Japanese. I started learning Japanese ten years ago, and I'm still not done.

The thing is—and this is going to sound obvious—you're much closer to mastering any one part of Japanese than you are to mastering all of Japanese.

If you make smart choices about what you learn and how you practice Japanese, you're realistically just months away from being able to do that first cool thing in Japanese—even if you're a total beginner right now.

Manga would be a great first smart choice to make.

How to learn from manga (+manga recs)

Learning Japanese isn't easy, but it is pretty simple.

It boils down to three basic steps:

And now let's talk about each of those steps within the context of manga.

1. Pick a manga suitable for beginners learning Japanese

If you're stubborn and willing to make heavy use of Google, you can ignore this section and just pick something you find interesting.

For everybody else, I recommend starting with a manga from the slice-of-life genre. This is the genre of everyday stories and thus contains sentence structures and vocabulary that come up in everyday life. This greatly limits the scope of vocabulary you'll encounter, and that's helpful when you're just starting out and don't know many words yet.

Here are a few tried-and-true recommendations:

And I'll also toss in Crystal Hunters as an editor's choice. It's a fantasy manga that was intentionally written for beginners of Japanese. The first book contains only 87 unique words, and you can read the first book completely for free. Subsequent books get progressively harder. (Crystal Hunters also has a free guide that teaches you all the Japanese you need to know to read it.)

We talk about this in more detail in our blog post on learning Japanese vocabulary, but the reason for †this is that different genres have different key vocabulary words and different authors have different styles. The first manga book you read will hit you with a barrage of new vocab and sentence structures, but as you read more, you'll learn the key words and generally acclimate. Before long, reading manga will be a primarily enjoyable activity.

2. Read your manga with OCR software

OCR stands for optical character recognition, and it basically serves to detect text inside of images so that the text can be copied. This is useful for language learners because OCR'ing text is much faster than typing the Japanese out by yourself, especially if you don't know how to read a particular kanji. (You don't even wanna know how many hours of life I wasted scribbling out unknown kanji by hand...).

Here are a few OCR recommendations for you:

Once you've got that set up, you can do things like this:

Here's what you're looking at:

If you don't have Migaku, you can instead just paste your text selections into an online dictionary like Jisho. It's not quite as convenient, but, again, it works.

Also: an OCR that can be used with physical manga books

3. Make flashcards out of useful words

I'm going to make a bold statement here: you don't have a bad memory.

Humans, by nature, forget. That's a good thing. If you didn't forget, you'd remember things like how many ceiling tiles were in your 2nd grade classroom or all the days the lunch lady gave your classmate Doug more tater tots than she gave you. That would drive anybody crazy.

To avoid going crazy, your brain regularly gets rid of memories that aren't sufficiently succulent: things that don't seem useful; things that don't stimulate you, shock you, or otherwise move you; and, well, most things.

Thankfully, we can largely resolve this memory issue by just periodically reviewing information. If you try to remember something several times, your brain will eventually figure out that you feel you need that little bit of trivia. If you review it at gradually increasing intervals—2 days, 4 days, a week, 2 weeks, a month, two months, etc.—you'll eventually commit that thing into your long-term memory.

Any flashcards are better than none, but this is one of Migaku's specialties.

Do me a favor and look at that picture from the above section again. See the orange button in the mid-right portion of the screen?

Here's what happens when you click it.

The word I've clicked on has been transferred to Migaku's Card Creator. If this was a longer sentence, Migaku would also grab the sentence that the word appeared in. On the left-hand side of the screen there are dictionary entries I can copy, and then Migaku generates a high-quality audio recording of your selected word and the sentence it came from.

I've also taken a screenshot of the manga episode and added it to the flashcard, which you can see in the next photo.

(Note: This took several paragraphs of text to explain, but the full process only takes a few clicks. Once you're up and running, you can make flashcards faster than you can sneeze.)

When you open the Migaku mobile app, you'll see a deck (called "mining" by default) which contains all of the flashcards you've made with Migaku. Clicking on the deck will open an algorithm-curated study session.

In the study session, you'll see several flashcards. Here's the one we created in the above section:

Migaku will show you the front of the card, and your job is to see if you remember what the word means. When you're done, tap the screen to flip the card over, then indicate that you remembered (√) or that you didn't remember (X).

Based on your feedback, Migaku will automatically schedule the flashcards you studied today for review in the future. Each day you open Migaku Memory you'll be presented with a list of flashcards that our algorithm has determined you are about to forget, and should thus review. This filtering process ensures that more of your review time goes to the things you struggle with, and that less of your review time is wasted on things you know well.

(Note: While Migaku makes this process very easy, you can create similar flashcards with an open-source service called Anki. It has a learning curve and isn't as convenient, but it's free and very customizable.)

How to choose the right manga for your skill level

This is hard to give a concrete answer to. It's very subjective, and largely boils down to three factors:

Everybody will have a slightly different threshold of "acceptable" difficulty depending on their answers to those three questions.

For your first manga

First, be patient. One of the biggest hurdles you have to get over in terms of consuming Japanese content is simply getting your foot in the door. More content will become available to you as your level improves, but it can be hard to find a good first series to read.

Here are the rules of thumb that I personally follow:

Chances are, you're going to find a lot of cool stuff that you'd love to read... but it's a little too hard to read now. That's OK. Add them to your "to read" list and move on to a simpler series. Rather than struggling through one very difficult manga, you're better off reading several simpler ones. By the time you've read through five or six books of manga, something that initially looked difficult may very well have become doable!

For your next several manga

First, congratulations. You've reached what is, in my opinion, the coolest part of learning Japanese. You've now demonstrated to yourself that you can understand Japanese, and you've got a huge list of stuff you want to read. It's an exciting time.

If you enjoyed the first manga you read, continue on with the series. It will get easier as you go, now that you're familiar with the author's style and the manga's key vocab words. From there, you can look into other series by the same author or publisher.

If you're ready to move on, search the name of the manga you read on Natively, a platform that organizes Japanese books, manga, anime, and more by difficulty. There are several practical and social aspects of the site, but for now I want to focus on the "Grading" section of each listing.

For example, if you chose to read Yotsuba&!, here's what you'd see in the Grading section for the first book in the series:

Depending on how you felt about Yotsuba&!, then, you can easily find manga that's easier, harder, or similar in difficulty based on the community's perception. This makes it easy to pick a "next" manga that's a better fit for your level.

Some challenges you'll face when reading manga in Japanese

Reading manga in Japanese is an excellent way to way to get practical exposure in the language, even as a beginner, but it does present a few challenges for you to overcome.

If you're using Migaku, simply click on a confusing word and our AI will breakdown each part of the sentence for you.

If you're reading on your own, try:

Key Takeaways:

Manga is a fun and effective way to learn Japanese! The focus on dialogue and the context provided by its illustrations make manga more accessible than other types of content, such as books or TV shows.

If you're not sure where to start, we recommend a slice-of-life manga like Yotsuba&! or Doraemon—and using tools like Migaku that streamline the process of looking unknown words up.

Good luck!