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 Words of Truth and Wisdom: Manga University
Written by Alethea and Athena Nibley
As we were wandering aimlessly through the exhibit hall on the second day of Anime Expo this year, we came across a booth with a lot of books. This isn't exactly uncommon at an anime and manga convention, but it caught my attention anyway, maybe because they also had t-shirts. Then, as I was standing there, looking at all the books they were selling, I noticed one about Japanese sound effects, and I thought, “I wish everyone would read this book, and then we could keep all the manga sound effects in Japanese, because they're so much prettier and more accurate that way!” The thought found its way to my mouth, and we started talking to the people running the booth. And as it turns out, they read (or have read?) our column! So hello! And I'm sorry we never got your names!
The booth belonged to the Manga University. They publish all kinds of things to help people learn everything there is to know about manga, including How to Draw Manga books. I have to mention something about these here, because our boss at one of the companies we work for (I'm not telling, in order to protect the innocent) has kind of a beef with books on how to draw manga. I'm sure a lot of manga fans have been frustrated because “normal” people think manga is all about one specific art style, while we all know that manga is only a medium and can be drawn in infinite different ways. So if we're trying to prove to people that manga isn't just big eyes and small mouths, why are we saying, “Look! Here's how to draw big eyes and small mouths!”? But, as someone who owns a How to Draw Manga book (I think it's even the same series Manga University publishes), I can put those fears to rest, because these books are more about how to a story in general than how to draw in any specific style. Much like the how to draw comics books I think I've seen Marvel publish? I don't remember.
But anyway, I want to focus more on their Kanji de Manga series. That's, of course, where the book on sound effects came from. The guy behind the table explained to us the idea behind these books. See, a lot of people watch anime and read manga and get interested in learning Japanese. But when they start taking classes, they're thrown into a world full of all sorts of crazy linguistics terms--there's a reason you can fulfill the same GE requirements at BYU with a math class or a language class, is what I'm saying. Heck, in our Japanese class, it was almost like the people who wrote the textbook came up with a third language that you had to figure out in order to make sense of anything. It's like jumping into a pool of really cold water, and most people's first instinct is to jump right back out.
So the idea behind the Kanji de Manga series is to kind of bridge the gap. Now I'm mixing metaphors. Let's go back. The idea is to ease people into it, so the casual learner of Japanese can learn a little bit at a time, and it's not as intimidating. I'm imagining a giant force field made up of linguistics terms for some reason. And it's like a really really thick waterfall, and you have to work reeeeeally hard to push yourself through it if you want to learn Japanese. But the Kanji de Manga series is like an umbrella that helps take the pressure off. Does that make sense?
And when they explained all this to us, we thought of all our friends who keep starting to learn Japanese but just can't get through the waterfall. So is this a giant plug for Kanji de Manga? Yes. Go check it out and see if it works for you!
But it's also a good opportunity to talk about some of our own tricks for Japanese. We were once asked how we keep from losing our Japanese. Right now, the answer is very simple--we translate manga every day for work. But it's also true that we never felt like we did the three hours a day of studying we were told people need to do to really succeed in a language class back when we were still taking classes. There's a very simple reason for this, too. While we weren't necessarily going over the textbooks over and over and over, we were constantly reading manga. We mostly only ever read manga in Japanese, and back then, we only ever read manga in Japanese, so we always saw the grammar constructions in action. It was pretty awesome, too, because we'd learn a new construction in class, suddenly we'd see it all over the place in manga (or hear it in the anime we were watching), and we could be like, “Hey, I know that now!” It was especially cool when it was something the teacher said people never really used anymore.
Come to think of it, “manga” is pretty much the key word for everything in our Japanese studies. One time in our Japanese 444 class, there was a kanji in the short story we were all supposed to read, and no one had been able to find it, but Athena knew what it was. So when the professor asked us where we found it, to help the rest of the class, she remembered she'd actually read it in a manga somewhere. One of our classmates said, “Apparently the right answer is always 'manga.'” (For the curious, the kanji was “ireru (to make (as in tea or coffee)),” and she'd read it in Matantei Loki Ragnarok. She thinks volume 4, but she couldn't say for sure.)
I was thinking of what manga to recommend to everybody to help them on their Japanese learning quests. We used to always recommend Sailor Moon, because most of the words are either easy, or katakana versions of English words (Moon Prism Power Make Up, anyone?), but thinking about it now, I think any manga that you care enough to look up all the words would probably be a good place to start. Building a vocabulary is very important, after all. I also think that the difficulty level of a manga depends on who's reading it. For example, when we first started translating Saiyuki, it was super super hard, because we weren't used to dealing with that kind of character. But then it became one of our favorites, and we watched the anime over and over, and I guess we got on a wavelength with the characters, because now it's not that hard. Unless there's a really dramatic scene and we start getting picky about wording.
Of course, with all the English manga on the market and the scanslations to make up for the rest of it, it must be pretty hard to find the motivation to read it the hard way when the English version is practically sitting right there in front of you, but if you really want to learn Japanese, it's definitely worth it. So pick up some Kanji de Manga and a Japanese to English dictionary, and see what you can do!
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