Finishing Dragonball in Korean

ian
Mon, 08 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT
learning, languages, self-improvement

Over the past few days of vacation I finally had the chance to finish reading Dragonball! I started this a few years ago and have gone in spurts, sometimes not reading for months at a time as work got in the way.

This post is a short reflection on what I learned, which I hope will be useful for other language learners.

Why the challenge?

I did this because I wanted to improve my Korean for various practical reasons, but I'm also very lazy when it comes to studying. I also tend to like Japanese media a bit better than Korean (a few Korean webtoons and comics are good, but I'm more a fan of the Japanese manga art style). So I split the difference and tried to find manga that had high quality Korean translations. I also have fond memories of devouring comics as a kid (mostly Calvin & Hobbes), and am sure that did something to improve my reading.

Picking the series

With the general medium and genre decided, I looked for a series. I had watched several of the classics in anime form, including One Piece and Fairy Tail, but they were a bit too advanced for my Korean level ~4 years ago when I started this. Then an acquaintance who is fluent in Japanese mentioned that he had read Dragonball in Japanese multiple times.

I took a look at the preview and was surprised to find that it was not TOO far above my own level. It was definitely challenging, but I could understand something like half the words, and most of the grammatical constructions, which was something! I should also not that I had never read any of the English translation, nor had I watched any of the English dubbed anime / films.

The journey

I was extremely lazy the first few years, and it was difficult to get going. Reading was also a bit demoralizing at first with a failure rate of something like 50-60% for a while. But the vocabulary and patterns were pretty repetitive so I did improve pretty quickly.

I found it helpful to force myself to NOT use a dictionary after the first few volumes. This is how most kids learn a language anyways, and it had a few benefits for me:

It made the reading more enjoyable and easier to focus on, since I wasn't stopping multiple times per page to consult a (terrible) Korean-English dictionary.

It made obvious which words were important to look up, since they kept popping up...

But I didn't actually need to look them all up, since the meaning sometimes became more obvious from the context.

The story was (IMO) significantly more engaging for the first 16 volumes, and the earlier chapters also had more attention to artwork detail in many respects. I don't regret reading all the way to the end, but it got quite repetitive and predictable to be honest.

To complement the reading (and provide a reward for the slog initially), I also watched Dragonball and Dragonball Z Kai on Laftel (NOTE: This may be region blocked), reading the chapters BEFORE watching them most of the time. I think that helped me focus on the text and improve my (weaker) reading.

Retrospective: what did I learn?

I significantly improved my Korean reading comprehension and vocabulary. I also improved my knowledge of more advanced grammatical structures, but to a much lesser extent. Dragonball is extremely repetitive, which was great for reinforcement learning, but it didn't dramatically expand my grammatical prowess.

One unexpected area I also improved was my ability to understand humor and make jokes! Especially word plays. Dragonball's Korean translation is excellent, and given the cultural similarity, a lot of the subtler jokes around things like age and respect translate well.

I can also sound like a cheeky teenager and know a lot of ridiculous sounding insults!

This will NOT help so much if you're interested primarily in learning household / everyday conversational patterns, but it IS conversational, so it can be a good complement to other TV shows and books.

The next chapter

What will I do next? I haven't really decided on the next series, but One Piece and Fairy Tail are probably reasonable options now.

I think I might also work on my Japanese a bit on the side. My Japanese is nowhere near as good as my Korean, but the success of this experiment makes me think I could probably work my way slowly through the first 16 volumes. As it's somewhat aimed at kids, it helpfully has Furigana so I could really level up my Kanji recognition.