Wakarukana is a weird little website that does something new and unique that may or may not be really helpful. (We’re honestly not 100% sure yet.)
The site offers a (growing) number of Japanese texts and media including manga, books, and anime. You can sort by category and five difficulty levels: very easy, easy, medium, hard, and very hard.
When you find a manga, book, or anime you want to get into, click on it and you’re brought to a page with five sentences from that series. These five sentences are random, and representative of the difficulty level that book or show presents.
You read the sentences, and if you can understand them completely, check the little boxes next to them (or don’t) and the site tells you how easy reading or watching that thing will be for you.
This basically helps you bypass asking people in forums whether they think you’re ready to try reading Dragon Ball. Instead, click on Dragon Ball in Wakarukana, read through the sentences and say, “Oh heck yeah, I understand all of this!” or “Oh… I guess I have more studying to do.”
Or “Heck yeah, I can use this to study all these things I don’t know yet!”
One big plus: for manga and books, the sentences include or omit furigana where the original text does (or does not). That way you know if it really is your level. You should only be looking for books that have furigana on words you aren’t familiar with, otherwise you’re cheating yourself.
One big negative: anime audio was just added and the quality isn’t quite there yet. But for a site that literally just launched and started feverishly expanding its content, we weren’t expecting audio at all. For now, we recommend avoiding the anime section completely until it improves.
If you want to try reading more native Japanese material, you can use it as a quick check to see if said material is above or below your current abilities. You should still look for actual examples before you buy them in person or online, but as it grows, Wakarukana could be a nice, quick way to find new Japanese media to consume.