For a Japanese person, manga books aren’t written backwards. Japanese language is traditionally written from top to bottom and right to left because ancient Japanese written system was imported from the Chinese one and, well, that’s basically how Chinese people used to write.
, 史记, 古文观止. When you read manga book and will find that characters lay from top to bottom, which means that lines and pages should be arranged from right to left——just opposite to Latin or something like it. So it's not 'backwards' at all. And it's just a tradition in written Chinese script or scripts similar to like Japanese, not a must.
And sometimes, when the handwriting of the mangaka (or their associate) is especially messy, you may see some untranslated kanji. If you are reading raw manga (read: untranslated manga), you may see every writing system used (katakana to a lesser extent). For instance. This is taken from a speech bubble from Attack on Titan (Shingeki no Kyonin).
On a macro scale, manga publishing is roughly 35-40% of all Japanese publishing, where comics publishing in America doesn't really even show up on the scale, maybe at a few%, tops. In Japan, manga is published by well-established publishing conglomerates that publish books, magazines and comics.
All traditional Japanese manga reads from right to left, the reverse of English, which reads from left to right. In original manga-style books, the action, the word bubbles, and sound effects are all written in this direction.
“Because it's manga you have to read it backwards which makes it fun and different. We are looking to get more.” In Japan the convention is to read lines of text from right to left. Translators have kept the right to left format in their English versions.
Japanese can be written in two directions. The first is used for most newspapers, books (incl. manga), etc. Individual pages are thus bound on the right and thus, from a Western perspective appear to be read from the "back".
Japanese is not read right-to-left, at least not in the way of languages like Arabic. It is read top-to-bottom, then right-to-left OR left-to-right then top-to-bottom. FWII the former is the more traditional way and still used in many contexts, but the latter is more common (probably in part thanks to computing(?)).
Why are some manga books backwards? The same reason Europeans drive on “the wrong side of the road”. It's not wrong–or backwards, in manga's case. Because manga hails from Japan, it follows their reading style–which is right to left.
The right-to-left order was considered a special case of vertical writing, with columns one character high, rather than horizontal writing per se; it was used for single lines of text on signs, etc. (e.g., the station sign at Tokyo reads 駅京東).
Though, some older people still prefer to write vertically citing that it looks more formal. Most general books are set in vertical text since most Japanese readers can comprehend the written language either way. But horizontal written Japanese is the more common style in the modern era.
Japanese is ranked by the U.S. Foreign Services Institute as the most difficult language for native English speakers to learn. The institute uses the time it takes to learn a language to determine its difficulty 23-24 weeks for the easiest and 88 weeks for the hardest.
The Japanese language is considered one of the most difficult to learn by many English speakers. With three separate writing systems, an opposite sentence structure to English, and a complicated hierarchy of politeness, it's decidedly complex.
Here is a list of the main languages that use right to left scripts:Arabic.Aramaic.Azeri.Dhivehi/Maldivian.Hebrew.Kurdish (Sorani)Persian/Farsi.Urdu.
English, like Mandarin Chinese in mainland China, is written left to right and then top to bottom. But in Taiwan, characters are written predominantly top to bottom and then right to left.
Like other East Asian scripts like Chinese or Japanese, Korean script may be written horizontally or vertically. But in today's Korea, overwhelming majority of Korean is written horizontally, to be read from left to right. An article from Chosun Ilbo, dated July 9, 1970 about bus companies.