/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>19122519
Manga is reading, but it's much less reading on average than you would get if you jumped straight to Light Novels.

Let's face it, using your brain is one of the most important parts of learning language, and visualizing scenarios/characters/things will help solidify what you've learned more than just about anything else. In a novel, things are described in detail, from the setting to the characters to random things happening off to the side. Manga convey this through pictures, which reduces your overall learning by a very large amount.

The real trouble is, lots of really good i+1 tier sentences for beginner/intermediate learners are found in the descriptive text of LNs, while most of the dialogue in manga are on a different level in terms of slang/grammar patterns and are not "easy" or good to use as learning material. Then, whenever there is a wall of text in a Manga, it will seem more daunting since you're not used to crunching large amounts of kanji. As a bonus, novels also contain the same dialogue whatnot/slang/etc seen in Manga, so you'll be ready for anything.

Basically what it comes down to is this - how much do you want to learn, and at what speed? If you like learning slowly and things constantly being difficult, keep on grinding core decks and reading Manga. If you want the fast track to learning all sorts of new words and grammar patterns, you pretty much have to start reading novels. Sure, you'll probably need to absorb a ton of new vocab all at once every time you start a new novel, but you'll only need to learn it once, and you were going to have to do it anyway... no downside.

Again, Manga is reading, but you're essentially cheating yourself out of learning lots of stuff you NEED to learn at some point. There's a reason English teachers hate those kids who read comics in class instead of actual books - because they're shit as learning materials go. Ironically, the only way to fully enjoy comics/manga is to read enough normal books to be able to understand them in the first place.