Manga consists of pictures and text, which not only allows you to understand the text more easily, but it also makes the text feel less intimidating by spreading it out over many pages.
You don’t need to bang your head against the wall, you can instead approach normal books more slowly. Reading manga is a way to get around this. It’s basically a literary representation of the great wall, so massive and threatening that even trying feels futile, a compact wall of texts stopping you from advancing any further.
Reading a normal book in Chinese is intimidating if you’ve never done it before and it might still be even if you have read books before. Needless to say, it’s also a way to learn new slang or spoken forms. In this way, reading manga will help your listening ability quite a lot, especially when it comes to understanding colloquial Chinese. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen a word written down and thought to myself “Ah, so that’s what people have been saying all the time!” In short, it’s a way to study explicitly words that you might hear all the time, but usually don’t pay attention to.
Just hearing these isn’t always enough, sometimes reading them is the key to both understanding and usage. Moving over to words and phrases, there are many small words or ways of expression that will typically not be taught by your teacher or your textbook, but are still very common. I’ve always found dictionaries lacking when it comes to descriptions of these words. in formal texts, you don’t see them very often, but reading manga they sometimes appear almost in every sentence.Īlso, you will encounter many onomatopoetic words (such as “bang”, “hiss” or “crash”) and you will clearly see how they are used and written, because they appear next to whatever is producing the sound. Sure, if you socialise with many native speakers, you’re likely to learn how and when to use these anyway, but seeing them written down really helps. To begin with, you will be flooded with modal particles (啊，喔，啦，唉，嘛，etc.). This gives you an almost unique opportunity to see sounds, words or phrases written down that you will never find in any textbook or any dictionary. Most of the text in manga is dialogue and it will be fairly colloquial (depending a little on what manga you’re reading). Seeing colloquial Chinese in written form
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In this article I will discuss some merits of reading manga.įor a much more detailed discussion about how to use comics to improve your Chinese, check this article: A language learner’s guide to reading comics in Chinese. Since then, I have thought quite a bit about this and I now consider reading manga to be extremely good, not only for beginner/intermediate students, but also for those on a more advanced level. Gradually, I became aware that reading manga is a very good way to address certain problem associated with learning Chinese, especially if you learn the language in a formal environment. However, while living in Taiwan, I had easy access to a more or less unlimited source of manga translated into Chinese. Before I started learning Chinese, I wasn’t too keen on reading manga (Japanese for “comics”, 漫画/漫畫 in Chinese).
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