It can be considerably harder sourcing raw manga due to just your lack of familiarity with Japanese websites. Most of your searches will probably just end up being people looking up where to read Japanese manga translated into English. Wotaku might get you in the ballpark but you’ll still probably need to source stuff yourself.

Honestly, what I’ve found easiest is to just set up a JP bookwalker account and browse that. If you’re committed to piracy, just appending raw to your Google search for a Japanese title should do it but if the series you’re after is niche it might be harder to find. Mangajikan is decent if you just want mainstream titles. Twitter is also great if you just want to find random stuff to read; authors frequently just post full chapters of their works. That’s basically exclusively where we pull stuff to translate from, you get a really fun variety digging through random Japanese hashtags. Twicomi is a great frontend for that. Not sure on VNs, haven’t read one in years.

When you do start reading, just stay committed. Not sure how long you’ve been learning Japanese but forming good habits from the beginning is essential. You don’t want to take a day off, and then another, then a week… Good luck, I hope you get 日本語上手’d soon!

Yeah pretty awful. If this stuff was around when I started reading manga in the mid 2000s who knows how many series I might’ve skipped out on. Even though most of these are just early access, I feel like it totally goes against one of the main purposes of fan translations, accessibility. My favorite part of translating manga is knowing I’m providing otherwise unknown series to others and helping people discover something new. Not everyone can just pick up Japanese (日本語上手！！) so helping people access their hobbies is really fulfilling and gating that behind a patron is shitty. I know the pain of being a poor kid whose parents wouldn’t support their interests.