Living in Japan as an exchange student in high school, I used manga as a way to learn colloquial Japanese. It was a good experience overall and the stories are

Living in Japan as an exchange student in high school, I used manga as a way to learn colloquial Japanese. It was a good experience overall and the stories are engaging. Plus, lots of the kanji have jimaku (written in the phonetic characters) underneath because many readers, like me, were learning all the characters required to read at an adult level. The only problem I encountered was reading one during classical Japanese class, which I couldn't understand at all. The teacher was lecturing in the room and walked up behind me talking. Everyone else would read comics in class, so I didn't stop. My Japanese was not good enough to realize his conversation had shifted away from the subject of koten (classical Japanese literature) to me and my reading material until a few seconds, by which time the whole class was laughing at me. I think he knew I was committed to learning the Japanese I could at that moment in my learning.