Random Guide Backlog:
Random Guide #5. At this point, I think I should just publish a website with all of this information. And yes, after this, the trifecta of "Random Guides" for the main 3 reading materials in Japanese will finally be complete. And yes, I should probably be studying for exams rather than writing this up, but this one is dedicated to a friend, and like 2-3 people have been asking for a Manga one. I think after this one, I could move onto listening materials. I've done anime… So J-Dramas? YouTube? Anyways. Manga. Probably, don't quote me, the best-selling medium out there among the ones that I've talked about so far.
What is Manga?
Manga are Japanese comic books or graphic novels that cover a huge range of genres—from action-packed adventures and sci-fi to romance, horror, and even slice-of-life stories. They’re usually black-and-white, read from right to left, and often have distinctive art styles. Think of them like novels but with expressive artwork that brings the story to life. Some manga get adapted into anime, but many are standalone stories loved by readers worldwide.
If I were to give an estimation of the ratio between artwork and text for each medium, Light Novels would have a ratio of 90:10, 90 representing text and 10 representing imagery; Visual Novels would have a ratio of 75:25, and Manga would typically have a spectrum ranging between 25:75 – 40:60. As you can tell, Manga has a lot less text than the other two aforementioned mediums.
Title: クラスのぼっちギャルをお持ち帰りして清楚系美人にしてやった話
Why Manga?
A lot of people watch anime and a lot of Anime have been adapted from Manga. Manga is also super-expansive in terms of what the medium encompasses as it has a lot of stories ranging from Rom-Coms to Battle-Shounen to Fantasy to Shoujo to even stories aimed at the Seinen and Josei demographic. There are a lot, meaning a lot of manga that can have varying levels of difficulty. You can pick up any story and read it. Manga uses images to represent its descriptions so seldom will you see a lot of descriptive language being used, This makes it a lot more approachable than the other media I've talked about so far. A lot of manga have furigana too, so it's easy to pick something up and read it without needing to rely on an OCR or a dictionary to know the kanji. It makes look-ups a breeze too (though, we will be talking about ways to use Manga to learn Japanese).
Prerequisites for LNs/WNs:
If you've read the basics guide, you can skip this bit, but if you don't want to read, follow these:
– Hiragana + Katakana Knowledge ( https://kana.pro/ )
– Basic Grammar Knowledge (N4+) (Either Read https://yoku.bi/ or finish Genki I and II)
– At least 1k vocab words ( Use Anki and The Kaishi 1.5k Deck to learn the most common vocab)
– You don't need prior reading experience, but you can always use Graded Readers as a gateway into reading before Manga
Getting Manga:
If you can, I will always recommend buying Manga from trusted vendors who sell for really cheap like https://amazon.co.jp/ or https://global.bookwalker.jp/categories/2/
I won't condone piracy because you should always support authors when you can, but if there is a manga or resource that you want to look for that you can't find, I'd recommend checking out this page which will show you some good resources for digital manga.
If you do manage to secure some manga, then there are quite a few tools you can use. I'll go over two popular methods, one for physical manga and one for digital manga.
Using OCR:
If you have a physical Manga Copy, you can take a photo of the Manga on your phone and use an OCR software like Google Keep in order to scan dialogue and extract the text from the image.
Example of extracting text from a Manga Panel.
You can also use a dictionary like Jisho or Yomitan to search words up afterwards.
If a manga has furigana at the top of the word, you can use that to accurately search up kanji inside of your manga without the need for OCR.
Alternatively, there are other resources such as Manga_OCR:
https://github.com/kha-white/manga-ocr
You can either use the github to set it up or read this:
https://lazyguidejp.github.io/jp-lazy-guide/setupMangaOnPC/#setup-mangaocr
The benefits of using OCR are that you can use it on any manga page and with software like Google Keep and Manga-OCR, you'll get generally accurate results, though, you may have to rescan it or run it through the OCR again if there are inaccuracies inside of the text. This may be useful for you who just want to get in there and read manga with minimal setup.
However, while the setup for OCR is generally shorter than the next software that I am about to introduce, this next software helps by allowing you to use dictionaries like Yomitan on top of the manga you're reading.
Using Mokuro for Manga:
This next software is Mokuro, which is probably going to be better than OCR despite the long setup times. If you get access to raw digital manga, you can turn them into mokuro files and use something like https://reader.mokuro.app/ to read them online.
This is an example of what it look like:
Using Mokuro to be able to read Manga.
If you want an introduction to Mokuro, you can read it on the github page here:
https://github.com/kha-white/mokuro
Otherwise, here's a setup guide:
1. Get your downloaded Manga raw.
Idc how you get your manga files. Tinker around with the resources above and download them.
2. Process your Manga
Once you have them, go to this link here:
https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1k-M1zr4hBnZTxlRODtNFn9r08XS5bKYB?usp=sharing
Follow the guide on this link and have everything uploaded to Google Drive. Either choose to process one volume at a time or process all of them at the same time Follow the comments in the hashtags to see how to process manga.
Once you process the manga, go to Google Drive and find your processed Manga.
Once you've successfully compiled all of your Manga Raws, then click on your folder and download it as a zip:
After you've downloaded it, extract the folder and locate it
When you have your folder, check to see if the _ocr folder and the necessary html/mokuro files are present:
Copy the directory above:
After that, go to https://reader.mokuro.app/ and it should look like this:
I already have some manga uploaded.
Click this button on the top right:
And Choose to upload a directory:
Once you choose a folder, upload the files:
Once they've been uploaded, you should be able to pick up a manga, select it, and read it.
If you hover over a textbox, it becomes selectable text.
You can hover over textboxes with your mouse to select text like this
You can either search words up in Jisho or use Yomitan like in the screenshot above.
Anyways, this should pretty much be it for this. I personally think reddit is kind of limiting when it comes to how much I can write/post (especially with the image limit), so I think I might just compile everything into one website soon. To those who have been keeping up with the guides, please tell me if you think I should and if you have any criticisms, drop it in the comments below. Adieu for now.
by TSComicron