When I first started reading I had a bad habit of picking up a lot of books that seemed easy enough to read but that I wasn’t interested in enough to actually push through with so there are a lot of things I only started. It took me a while to actually finish reading anything.
The first manga I started was よつばと！ which I did enjoy but I had read it a few times in English before so I didn’t really have the motivation I needed to make progress on it. The first manga I read all the way to the end was レンタルおにいちゃん with the wk bookclub.
My first attempt at a novel was 小説 ミラーさん -みんなの日本語初級シリーズ- which I stopped reading a couple of chapters in. I read mostly manga and vns for a long time after that and then managed to finish my first novel, ジャックジャンヌ ―夏劇― a couple of months ago.
My first manga was Sailor Moon - although I’ve never finished it in Japanese (not sure I’ve read it all in English, either). I read the first two volumes when I was very, very new to Japanese and could only recognize a handful of words and kanji. In retrospect, it was way too hard for me at that point, but it did help me get much more comfortable and faster with reading kana, and at least I got to look at pretty pictures.
My first book was actually nonfiction: 宮原知子の英語術 スケートと英語のさとこチャレンジ | L24 It’s an autobiography of a figure skater I like, which is why I picked it up, but she also talks a lot about her English-learning journey, which was interesting to read as someone coming from the other direction.
The first book I ever bought was 狼と香辛料 1 | L35 in August of 2019, which was way out of my league at just 4 months of studying (lol). I knew that when I bought it though, and I spent like two weeks trying to just slightly understand the introduction. That was fun in its own way, but definitely wasn’t what I would call “reading.”
The first thing I actually finished was Vol. 1 of よつばと！in May of 2020, a year after I started learning. As soon as that was done, I started my first novel, ウォーリアーズ〈1〉ファイヤポー、野生にかえる | L25??, the Japanese translation of a series I’d reread several times as a kid and knew well. After 3 months of consistent, slow progress, I managed to finish it in August. It was a good way to ease into reading full novels, but I try to avoid translated works now. Oh, and I finally got around to finishing 狼と香辛料 in February of 2021.
First book I bought in Japanese, before I could even read it, was 天と地の守り人〈第1部〉ロタ王国編 | L30 (still on the “to be read” shelf, though I probably can manage it now).
First books I actually read were from the ポケモンえほん series (ポケモンえほん - Wikipedia). I think the whole series is out of print but I picked up a few volumes at a used book sale because I love Pokemon, and though they are all in hiragana & katakana and the art is sometimes hilariously bad the stories are cute and it was something I could actually read. Probably a similar level to the level 0 free books here: Free books – にほんごたどく
Of course, this doesn’t include textbooks or assigned reading from classes. We read a lot of short dialogues or news articles in the classes I took in high school and college.
I had the opposite habit of picking up things I was interested in but didn’t have the language knowledge to read yet!
What finally got me in a habit of reading was joining the wk bookclub for 暁のヨナ (series) | L27 and having to be ready for the weekly read-aloud sessions having read the chapter and looked up any unknown vocab. I was actually really surprised by how, after a few months of that, I really enjoyed reading in Japanese and felt up to tackling other manga (and some of those books I’d bought way back). Now I’m still doing the book club but also a lot of other reading outside of it… and hope to finish my first light novel DAYS 1 出会い | L20?? sometime this week.
The first manga I read start to finish, I think was 僕のヒーローアカデミア第16巻.
First book was 君の名は。
It was really hard for me to start because I had been studying for so long, the idea of not having 100% comprehension made me super nervous. I bought all the available Hero Academia manga at the time in hopes it would motivate me to read, but I would see a kanji and not know why the katakana was there and what was a name or an object. It was really a chore.
Your Name came about a year later and I felt myself really struggle but because I had seen the movie so many times it helped me piece together where I was in relation to the movie. However I have a newer rule not to read something you enjoyed watching because it takes significantly more time (granted it is faithfully adapted and not artificially shortened/lengthened for arbitrary reasons).
This was a stupid rule, and you should definitely do it for insight on a character’s train of thought and get more context for the why things are happening. Don’t listen to this quote!
If you’re interested in re-re-reading Your Name, the Japanese collector’s edition of the film comes with a bound screenplay. It’s really fun to read along with the movie while going through the extra notes on the script.
Old school shoutout!
From my time in Japan as a kid. I “read” these manga the way a kid does, where I looked at the pictures and read the hiragana, only understanding maybe half of it… ドラえもん 1 | L22
オバケのQ太郎 ザ・サムライ (series) | L25?? 鉄拳チンミ (series) | L30??
pictures for reference
As for books that I actually tried to understand everything…
First manga: シャドーハウス 1 | L22
First novel: 時をかける少女 | L23
First manga: よつばと! 1. Classically. I bought the first one of the series as it’s supposed to be easy. I bought the rest, because I like them.
First novel #1:となりのトトロ 徳間アニメ絵本. This is well technically a novel, in fact it’s (listed as) a children’s book. [IIRC I needed 11 days for the about 110 pages long book contents (half of it images), and then 8 days more for the 2 pages long 大人向け afterword about why parents should buy this book for their children ;-)]
First novel #2:時をかける少女. This is listed as a novel, but today you would call it a light novel. The word did not yet exist, though, when the book was written.
So all-in-all I haven’t read any “real” novels yet, as it seems.
Personally I started with stuff that was way too hard, but that I was interested in. My first reads
(besides Satori Reader and Crystal Hunters) were LNs
Attempted Sword Art Online 23 & SAO Progressive 1.
At that point, I switched to easier material for a while (mostly yuri). That would have been the realistic place to start. I read those all alongside translations, besides the last 1/3rd or so of 不登校.
My first manga was ぼくたちは勉強ができない 1 | L25. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you really like harem manga because this was one and a very bland one as well. However I have to give it credit for being one of the only harem manga where I can actually understand why all the girls fell in love with the main character.
I don’t remember what my first novel was, though. I used to read these old serial novel magazines I found so probably something from there?
Luckily I started using Bookmeter before finishing more than one book, because for some reason I totally remember not reading よつばと! (series) | L17 until later. But that was the first manga I read (though I read the series out of order since I bought them out of order), though it was purely because I’d read the series a few times in English and loved it rather than because it’s recommended as being easy. After that, I read 舞台に咲け! (series) | L25, which was quite a step up in difficulty. The next couple I read (極主夫道 (series) | L25 and GREEN (series) | L25??) were also that level, and then I completely coincidentally mostly stayed in that vicinity for a while with the occasional spike up or down.
The first book I ever started was a novel/LN (I usually just throw them in the same bucket since that’s easier, but also this is one of those fuzzy ones) 空への助走 福蜂工業高校運動部 | L28??, though I only read the one story from it before switching to and finishing the first book of the main series, 2.43 清陰高校男子バレー部シリーズ (series) | L28. They definitely would not typically be recommended for a first book since they’re intermediate-level and contain a lot of colloquial speech and dialect and I was shaky at best on both, but I managed it somehow… Probably helped that I’d already fallen in love with it from the anime. After that I mostly read manga with a tiny bit of novel-reading on the side, and it’s really only recently that I’ve been reading novels more.
Dredging up old memories, I’m pretty sure my first manga was ミントな僕ら 1 (りぼんマスコットコミックス 1058 ) | L20?? – at the time I had enjoyed Marmalade Boy in the English translation, and wanted to read this by the same author. I found fan translations online for the first couple of volumes and only as scripts, not scanslations, so I read the first few volumes with the aid of the fan translation when I needed it as a ramp up to working through the last four volumes unaided.
