Bilingual mangas

[Sequa]

Hi,
I considered buying bilingual mangas because learning vocabs has become insanely boring for me and many people say it's easier to learn them in context. However, I already tried once to translate a manga but I get stuck soon when I don't understand the grammar at one point (probably because it's too colloquial or I it is simply too advanced for me) or can't look up the vocab because it's some conjugated form I don't know. At this kind of situations I could look at the English translations but I fear that it makes it harder to focus on the Japanese text when you have the English right next to it. I also haven't found any bilingual mangas which have furigana, too and I don't know enough kanji yet.

So either I have a full Japanese manga where I get stuck at but I have furigana
or I have a bilingual but will have trouble translating without furigana.

An alternative would be to buy both the original Japanese and the bilingual but that would be quite expensive.

It also bothers me that in bilingual mangas the English text is in the speech bubbles whereas the Japanese is very small next to the picture. If I could find a manga where it'd be the other way round AND with furigana I'd be totally happy but I doubt such a manga exists.

Have you made any experiences with bilingual mangas? Can you recommend them for learning?
Or are there any easy to understand completely Japanese mangas?

[Jason]

I don't have any myself, but I'd be really leery of recommending them since, as you already said, your eyes will naturally want to focus on the English first.

[Belton]

I think you might be better off trying to work with Japanese manga instead of bilingual. I haven't used bilingual manga but in parralel texts I have the English is VERY different to the Japanese in order to make it work in English. And there's always the problem of which english word goes with what part of a sentence. If translation was a word for word problem computers could do it. ( Bring on the Babelfish )

It is difficult however. I had been learning Japanese for about 2 years before I felt I could tackle any books like these. Some knowledge of grammar was probably more important than having vocabulary.

My best experience has been with a series of storybooks of Ghibli films called "This is Animation". It helps that I've already seen the films and know the story. All the kanji have furigana. Although they seem much more advanced than I would have thought considering the age group the books might be aimed at. It gets better as I go along but I can't manage more than a couple of pages a day. I'm definitely not reading for pleasure yet.

Easier is another series based on Ghibli films but this time in manga form (I think they're called Film Comix). As everything is dialogue I find them much easier to follow. But it still takes a lot of concentration.

It's also worth trying the same skills as you would use in English (or whatever your first language is). When you find a word you don't know you figure it out from it's context rather than get out a dictionary. Or gloss over it while getting most of the meaning (where the pictures help).
You might be better off getting a sense rather than minutely translating everything.

As for learning vocab. Context is best but in the end repetition is what makes it stick, whether that is learning lists (tedious) or seeing it again and again while reading or hearing it again and again or best -- using it again and again.

for some free online bilingual manga check out Manglish
http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp/entertain ... index.html

for some other reading possibilities Mangajin's Basic Japanese through Comics parts 1 and 2 are worth a look as well as their Japanese the Manga Way.
They are more conventional textbooks illustrated with excerpts from manga to explain grammar points.