What to read

Don't aim too high. There's no particular point in it, and even if you aim too low and hit a manga that's "too easy", it'll still be enjoyable, and any practice is a good thing.

I always recommend Yotsuba& as the first manga people should try to read. It's incredibly easy, because it's about a little girl who only ever speaks in hiragana, and people around her will usually repeat whatever she says at some point, with proper kanji and furigana. It helps that the content itself is pretty much ideal for any person of any age. If there's a perfect manga out there, Yotsuba is it.

My second recommendation is Slam Dunk, because it's a fairly easy-to-read sports manga for youngsters, which also happens to be one of the most popular titles ever, and many people consider it the best of its genre. It's luckily also finished, so no waiting for obstinate authors to give up on their secure weekly income.

My third recommendation is Dragonball, which again is easy to read, funny, exciting, and completed. Plus it's a cultural milestone that everyone knows about.

Once people get through these three, it starts getting trickier. I think it would be a good idea to stick to shoujo manga for a while, because they'll be easy to read, while probably keeping a lower ratio of stupid attack kanji compounds (impossible to look up, because they're mashed together to sound cool, not make sense) and don't use quite as much slang (which again is tricky to look up, before you get used to the words they're based on). Example titles, um, maybe Marmalade Boy, Fruits Basket, Garasu no Kamen, Skip Beat, etc.

Next up we have the brilliant Meitantei Conan, a detective manga. I haven't actually read it myself, because I decided to watch 500 episodes of the anime instead, but it's filled with a varied vocabulary and interesting contexts to remember them by, as Conan will be solving cases based around the words as clues.

By the time you get this far, you'll pretty much have the entire manga world to choose from, with Berserk and Black Lagoon and whatever. Personal favourites include Aria, Kimi ni Todoke, Major, Boku no Chikyuu wo Mamotte, Hikaru no Go, and so on, but it gets highly individual in taste, and not very specific to how easy they are to read language-wise. Most important is that you enjoy reading whatever you pick.

Once you're ready for new challenges, you can move up to furigana-less stuff, which at first feels pretty ruthless. Anything by Urasawa Naoki is good, with Monster, 20th Century Boys and Pluto all quite fabulous in my experience. Also Honey & Clover by Umino Chika, who's doing Sangatsu no Lion these days. Nodame Cantabile is nice as well. Plenty of other material should be available in the seinen genre.

When you finally feel comfortable reading these things, you can consider picking up a light novel. There's a huge supply of all kinds, and "light novels" as a genre is fairly hopeless to define. There's comedy and romance and mystery and fantasy and action and sci-fi and erotica and whatever you can think of, ranging from 100 to 800 pages in thickness, with some being loaded with furigana while others refuse to put in any at all.

So where do you begin? Choose a title primarily based on dialogue. After tons of manga, this will be most familiar to you, and provide the least concentration of obstacles (ie. words you've never seen, sentences that twist your brain). The title that instantly springs to mind is Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu, which is about 90% dialogue, and rather funny to boot.

After that, it's a crap shoot, really. I haven't read everything, and much of what I've read is garbage, so even if I feel it's simple enough to read, it might be downright painful to pollute your mind with it. A semi-safe way is to get titles that have been animated, so you know if they interest you, but never, ever buy more than 1 (one) volume of a series. If you find you can read it comfortably and enjoy the story, you can buy sequels later without wasting precious money or time.

The one rule I stick to is this: if a page takes more than 3 minutes to read, switch to another novel.

You'll eventually have advanced enough to pick it back up and read it without looking up every other word, and it won't feel like such a chore if you can keep up with the plot. It's also important to read at a level where you have an idea of what is going on, so you can focus on single words and connect them to a context, rather than drown in a flood of new words at once and be unable to figure out what anything means.

If you need to know where to purchase manga/novels in Japanese, read this page for details.

Let me end this with a disclaimer that I'm not an expert or a teacher or whatever, and haven't passed (or taken) any magnificent tests, so your mileage may vary, and all that. Some people probably have more success studying textbooks.