I’m relatively new to grading manga on this site, and I’ve been wondering for a while now how much furigana should affect my ratings. Since grading is for others’ sake, I figured this is probably the best way to decide what to do.
I think we have a mix of people reading with OCR and not (I personally usually use OCR digitally, but rarely ever if I’m reading physically). I think you should grade how hard you think a manga is relative to another and it should all even out in the end.
I use Google Lens, so voted yes, but that’s it.
I almost only need it if reading manga or visual novels, since novels I have tap lookups. With most manga I read, I’m at a point where I can skip lookups and mostly get it if I want… Which I will often do now. But depending on the vocab I may be pulling out my phone a lot
I’m unclear on the connection btwn OCR and furigana in the OP, and how that’s supposed to relate to grading
I think they’re talking about manga, in which having furigana or not could feasibly change the perceived difficulty quite considerably, depending on the skill set.
I used to use an android tap-to-OCR thing but the UX flow was really disruptive. I could probably Mukoro (Mokuro?), but I prefer to just look stuff up.
I definitely use it for prose though since the UX on my method (ttsu with yomitan) is fairly painless.
Yeah, full furigana makes reading easier, and mokuro does a similar job (while also allowing for more). I feel like learners care less about furigana in manga these days, but I don’t have a good idea of how much less.
And the reason I specifically asked about manga is because it’s the medium where it’s the most common (unless you count “children’s book” as a medium I guess). I’m pretty sure I’ve seen VNs with full furigana, but I couldn’t name one off the top of my head.
I sometimes use Samsung AI Select for smartphone, on manga, to get text copied. Then, Yomitan search page with clipboard monitor (Firefox floating window). But I usually find it not accurate enough, not mention missing some letters…
Handwriting keyboard is more accurate, and editing Yomitan search query doesn’t ease that much of the workflow.
Plus, I can usually guess Kanji readings in vocabs. Reading feels more like multiple choice questions (MCQ) at this point. It’s more often that I want to make sure of the meaning. Manual lookup is also easier to look up for phrases. I have another dictionary app to search on type. (Yomitan search page doesn’t, needing Enter.)
If I have two devices, I would rather not use OCR. Not even early in the reading journey, though I would probably use Mokuro if it was a thing. (I was looking up with either app handwriting pad or radicals / SKIP codes then.)
I hand draw kanji into either DeepL or one of the other dictionaries I have on my phone/iPad if there is no Furigana and I don’t know the words/ possible reading as all my manga are physical copies.
Having no Furigana does considerably bump up the difficulty level for me so there have been a few that I’ve put aside currently due to that reason.
I tend to grade manga based on how difficult the wording and sentence structure is compared to other manga I’ve read but I won’t compare them to novels when grading.
I use OCR (Samsung tab pen function) on harder manga but it’s not like suddenly that makes it as easy as one with furigana. Slang and how rare or common words are matters a lot. So something like Frieren with furigana but more text and more specialised words still feels harder to me than Shadows House that has no furigana but very daily life text. So I take it into account and also think about whether i could have really read one book before reaching a certain stage of learning. That’s different for everyone.
Seconding this. Sometimes my grading is different than the majority but, well, that’s the point of having a lot of people grading.
OP keep in mind the idea is not precision and you’ll find personally some level 24 books are easier than level 23 books, or a level 28 book feels harder to you than a level 30 manga. But you can be relatively sure a level 26 book is easier than a level 30 book. Or a level 16 manga easier than a level 20 manga.
More than grading, if you want to help your fellow reader, especially at the beginner stage I really appreciated reviews that pointed out things like vocabulary challenge and furigana strategy, or high use of slang or a regional accent etc
Could you elaborate on how you use it? I have one but haven’t used it other than scribbling notes. For manga I just use Google Lens.
You’ve just opened my eyes. I tend to save my manga as PDFs. I could’ve been opening them in Chrome, instead of adobe this whole time. What have I been doing with my life. 
I don’t have a PC workflow, I just open them with whatever app on my Android Tablet and then use circle to search/OCR 
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I’ve only read manga with furigana so I voted no. But I might use OCR in the future when reading manga without furigana.
If I am reading digitally yes I always run it through mokuro first.
The physical manga I have have generally furigana, so I didn’t need to until now. Honestly my phone is super slow so ocr would be a huge hassle.
Sure I love it!
The function is based on Google lens technology I think? But it’s very convenient with the pen. It works best in short snippets of text without furigana, but once you understand the quirks it works on anything really, even a fair bit of handwriting
Hover with the pen on the right hand side of your screen and a little slightly transparent circle with a pen appears. Tap that. There is a circle icon for Google translate (blue with an A in a white square next to some kanji looking character). This opens a little widget - select your target language and translation language. You can minimise that after setup. Now with this function turned on your pen has a hover OCR functionality. Hover at the top corner of text and it automatically selects some text and shows it in a pop-up box with translation. You can adjust the box size and it works best with certain text sizes,
I got used to that quickly. One click copy is available.
For me, I thought this was the coolest thing ever, I made a lot of posts on wk, but it hasn’t been that popular with others. So maybe something about how I use it just works well for me, not sure.
I generally don’t lean on full sentence translations since Google translate is trash. I use it for the quick OCR of single words, mostly manga I read on Bookwalker. Normally I’ll have my screen split with 80% Bookwalker app manga and 20% kanji study app that I use the search function as a dictionary. I find this helps me a ton and I can quickly reference any kanji since I use that app for kanji studying as well. Or if it’s a kanji or word I almost recognise it gives me just enough confirmation to move on quickly
My preferred reading medium is paper, and so even on digital, I think I might have more patience with lookups and if I’m bothering to look up words, I engage with them more than perhaps the average learner. So maybe that’s why that works so well for me. I think just relying on the Google translate and expecting a kind of hover / correct translation feature would be disappointing.
Although, for quick translations of things I don’t care about, it’s good enough eg for: YouTube, image ads with text, and basically anything Japanese that comes up on my screen that I can’t select in the normal way, this tool is awesome.
The alternative, having to find a way to download manga and then running it through mokuro was just too much murky effort for me and this works great. Plus I can read manga previews that I never download. The ocr doesn’t always work, and I also like to read on paper so I have other strategies for looking up unknown kanji quickly.
Actually the pen is super helpful for that, too. This isn’t a special function or anything - did you know you can handwrite with the pen and it will automatically turn it into digital text? Just put your keyboard in the target language, eg Japanese, and if you draw a kanji (even with incorrect stroke order) it will recognise it and there you go. Just start handwriting into your dictionary input field and it’s so easy. Also, you don’t have to write as small as the field. Just start the first stroke in the field and you can write as large as you like. And if you need time to think before the next stroke, just don’t lift the pen (ie, if you lift the pen too long it will start the recognition process). So for a 15 stroke character, I might draw the first radical of 5 strokes but pause with the pen on the 5th stroke while I mentally prepare myself to write the next radical. You don’t have to be super fast but early on I was slow drawing kanji and this helped me
I’m used to reading with little to no furigana, but coincidentally ran into a full furigana manga (ガールズ×ヴァンパイア 話売り #1) yesterday and was relieved that I didn’t have to think for once. Even setting sleep deprivation aside, it’s just nice sometimes
This is so subjective and variable that I don’t think you should - or reasonably can - consider it in your gradings (though it might make for good info for reviews). I would say just stick to what Natively asks “which of these books was harder for you”
I hit yes. If a page has several kanji I don’t recognize, I use Papago to make the text selectable + jisho. Very rarely do I go an entire manga without pulling out Papago at least once.
20 years from now, the most popular form of OCR will be wearing smart glasses and tapping the word in the physical book to look it up.
I’m pretty sure that’s something you can do already with an Apple Vision Pro (well, I don’t know about the exact gestures or if Japanese is supported, but it has OCR)
So it will probably take less than 20 years to become common.
I use Google Lens when there are Kanji I don’t know. I just had to look up OCR software because didn’t know what it is but anyway I think from a learning perspective it’s better to not “overuse” it I guess? Since that way you probably won’t be able to memorize a lot of Kanji while reading. This also completely depends on your level though and how much Kanji you’ve learned before. I’ve learned a lot of Kanji by looking them up while reading
