My Japanese improved significantly by reading the Crayon Shin-chan comics. The advantage of comics aimed at young people is that they have phonetic characters (

My Japanese improved significantly by reading the Crayon Shin-chan comics. The advantage of comics aimed at young people is that they have phonetic characters (hiragana) written above the Chinese characters (kanji), so you don't have to deal with the hell of written Japanese (early Christian missionaries described Japanese as being a language "from the devil", and I am sure they were referring to the written version).