Last year I got my Daruma and set a goal to finish a manga in one year. Could have done that if I started a year ago and managed a page per year. I also knew if it wasn't fun I would bail. So I spent most of the year studying phrases, kanji and vocabulary. A friend of mine likes to quote Abraham Lincoln, as Tony and Abe would say, I was sharpening my axe.
To be clear, I'm not complaining. This is a hurdle I expected and want to overcome. Assuming both of my readers haven't bailed yet, then maybe it's because they're heading down the same path I am. I won't get into hiragana vs. katakana too much. They are the two syllabic writing systems in Japan (kanji is logographic). One is a cursive version of the other, every kana in the hiragana set has a counterpart in the katakana set. I often struggle with certain katakana, for example hiragana 'se' (せ) looks similar to katakana 'sa' (サ), hiragana 'i' (い ) vs. katakana 'ri' (リ). And the character sets get mingled in text depending on usage: katakana is often used for animals and foreign loan words e.g. pizza => ピザ ピザを食べる That's not really an issue, it's the handwritten characters that keep tripping me up. Handwriting doesn't just add individualistic style and foibles, but also inconsistency. Right now the one that keeps giving me pause is katakana 'me' (メ) and 'na' (ナ) which look different enough, UNTIL you handwrite and the author tends to rotate the ナ character. If I can get a decent photo, the differences will be even less apparent since the handwritten tail on the ナ is less curved, but this gives you the idea.
Found a new tool to support my translation efforts. Given that I'm reading while holding my phone and looking through the camera's view finder while writing with my right, this tenderizer has proven extremely useful.
My tempo is picking up. Text density is down and phrase reuse is up. Initially I only spent about 30 minutes a day on this project. As it gets easier, and more enjoyable, I'm spending more time on this. I'd like to carve out at least an hour every day. Process It's really satisfying when I can recognize phrases and individual kanji. I still need to rely on various tools to read Shin Chan. The most used single tool is my phone's camera: I read zoomed in at about 2x magnification, followed by my pen and pad, writing everything down with room for my notes and translation. The next tool is an app named Takoboto, a dictionary tool that let's you find kanji based on the radicals (think of radicals as building blocks to build kanji). I already mentioned the furigana next to the kanji. These are great for pronunciation, however to really understand the the dialog, it really helps to have the kanji. As I select radicals from the table (highlighted in orange) radicals that that are never combined with the selected radical disappear. Unselected but possible radicals appear in grey. You can keep selecting to narrow down the search. The top window shows possible matches. There are other dictionaries, some let you write the kanji on the screen and it will find a match. But for those to work you need to know the stroke order. And with practice you can surmise the proper stroke order for unfamiliar kanji. Translation Every few pages there's a title block like the one at the top of this post. The first two chapters were brutal with tons of dialog setting up the whole lunch room premise. But as things progress things are clearer and less complex. Once I've written everything down, I make notes on what I'm capable of translating myself. If I don't recognize a kanji, roughly half so far, I use Takoboto. Next I turn to the internet for phrases. the other thing I do is use the Japanese keyboard. I find that searching for expression using kanji and kana works much better than romaji (latin characters to represent kana). I used to struggle with the keyboard. Each key pops up a selector with related kana grouped by sounds. I've improved leaps and bounds since I've never had much motivation to practice using the Japanese keyboard before. Google Translate This is a last resort for a couple of reasons. The first is if I depend on Translate, what is the point of doing all this? I'd be better off buying an English version of Shin Chan. The other is the issue with understanding the context. Google Translate is fine for words or kanji but phrases throw it for loop. The title block at the top (Bosses and Minions) of the post starts with 親, parent. But change it to 親分 it becomes "boss", the kind that implies a crime syndicate. Below is what Google Translate does to this fairly concise and readable title block. Hilarity ensues. And to be fair, Google tries. Holding the camera over the text changes every couple of seconds as it tries to improve the translation. Since it doesn't know it keeps cycling through various interpretations.
Progress First couple of pages were tough, 45 and 30 minutes respectively. They are both pretty dense in terms of content. Third page went much quicker (10 minutes) due to less writing and repeating vocabulary. The other challenge is simply reading: I'm using my camera as a magnifier. Manga Pros & Cons I've already mentioned some of the downsides: tiny text, blurry text. Here are some other challenges:
So why manga? Why not stick to the text books and phrase books?
I've seen plenty of manga before. Thumbed through them in the bookstore or my son's collection. But this is the first time I bought one for myself, and unwrapped one for the first time. Before I unwrapped it, I noticed paper tab sticking out of the pages, which turned out to be am order replenishment card for the store. Totally usable as a bookmark, if one desired. Then the glossy cover came off, leaving a no nonsense book. At this point I was still feeling pretty confident. I'm not even sure what age group Shin Chan is written for. I'm guessing 10-12 year olds, based entirely on knowing nothing about the manga, only what I watched during the flights in and out of Japan. My confidence didn't drop immediately upon opening the book. everything looked fairly typical, but wow was the text small. The characters are a mix of hiragana and kanji. Some of the kanji also have tiny hiragana next to them: furigana. Which is a way to learn how a particular kanji is pronounced in a given context. For example: 生 can mean life, fresh, raw, genuine or birth. The pronunciation will change depending on how it's being used: Sensei: 先生 Namabiru: 生ビール Uma: 生ま Furigana provides the correct pronunciation in hiragana. Why not just use hiragana? (asks every Japanese learner ever). Because of the limited sounds in Japanese there are lots of homonyms. Kanji provide more context. すい (sui) depending on context can mean: 水 : water 膵 : pancreas 騅 : dapple-grey horse 錐 : cone or pyramid. So furigana can be a great learning tool or a crutch, depending on how you use it. In the case of Shin Chan, the manga, kind of useless for the most part. This image isn't typical, most of the furigana is readable with magnification, but some pages the ink bled into the paper. But does demonstrate some of the variability trying to read this. Until I get used to recognizing characters that may be handwritten differently, in a different font or just blurry, I'll really need to concentrate just on parsing text. Pretty sure that kanji is 教 : teach, faith, doctrine (thank you Wani Kani). The furigana is unreadable. So now my journey begins in earnest. I suspect I'll need a magnifying glass and a bottle of Advil (not a sponsor, just my headache cure of choice). There's almost 200 pages and I have until the end of January (1 year from when I set this goal). Not hopeful that I'll make a lot of headway, but if I can get over the hurdle of rewriting and translating every sentence, and actually reading with some comprehension (albeit slowly) I'll be pretty satisfied. 一生懸命頑張ってください This page, しんちゃんのだるま, or Shin Chan's Daruma is my journey to read a manga in Japanese. In The Beginning Growing up in the New York City suburbs I had the pleasure of watching early anime like Gigantor and Speed Racer on TV (Channel 11, WPIX). Many early mornings before school I would soak in the awkward voice overs and still frames used to save on actual animation. Over the years I was aware of, and enjoyed Japanese "stuff' but didn't give it much thought. Tetsujin 28 (aka Gigantor) in Kobe The Revelation Sibling #4 (I'm #5 of 6) married a Japanese woman and they lived in New York City, until 2010 when they moved with their two children to Kobe, Japan. I love to travel, have been all over the US, Eastern Canada many times, Italy, Israel and Holland (doesn't really count since we didn't leave the airport). In 2015, I travelled to Japan with Sibling #3 and my two boys for a visit. The trip was amazing. Despite being jet lagged, herding two 16 year old twins and a bit dazed and confused by the whole experience, I still found Japan to be enthralling. We explored Tokyo, Kobe and Osaka. In short, Japan and Japanese culture is ultra modern with ancient traditions, enough familiarity to be comfortable and a strange world that keeps you off balance. Japan changed my perspective of myself and the world around me...well, not yet. After my trip in 2015, it took a month or so for the experience to really soak in. And I already started thinking about my sons' 2016 Spring break. I also figured it might be nice to learn a few more phrases than poorly pronounced "Ohio go zai moss" and "Sue me ma sen". And Then There Was Shin Chan 2016 Sibling #4, my two boys and I travelled to Kobe, Hiroshima, Nara and Osaka. and three things happened. Nara is a city in Nara prefecture not far from Kobe. Famous for the Nara deer that roam the grounds outside the Todai-Ji temple, bowing, and sometimes attacking, tourists for the deer crackers sold by local vendors. I didn't get to crawl through Buddha's Nostril, and I can't say I experienced enlightenment, but I did begin to really love Japan. All the idiosyncrasies and the love for high tech and ancient traditions. Next we went to Hiroshima, which is amazing and the Peace Museum and memorials are genuinely emotionally moving. And then, there was Okonomi-Mura (okonomiyaki village). My sister in-law insisted we were going to have the best okonomiyaki ever. For some reason I couldn't get six little syllables straight and kept mispronouncing it. Then I Googled it, and thought "eww". I'm not a meat and potatoes type of eater, but I'm not exactly a gastronomic skydiver either. The idea of a cabbage pancake was not sitting well. I apologize for the photo, I'm not a foodie and never think about taking a picture until after I decide the taste is worthy of a visual memory. But seriously, this is a Frankenstein's monster that somehow tastes heavenly. Okonomi actually means something along the lines of "the way you want it". There're lots of different styles and ingredients to choose from but the three common themes are pancake batter, cabbage and okonomi sauce. (Just the idea of what "sauce" is in Japan is a whole other blog). All I can say is try it if you have the chance. There are places in NYC and San Francisco that serve it, usually Osaka style, which is slathered in kewpie (umami mayonnaise). Just try it, close your eyes and try it. The other thing I discovered in 2016 was Shin Chan (Shin is short for Shinnosuke). No idea if it's by design but "Shin Chan" could be interpreted as "New Boy". A crudely drawn boy with no manners and a penchant for mooning people. Something like a mash up of Dennis the Menace, Beavis, Butthead, Ren & Stimpy. Gloriously rude and immature, it speaks to the inner child in me. Don't judge me until after you've eaten Okonomiyaki. Shin Chan is one of those contradictions: A culture that prides politeness and honor, intermingled with social pressure safety valves like Shin Chan. The Journey After getting back home I realized I wanted more. I wanted to learn more about Japan, the culture and the language. And I started studying. Not effectively, at first, with so many resources: WaniKani & Tofugu, Nihongo Shark (now NativShark) and language and cultural podcasts and vloggers like Learn Japanese Pod and Abroad in Japan, apps like Kana Town, Human Japanese and Mirai Japanese. I was overwhelmed, while thinking jumping from resource to resource was a great way to stay interested. With so many resources and no strong background in learning languages, I spun my wheels quite a bit. And my time was limited, I could spend up to 2 hours during my commute listening to language and culture podcasts, but again, not the most effective way. I was putting lots of information in my head, but not in an organized manner. Setting Goals By January of this year I knew a bunch of phrases, vocabulary, katakana, hiragana and over 2,000 kanji. Still, I felt like nothing was gelling. I looked at a stack of unopened children's manga I bought in San Francisco's Japan town in 2019. Deciding that focusing on reading one of these would set me on the path of actually being able to apply all the non-verbal stuff I had been studying. So I turned to the Daruma Doll. A little representation of Buddha Bodhidharma, colored in the left eye, with the goal of reading a manga before the end of the year. This little buddha has been staring me for almost 11 months, waiting for me to color in his right eye. I have three weeks of vacation and due to COVID I'm not going anywhere. Let's see if I can actually achieve my goal. Easy, right? |
AuthorJapanophile since I was a kid...but never realized it until 2015. Archives
January 2021
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