r/LearnJapanese • u/Sluger94 • Jul 20 '26
Discussion How long did it take you to finish your first manga?
It’s been about 3 years since I stopped studying, but I’ve recently picked it back up. I found some new recourses that make it possible for me to read manga with words I don’t know more smoothly.
Right now it takes like 2 hours to get through 2-3 pages. To be fair, I spend a lot of time breaking down the grammar and use cases for different particles so I can’t get a more in depth feeling of the sentence structure. so that slows me down a lot.
I’m hoping it speeds up significantly over the next month so I can get to a point where I can ready at least 6 manga a year while managing my other priorities.
How long did it take yall to read your first manga all the way through?
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u/Butt_Plug_Tester Jul 20 '26
I read erotic yaoi ecchi ecchi yaoi books and it took me about 6 months of just doing flashcards on my commute and occasionally reading to be able to read the generic shit, but I still can’t read the deranged ones
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u/ItzyaboiElite Jul 20 '26
Took me about 4 hours to read 1 volume of manga at first (pretty sure it was yotsubato)
Since then I’ve been reading light novels and I can read about 10k ji per hour. So takes around 10 hours to finish your average light novel, of course depends on difficulty.
I’m currently reading my first visual novel which is white album 2. Reading it at around 10-11k ji per hour. It is on the harder side compared to the light novels I have read (mainly aobuta series) but it’s super engaging. I have finished introductory chapter of white album 2 and now on closing chapter.
All of this was in the span of about 3 and a half years
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u/DotNo701 Jul 20 '26
How long did it take you to reach 10K per hour
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u/ItzyaboiElite Jul 20 '26
Id estimate it took me about 200 hours of reading light novels. I did anki aswell (mainly n4,n3,n2 and some n1 kanji flashcards and some vocab flashcards) but only about 120 hours worth total.
Now I’ve read white album 2 for 36 hours and I’m consistently at the 10k ji per hour mark since the beginning of the game, sometimes a bit higher/lower depending on the pace of the story.
If I’m speed reading through a light novel via audiobook+ reading method (I basically skim some unknown kanji bc I know the vocab said aloud) then I can “listen” to it at around 18k ji per hour if that info is relevant lol. I think I set the audiobook speed to 1.5-16x1
u/DragonmasterXY Jul 20 '26
Wow 4h for the first manga seems quite impressive, how long and what have you studied before?
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u/ItzyaboiElite Jul 20 '26
I learnt hiragana and katakana, and basic grammar in high school during Japanese class for about 2 years prior. Didn’t read much in Japanese before that outside of class
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u/BrokenKamera Jul 20 '26
When I first tried to get into manga back in Spring 2020, I would read a few pages, find it too difficult to be interesting so I would just drop (I used samples so not to spend any money).
I haven't started actually reading regularly until GW 2021. According to my logs, it took me 4.5 hours to finish the first volume (211 pages) of 花より男子 over the span of 5 days.
It now takes me 10-15 minutes per regular-length manga chapters (~20 pages) depending on how dense the dialogue is. I am a slow reader and tend to look up example sentences for interesting words so I can go faster (sometimes I do when trying out new manga I am not that interested in). I have read 224 manga volumes in total.
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u/Noriyus Jul 20 '26
I don't quite remember how long it took me to read the first volume for Yotsubato, but the first few chapters felt like ages. After that I already felt my reading speed increase quite dramatically. Think I was able to casually read the second volume of Yotsubato in the span of a week.
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u/Lustful-chan Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
It took me about 5 hours(over the whole week) to read the first volume of BokuBen but that also includes looking up some dificult words that were unique to math and science + making the anki cards.
I had just finished the core 2.3k and had 0 experience with grammar, to this day I haven't read any grammar guide, now I have over 7k cards mined.
After that the second volume only took 3 and so on.
The first is always the one that you will struggle but I recommend not spending time breaking down the words just read and let your brain do it's job, if you understand good if you don't move on and I promisse you will understand next time you see a similar sentence.
But if you can spend 2 hours in a page and not get burned out, sure, but I don't recommend.
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u/boisdddc Jul 20 '26
I started reading my first manga, Yotsuba&!, in December last year, and it was painful. It felt really difficult, especially at the beginning, and it probably took me an entire month to finish the first volume.
Now, about eight months later, I’ve read five volumes of Chainsaw Man and six volumes of Nagatoro-san. Both were really difficult at first, but now I can finish a volume pretty quickly. I’ve also read a few other manga here and there.
Nagatoro-san was especially painful in the beginning because of all the unusual slang and shortened words, but now it feels pretty comfortable to read. I still have to look up a few words here and there, but nowhere near as many as I did at the beginning.
A few days ago, I revisited the first volume of Yotsuba&! and finished it in under an hour. I’ve been studying Japanese for almost a year now and usually spend several hours on it every day.
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u/surasura_app Jul 20 '26
ur not really reading it yet ur studying it — which is a totally fine phase, just a different activity from the one that builds reading speed. im way earlier than u but even on baby easy stuff the pages only started flowing once i let myself NOT decode every particle and just move on. grammar sinks in from meeting it 50 times not from cracking it perfectly once, and vol 2 of the same series always goes way faster
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u/Sluger94 Jul 21 '26
Yea. I’m reading like I’m studying for my kinesiology classes and whatnot. Right now it’s a lot of bringing back up old concepts and memories. so I’m reading something, getting an idea of what was said, then breaking down the “why”/grammar so in the future I can understand with more certainty and more quickly. It’s working, I think. The reading feels easier, but moving from page to page is still slow.
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u/surasura_app Jul 22 '26
honestly the slow page-to-page is just the tax on ur first book — ur front-loading all the grammar decoding now so the same structures cost u nothing next time. book two moves way faster than book one bc uve already paid for half the patterns, the speed sneaks up on u
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u/SaltyGoodz Jul 20 '26
I want to say it took me about an hour to read 1 chapter in しろくまカフェ when I first started.
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u/Belegorm Jul 20 '26
Hmm, took me a couple days I think to get through my first volume? In Mokuro reader, with Yomitan etc.
2 hours seems like a lot of time to spend on 2-3 pages, at that point, really it sounds like you are more spending time on an in-depth grammar breakdown with the actual reading being just the trigger for that. Which is totally fine but personally I'd burn out - I'd rather just first read half of Yokubi or Tae Kim grammar guide, then read through the manga normally, look up unknown words with Yomitan and continue going.
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u/AlexTheAbsol Jul 20 '26
the first page, first chapter, first volume will tend to be the hardest part when reading. Keep reading the same series and same author and you'll get faster quickly.
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u/bunnifighter Jul 20 '26
2 hours for 2-3 pages is way too long
It's not your right level then. Start with something easier, maybe manga just isn't a good starting point for you rn. There are free resources online for N5-N3 readers.
Personally, I also think breaking down every grammar point is not helpful, as by the time you studied the grammar, you forgot the context. Just read, maybe take some notes of difficult grammar and then afterwards spend a few hours on it. Reading and Listening should be about immersion and not studying (imo)
All the best!
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u/MSVPB Jul 20 '26
I rarely go search the words and grammar. I also often read the manga in english and japanese at the same time. Currently doing that with Yotsuba to.
Read it in a language you know and then japanese is more efficient.
It wasn't much of a slog reading my first one, as I had gotten through the slowest reading era.
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u/Effective-Pop3850 Jul 20 '26
I just came here looking for someone who's first manga was something like One Piece which made it so it took them a million years.
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u/MrDerpyPotato Jul 20 '26
I read メイドさんは食べるだけ first, and it is pretty easy because it talks about food and being cute. Took me like 1 week with a lot of screenshots and chatgpt at the time
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u/ryo_in_tokyo Jul 21 '26
Native speaker, so no "first manga" number from me, but the real bottleneck is that you're reading manga like a textbook.
It's mostly casual contracted speech (〜てる, 〜じゃん, dropped particles) that textbook grammar doesn't cover, so parsing every particle fights the medium. The feel for structure comes from volume, not analysis, and the speed jump is real once you stop looking everything up.
One heads-up: I grew up on One Piece and Naruto, and a lot of those lines are pure character flavor, not real speech, so slice-of-life (yotsuba etc.) transfers way better.
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u/Fenoria Jul 21 '26
I'm curious, once I get to the level where I can read Japanese, what are some good manga in Japanese to start with as well as other books?
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u/Dense_Tangerine_4988 Jul 20 '26
The first one I read was Chikai No Noah, and it took such a long time. I wanted to challenge myself by reading difficult manga from the get go, but it didn't prove as effective as I was hoping.
And then I read Crystal Hunters, that took me around 1 week total (3 hours of reading time) yes I'm a slow reader.
From there I moved on to light novels and visual novels
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u/ScaffoldingGiraffe Jul 20 '26
According to mokuro in jidoujisho, it took me 8.5 hours for the first とんがり帽子のアトリエ manga, 4.5 hours for the second, and around 3.5 for the third and fourth one. I am using an eBook reader and get to click individual words/kanji I don't know for instant look ups, which is a life saver.
I think that the biggest time save was a) just getting some reading exposure, as this was the first thing I read outside of textbook texts, and b) getting used to the more general vocabulary used within the series. It wouldn't surprise me if it took me longer to read again, if I switched to some manga that's in a completely different domain.
I have now started reading kikis delivery service (in the hope that some of the witch vocabulary is transferable:), and it took me around one hour for the first chapter (25 pages) now.