About a week ago, I finished my first Japanese Manga.

Now I've read mangas before, but they were in English. Around the age of 14, I fell in love with a manga serie called Prince of Tennis. I used to play a lot of tennis back then, and so it made sense that I read about it. I read all the Prince of Tennis books they had at my local library and when that wasn't enough, I had them order the rest for me. I also then found out they had an anime series. So I started watching that. At first, I was watching it all in English, but those became hard to find, so I took up the Japanese versions, with English subtitles. I watched hundreds of episodes.

Since I've been in Japan, I didn't really think about it until my friend mentioned it to me. I then went out to look for it, and I found the first volume of Prince of Tennis (テニスの王子様  in Japanese). Now, even though there are "furigana", the spelling of the kanji characters, next to every kanji, the vocabulary and also the slang word they use in mangas made it very difficult to decipher. I had to use the dictionary the whole way through. But I finally did it. I can now say that I have read a Japanese manga in Japanese.