Sometime last month I finished “reading” my five volumes of Natsume Youjinchyou (one of my favorite anime). I discovered something about manga writers while “reading” Natsume Yujinchyou: they genuinely want their readers to comprehend them. At least, I think that’s why Midorikawa-san keeps changing the reading of these kanji.* For a while I just assumed my dictionary was defunct. For instance, one of the very first words I looked up in the first volume gave me this kanji compound:
二組 (online dictionaries assume a reading of “にくみ,” or nikumi)
And used this as furigana:
そつち (sotsuti)
I wasn’t using anything but my paper-and-ink dictionary at the time, so I was completely lost. Looking the furigana up later in Denshi Jisho I get nothing. Nada. Zip. So, maybe it’s the name of the school? More likely it’s slang for something, as ”そつ” is the beginning of quite a few school related concepts, like graduation. The kanji themselves appear to mean either double (as in adjoining rooms) or class two. This makes sense with the story as Natsume is in class two, and since I’m no where near OCD enough to dig deeper when there are so many other things out there to partially translate, I’m leaving it at that.
Like I said, it took me a while to catch on, and sometimes I know I still miss it. Luckily the furigana often look a little different when they are being stretched out by characters they don’t belong to. I’m also starting to a be a little better at remembering which kanji I’ve seen before (still might not remember its reading, meaning, or where I first saw it, but the little feeling of recognition that I do get is nice). Since I’ve notice this I’ve realized the author does this all the time, it’s not just once or twice for a special word. Sometimes she even does this for katakana, which is really bizarre. I’ve come love it because it raises my chances of knowing what the sentence is about. It’s a small thing, but it always brings a smile to my face, especially when I find that I understand both words.
* You may already know that Japanese has multiple alphabets. In short, Kanji are the little picture characters. Japan’s other alphabets – hiragana and katakana – are phonetic, but Kanji aren’t and require memorization. Lots of it. It is often said that to read a newspaper in Japanese one needs to know about 2,000 kanji. Furigana are the small, phonetic characters written over kanji to let people know how they are being read, since kanji have multiple readings (both for meaning and pronunciation). Furigana are used when you’re not sure if your target audience will be able to read the kanji you’re using, which basically restricts it to either media meant for kids or for particularly archaic or technical kanji. Both Natsume Youjinchou (manga) and DQ IX (DS game) use furigana for all their kanji.
People? Reading? What a novel idea! =DBut seriously, I agree wtdeehlarheoly. While different people have various reason and goals for studying Japanese, I think the language is best approached and most easily learned when you try to improve each of the 4 elements: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. #8 is definitely my #1. I remember when it took me ages to read a single page of a book in Japanese and manga was a struggle. I’m still not a quick reader, but depending on the content I can usually get by fairly well. Noting that improvement feels really good.And personally I’ve always loved to read. I can spend hours at a bookstore or library, and for that reason bookstores in Japan have been really frustrating for me; seeing all these interesting-looking books that are mostly inaccessible. As my Japanese reading ability has improved, this has slowly changed for me. Great feeling.Nice post, Mac.
well for windows .if you go to riegon languages (prob. in Control Panel but you can search Region ) and then click on the tab Keyboards and languages and then change keyboards then Add a keyboard. You go to japan and then get Microsoft IMEThen on the task bar there should be a little icon with EN on it. This is the language bar. (sometimes you might have to tell your computer to show the language bar) If you click on EN you can change to Japanese. then there will probably be an A written there, click on that and choose hiragana. The A will change to あ . Then you can just type in romaji and it will convert it as you type.When you want a kanji, just write it in hiragana and hit space. There will be a drop down menu where you can pick which kanji you want. if you don’t want it to convert it to kanji, after it converts it to hiragana hit enter.