I collect reading resources in Japanese and write book reviews by JLPT level. Japanese langblr but only for reading books - Bookblr for but only for learning Japanese. Share your books with me o(*^＠^*)o
Reading novels in Japanese can be a real challenge if your reading flow comes to a stop every time you encounter a kanji you can’t read, so getting a book with 100% furigana can help cutting back on that frustration.
There are several Japanese publishers with a younger target audience, whose books all have furigana on every kanji while still presenting complex and interesting stories about 150 – 300 pages long.
They are my top recommendation for all intermediate readers, who already have experience with graded readers, easy childrens stories or manga, but have yet to read a longer novel aimed at native speakers.
講談社青い鳥文庫 – Kōdansha Aoi Tori Bunko
集英社みらい文庫 – Shūeisha Mirai Bunko
角川つばさ文庫 – Kadokawa Tsubasa Bunko
小学館ジュニア文庫 - Shōgakukan Junior Bunko
双葉社ジュニア文庫 – Futabasha Junior Bunko
静山社ペガサス文庫 – Seizansha Pegasus Bunko
TOジュニア文庫 – TO Junior Bunko
You will recognize them easily by their colorful frames around the covers and they include popular anime movies like 君の名は。novelisations of anime series or disney movies, light novels and even the Harry Potter books.
I go into more detail about my recommendations for each publisher on my blog.
Reading novels in Japanese can be a real challenge if your reading flow comes to a stop every time you encounter a kanji you can’t read. The
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[Image description: A photo of a newspaper ad for Kincho’s anti-mosquito products. At the top, the text translates to “(connect the flying mosquitoes in the numbered order)”. The person who took the photo has connected the dots and shown that the result spells out “Bored?”.]
or, “How the transition to horizontal writing went both ways on the sides of cars”
In Japan, some company cars and trucks write the company’s name from the front of the car to the back: left to right on the left side, but from right to left on the right side.
It’s not well documented why people did that, but my personal pet theory is that this started when Japanese was still in the transition from vertical writing (columns right to left) and had to decide between which way to write Japanese horizontally.
Top to bottom, right to left
According to Wikipedia’s article on “horizontal and vertical writing in East Asian scripts”, before WWII, Japanese was written horizontally only in one row when constrained for space, and since columns went from right to left, the one row went from right to left.
Here is an old print ad for Calpico (カルピス) where the logo, being horizontal, reads from right to left, and the ad copy underneath goes from top to bottom, right to left:
This is a lot like writing words top to bottom with upright Latin letters. Here are two signs in Dutch for a liquor store (slijterij), one vertical and the other horizontal.
But especially after WWII when Japan rushed to Westernize, Japan adopted left-to-right horizontal writing to match the Latin alphabet. This follows the footsteps of the January 1915 issue of the Chinese magazine Science, which wrote Chinese horizontally to make various scientific formulae easier to read.
本雜誌印法，旁行上左，並用西文句讀點之，以便插寫算術及物理化學諸程式，非故好新奇，讀者諒之。
This magazine is printed sideways from the top left, and marked with Western punctuation. This is to make more convenient the insertion of mathematical, physical and chemical formulae, and not for novelty's sake. We ask for our readers' understanding.
Coincidentally, this solution was mostly equivalent to rotating vertically written Japanese 90° to the left, then rotating every letter 90° to the right.
Why not both?
The thing is that there was a pretty long time in Japan where left-to-right and right-to-left writing coexisted. So when writing text on vehicles, people wrote the name from the front to the back, so that a stationary observer can read it better when the vehicle is in motion. But it’s weird now that left-to-right won out by a huge margin.
Here are two advertisement plaques for Calpico—I don’t know when the specific dates are—that have motly the same design, but the older one (using the kyūjitai 戀) goes from right to left, and the newer one (using the shinjitai 恋) goes from left to right. (I don’t know why the character in the ad looks so blackface-y, but it’s what it is...)
This post was prompted by this Quora question, which listed some times when this practice went sideways (pun definitely intended). Translation follows.
平野 幸司 (Koji Hirano)さんの回答: 諸説ありますが、船は進行方向から文字を先頭にして書くことで「どっちが先頭か」をわかりやすくしており、それを真似ている…というのが有力ですね。トラックは別にどっちが先頭かわかりにくいわけではないので真似しなくても良いと思いますけど
Q: Why are company names, like on the side of a truck, written from right to left?
Answer by Kōji Hirano • president of idealShip, Inc. (2006–now) • 1215 answers written, seen 130.87 million times
There are various hypotheses, but the prevailing one is that it’s in imitation of ships writing letters from the front to the back to make it clearer which side it’s facing. Though, I don’t think a truck needs to imitate that, being obvious which end is the front end of one...
Also, I’ve directly heard before that many companies do it as a good luck charm to keep the company moving forward. They seem to associate going against the direction of movement with things going badly, and want to avoid that.
I often hear the hypothesis that it’s easier for a moving car to read it when the text goes from the front to the back, but I don’t trust that...
You see this↑ brand often! It’s Sujahta. [Note: written “スジャータ”, a dairy product company, and the #1 brand of coffee creamer and chilled soup in Japan as of 2009]
Writing backwards causes these kinds of... mishaps...
Not 送輸—トイレ : [portTrans — Toilet]... but レイトー輸送 [Reitō Transport]
Not わかいあの肉 [That Young Meat]... but 肉のあいかわ [Aikawa Meats].
Not 所業エロ山 [Actions Lewd Mountain]... but 山口工業所 [Yamaguchi Industrial Works]
Not クッサア [EW, IT REEKS!]... but アサック [Asack]
I’m personally against this practice of writing right to left...
Ok if you have any japanese learners in your life, my pro tip if you want to make them happy is to ask them nonchalantly if theyre taking N1 this july
3 people have casually asked me this in the last week for some reason, and wheeeeeewwww boy i would fail the N1 so fast, but wowzers it's been a high to be asked this
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Realizing that work doesn’t feel like it’s helping my Japanese improve because it’s teaching me things that are NOT what I want to learn.
At this point I’m upper intermediate, so I know most of the essential skills that carry over between different settings. Basic grammar, function words, listening fundamentals.
Now, it’s most filling in the vocab, and unfortunately I’m spending 40 hours a week learning things like INVOICE and LOGISTICS and TAX WITHHELD and surprise surprise these things don’t help me read my fantasy mystery romance manga any more smoothly
seriously though, this is what ive been talking about. Like they lure you in with "100 words cover 50% of the language!" or whatever bs factoid, and then it's like 15 years later and you have learned 250,4346,43222.642 words and somehow it is not enough
Realizing that work doesn’t feel like it’s helping my Japanese improve because it’s teaching me things that are NOT what I want to learn.
At this point I’m upper intermediate, so I know most of the essential skills that carry over between different settings. Basic grammar, function words, listening fundamentals.
Now, it’s most filling in the vocab, and unfortunately I’m spending 40 hours a week learning things like INVOICE and LOGISTICS and TAX WITHHELD and surprise surprise these things don’t help me read my fantasy mystery romance manga any more smoothly
seriously though, this is what ive been talking about. Like they lure you in with "100 words cover 50% of the language!" or whatever bs factoid, and then it's like 15 years later and you have learned 250,4346,43222.642 words and somehow it is not enough
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haha, i totally dropped off the map for a while, huh? well, i decided to apply for grad school last fall and so every time i thought about opening my laptop to update this blog, i was instead reminded of upcoming due dates and resumes and essays and emails...and i just left the laptop closed. BUT! the application period has long since passed. more importantly, I GOT IN!!! the program starts in august and i'm very excited to be entering a new chapter of life. sometimes i feel like i'm behind since i didn't pursue a master's straight after undergrad...then again, everyone lives life at their own pace. i don't know if i truly believe in fate or destiny or anything like that, but i do take some comfort in the belief that i'm exactly where i'm meant to be in life at any given time. whatever happens will happen. my job is to deal with things as they come.
anyway, why don't we get down to business? i've got a few panels to compare from chapter 70 today. the first one is of tengen with the butterfly mansion girls.
english:
Say something! You stuck-up pig! // Kyaaah!
japanese:
何とか言えっての‼ 地味な奴だな‼ // キャ――ッ
this one took me completely off guard because tengen 100% does not call kanao a pig or stuck-up in japanese. all he says is "[You're a] quiet one," albeit in a disrespectful tone. being quiet or reserved is, after all, one of the worst things you could be in tengen's eyes. something like "You meek little mouse!" would be closer to the original japanese and a more in-character insult for tengen, in my opinion. seriously, i've never ever, not once in all my years of studying japanese, thought of pig as a suitable translation of 奴. what the hell were they thinking...?
next is a panel of tanjirou yelling at tengen about aoi.
english:
People have different needs and abilities! You can't just use them as you like with no regard for them at all! Let Aoi go!!
japanese:
人には人の事情があるんだから無神経に色々つつき回さないでいただきたい‼ アオイさんを返せ‼
this panel comes after tengen has just said that aoi doesn't look like she'll be useful, but since she's basically a corps member he's still going to take her on a mission anyway. both the reader and tanjirou know aoi feels insecure about her position in the corps, and in classic tanjirou fashion, he indignantly yells at his superior for the transgression.
tanjirou doesn't quite say anything about different needs and abilities or using people as one pleases, though. more literally, his line is "People have their own circumstances, so I'd like to ask you not to callously poke at this and that!" basically he's telling tengen to think before he speaks. i guess the "you can't use people" part is a reference to tengen's plan to use aoi for his mission? having read the japanese version still makes it a confusing choice in my opinion, to say the least.
i'd also like to point out tanjirou's somewhat polite ～いただきたい and the 返せ‼ that comes right after. very funny juxtaposition to me, teehee.
the final panel for today features tengen and tanjirou & co.
english:
So...? // He's tall! // Where are we going?
japanese:
で？// でけえ // どこ行くんだオッさん
firstly, i think "He's huge!" instead of "He's tall!" would've been a better choice for zenitsu's 「でけえ」, but that's just me. the main thing about this panel that got me, though, was inosuke calling tengen オッさん. it's been omitted in the official english version, which i can understand. there's not many good english translations of it that would fit inosuke's character. i've seen it translated as mister, but inosuke wouldn't say that. i've also seen it as pops or bloke, but inosuke wouldn't say that either. if demon slayer were being translated now, they might have gone with unc, which honestly is probably the best option available. unfortunately inosuke is not a black u.s. american and does not live in the late 20th or early 21st centuries, so he still wouldn't say that.
they could've gone with old man and that would've been fine, but whatever. mostly i just wanted to show more people that inosuke calls tengen オッさん. it's so fucking funny to me. "where are we going, OLD MAN?" and the old man in question isn't even 25.
that brings us to the end of this panel comparison. i'll try to get back into reading demon slayer more often, but no promises. thanks for reading, and please look forward to the next posts! 読んでくれてありがとう！次の投稿を楽しみにしてください！
*I had to localize this for Japanese funeral processions (“cremate the dead with their smartphone in the casket”) and Japanese cultural beliefs (the dead crossing “the River Sanzu” instead of the River Styx)
today it dawned on me that i might read more in japanese if i had an actual book app on my phone. 🤷♀️ i downloaded Kobo and immediately read two manga volumes. I guess i can get anything done as long as it involves being on my phone
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I just finished the 10th volume of 名探偵コナン! Considering how long this series is, hitting 10 volumes already feels like a small milestone to me. 😃
Originally, I planned to watch the anime regularly so that I could hear the words I’d read in the manga. Well... somehow I didn't manage to keep up with the anime. 😅 I'll try again.
I got a Japanese study partner who gets on a call with me for an hour once a week, and we just read manga together
Like, he shares his screen and we read out loud page by page
The goal is that this will be a gateway for me to finally read in my own, but for now it’s fun to read together so we can be like “how do we read that kanji? yeah but in this context. is it coming up on jisho for you? no the left radical is different”
