Japanese Manga
Posted: Tue Aug 09, 2005 4:27 pm
Hi,
I don't know any Japanese at all, so the phrasing of my explanations / questions might be slightly silly. I'll do my best.
I had a glance at a few Japanese manga strips (外国人) this evening and quite a few things struck me:
- All the characters were, erm, "annotated". I mean, next to the character the phonetic value was written in (a) Japanese script. Is this a common practice or only in books for younger readers (to be compared -- mutatis mutandis -- with diacritics indicating the vowel value in Farsi which can be found back in some books for kids?)?
- I was glad to be able to read/understand the title of the book (the three characters belong to my still limited Chinese vocabulary), but it struck me that the book had both traditional characters (as 語, not 语) and simplified ones (as 外国人, and not ..國..). How come?
- 言 was annotated in two completely different ways (my Japanese friend read the Japanese annotations, and they sounded completely different) , while, as far as i know, Chinese (Mandarin) has yan2 and yan4. How come?
- Could anybody help me with locating on line (and exhaustive) lists of Chinese characters used in Japanese and (especially) in Korean and with some explanations on the relation Chinese character - Japanese annex Korean reading?
As always, many thanks in advance.
Frank
I don't know any Japanese at all, so the phrasing of my explanations / questions might be slightly silly. I'll do my best.
I had a glance at a few Japanese manga strips (外国人) this evening and quite a few things struck me:
- All the characters were, erm, "annotated". I mean, next to the character the phonetic value was written in (a) Japanese script. Is this a common practice or only in books for younger readers (to be compared -- mutatis mutandis -- with diacritics indicating the vowel value in Farsi which can be found back in some books for kids?)?
- I was glad to be able to read/understand the title of the book (the three characters belong to my still limited Chinese vocabulary), but it struck me that the book had both traditional characters (as 語, not 语) and simplified ones (as 外国人, and not ..國..). How come?
- 言 was annotated in two completely different ways (my Japanese friend read the Japanese annotations, and they sounded completely different) , while, as far as i know, Chinese (Mandarin) has yan2 and yan4. How come?
- Could anybody help me with locating on line (and exhaustive) lists of Chinese characters used in Japanese and (especially) in Korean and with some explanations on the relation Chinese character - Japanese annex Korean reading?
As always, many thanks in advance.
Frank