So I’m learning Japanese and I’d love to have more practice material, but from what I can tell most (maybe all) of the manga available from the several sites I checked on the Megathread wiki only had translated books. Many languages, tbf, but I could not find the original Japanese anywhere. Am I just missing it or is there a particular source I should look at for untranslated books?

Also as a corollary, anyone have a good source for visual novels in Japanese?

  • PurpleDoveScans@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    3·
    15 hours ago

    It can be considerably harder sourcing raw manga due to just your lack of familiarity with Japanese websites. Most of your searches will probably just end up being people looking up where to read Japanese manga translated into English. Wotaku might get you in the ballpark but you’ll still probably need to source stuff yourself.

    Honestly, what I’ve found easiest is to just set up a JP bookwalker account and browse that. If you’re committed to piracy, just appending raw to your Google search for a Japanese title should do it but if the series you’re after is niche it might be harder to find. Mangajikan is decent if you just want mainstream titles. Twitter is also great if you just want to find random stuff to read; authors frequently just post full chapters of their works. That’s basically exclusively where we pull stuff to translate from, you get a really fun variety digging through random Japanese hashtags. Twicomi is a great frontend for that. Not sure on VNs, haven’t read one in years.

    When you do start reading, just stay committed. Not sure how long you’ve been learning Japanese but forming good habits from the beginning is essential. You don’t want to take a day off, and then another, then a week… Good luck, I hope you get 日本語上手’d soon!