this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
18 points (100.0% liked)
Anime & Donghua
11475 readers
41 users here now
Welcome to c/anime on Hexbear!
A leftist general anime and donghua community for discussion and memes.

Simple rules
-
Be nice.
-
Use spoiler tags.
-
Don't sexualise underage characters, including 1000 year old loli ones.
-
Don't post hentai here. This is an anime community.
High quality threads you should definitely visit
Gigathread: Good Anime Talks, Presentations, Conventions, Panels, etc
Piracy is good and you should do more of it. Use https://aniwave.to/ and https://4anime.gg/ for streaming, and https://nyaa.si/ for torrents. Piracy is the only means of digital protest that audiences have to fight poor worker treatment.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I swore I'd already put this one in the bottomless pit of PTW but apparently not. Time to rectify that!
I take it that's why you put the star there.
This activated a neuron of me as a brand-new weeb watching my "first anime" (Little Witch Academia) and just looking at the episode list when I was halfway through it just to see how many of the episodes I could remember.
The obvious cliché answer is just "read Yotsuba&!" but I can do you one better: My Journey to Her (Boku ga Watashi ni Naru Tame ni, abbrev. BokuWata). Single volume with eight chapters. Most terms have no furigana, but I didn't let that stop me. It's an autobiography of a Japanese trans woman going to Thailand for SRS.
Aside from Yotsuba&! and BokuWata I have also read ARIA in Japanese and really enjoyed it. I also have the first volume of Doraemon in Japanese but I've hardly touched it, alas.
Cute!
Great recommendation! But perhaps too good of a recommendation, since I've already read it
I guess I could re-read it in Japanese, but I read it relatively recently so I don't think I'd have that same pull. Incidentally, that's the second manga in the "autobiography of a Japanese trans woman going to Thailand for SRS" I've read, the first being Umareru Seibetsu wo Machigaeta (I Was Born the Wrong Sex) which I think I've read in both English and Japanese.
As a dutiful Japanese learner, I do have Yotsuba&!, and I've read a few chapters, but the kind of thing that really gets me hooked is well-developed characters and emotional turmoil (hence Ikoku Nikki). I think when I get to the point where I can easily read in Japanese at about the same pace I can in English, I could read something more lighthearted, but in the meantime I need something properly dramatic to keep me plowing ahead.
The
is on me, hahah. I'll add Umareru Seibetsu wo Machigaeta to mia planlisto. And it's interesting that you have that attitude towards Yotsuba&!. I guess for me Yotsuba&! is good because one doesn't need to understand much of it to follow along on the plot, but one gets more out of it by understanding more of the text, so it's basically easily read as long as I accept that I won't understand everything. But I can also see your perspective.
This is also a case of having different needs from an immersion text: I've now gotten to a point where I actually want something on around a high school reading level without furigana (or without copious furigana, at the very least) so I can really test and reinforce my kanji and vocabulary knowledge. But early on, I was much happier to read something along the lines of Yotsuba&! which I could get through without giving up in disgust. It's all about finding that right balance of challenge and enjoyment.