Fullmetal Alchemist... Furigana?

[myles1260]

Does anyone know if 鋼の練金術師 (Fullmetal Alchemist) has furigana? I want to get back to reading it, but I told myself I'd buy them and read them in Japanese (As soon as I'm good enough, so maybe by the end of the school year). However, it has to have furigana, because of course, I'm not going to be able to read all the kanji...

[Yudan Taiteki]

The series runs in Shonen Gangan so it probably has furigana.

However, if you lack the Japanese ability to read the kanji in a manga it's also highly likely that you lack the grammatical ability to read the manga as well. You can give it a try, though.

[Harisenbon]

It does have furigana, but like Chris said, if you lack the knowledge to read the Kanji used in the book, you most likely lack the knowledge to understand the grammar being used.

Fullmetal Alchemist isn't exactly a beginner-friendly manga.

[myles1260]

^Thanks guys. I kind of know that, so that's why I guess I'd start out using a dictionary. By the time I desire to read it, I'd already know a good amount of kanji though, maybe 1000 or so, probably more. By then, I think my vocabulary could be good enough to read it at a decent pace, using a dictionary for the things I do not know.

[MMM]

Do you want to read F.A. to learn Japanese, or are you learning Japanese to read F.A.?

[richvh]

Don't neglect grammar. Kanji is relatively easy to look up, but unfamiliar grammar is harder to look up, and the colloquial grammar often encountered in manga usually trips up first time readers. (And just because you've memorized a lot of kanji doesn't mean you can read the words they are part of. I've learned well over 1000 kanji, mostly through reading/writing/copying them, and I still have to look up unfamiliar words with familiar kanji from time to time.)

[becki_kanou]

Not to smash your dreams or anything, but I'm going to have to agree with everyone here; the level of the grammar is going to be your main difficulty. Even after a few years of study, and especially if you're learning exclusively/mainly from textbooks (which are notoriously short on colloquial grammar in any language), you're still going to be struggling to understand the sentence structure.

Chris has said this many times in many threads, and we should probably have it bronzed and put it up somewhere, but "Aimed at kids does NOT equal easy for non-native beginning students."

[yukamina]

Well, avoiding native materials is not going to improve one's Japanese, so if you want to read a manga, I say go for it. Even if it's a struggle, you'll learn some new words.

[becki_kanou]

Well, avoiding native materials is not going to improve one's Japanese, so if you want to read a manga, I say go for it. Even if it's a struggle, you'll learn some new words.

That's absolutely true, but attempting materials that are far above your current level is likely to be discouraging rather than encouraging. Perhaps finding a middle ground beteen textbooks and manga is a better idea.

[Yudan Taiteki]

Well, avoiding native materials is not going to improve one's Japanese

That really depends on your level. If you are a rank beginner, spending an hour deciphering and decoding one page of a manga is not as fruitful as an hour spent studying a beginner textbook. When I tried this "manga method" as a near beginner, I essentially learned nothing -- even the words I looked up I didn't retain because I wasn't practicing them, and it took so long to look everything up and decipher everything that the actual amount of Japanese I was dealing with was very small, and I wasn't even fully comprehending it all.

[MMM]

Well, avoiding native materials is not going to improve one's Japanese

That really depends on your level. If you are a rank beginner, spending an hour deciphering and decoding one page of a manga is not as fruitful as an hour spent studying a beginner textbook.

I have to agree here. Learning Japanese with pop-media isn't like Daryl Hannah in "Splash". It is much more difficult and the chances of making mistakes is much higher.

Learning by textbook is like being thrown in the middle of the Nevada desert with a GPS and told to find Las Vegas.

Learning by manga is like being thrown in the middle of the Nevada desert with a compass and told to find Las Vegas.

The best way will be "both" but even I wouldn't encourage attempting manga until a couple years of serious study. The reason is some people study Japanese to be able to read manga in the native tongue. That's a worthy reason, but I have seen some get so frustrated they aren't "getting it" when they open their manga that they eventually give up.

I translate for a living, and I am constantly looking up kanji. Especially in sci-fi, writers like to play with words, sometimes and make "cool-sounding" (or magical-sounding, or scary-sounding...) kanji combinations to fit their needs in the story. Like "droids" in Star Wars.

[richvh]

Well, once you reach a certain level, when you are reading for pleasure you don't have to look up quite so much as when you're translating, as you can depend a bit more on context. Reaching that level is a long process, however

[Yudan Taiteki]

Definitely. In pedagogy classes, I've seen the following graph used:


You imagine this as moving from the bottom of the figure to the top as you learn Japanese. The red represents use of non-native material (textbooks), the yellow represents pure use of native materials, and the orange areas (where the triangles cross) are a combination -- either modified native materials, or native materials with a lot of dictionary/reference manual usage. As you learn Japanese, the amount of native material you can handle increases, and your textbook and reference work use decreases.

[yukamina]

Shortly after I started learning Japanese(age 13, eeee), I got a hold of a Japanese manga. I was pretty hopeless; I couldn't tell where one word ended and another began, and I was still learning that the particles wa and e were written は and へ... BUT I still remember some of the words I looked up, and I really enjoyed trying to read that manga. I'm not suggesting that people use manga as a learning method, but I don't think giving it a go will do harm. Unless you lose motivation easily, in which case you're in trouble anyway.

[myles1260]

Okay, first things first, I'm not a quitter. I'm very determined to do this and absolutely will not quit until I reach my goals for Japanese.

Second, manga is one of my favorite pastimes, if not my favorite one, so the goal of being able to read it in the native tongue is a large part of my drive. I think I'm a fast learner anyway... I'm on the 20th lesson in Genki, meaning I'm almost done with the first volume... I know 101 kanji, all my hiragana and katakana, and a good amount of grammar... I can't exactly elaborate on what I know, but if you've looked at Genki, you'd understand. Here's the thing- Just started high school, the workload is crazy, sometimes I get like 9 hours of hw on weekends, and a lot on weekdays, I've been learning Japanese for less than 2 months, and somehow, I still got this far. I would say my pronunciation is about 90% perfect, due to my watching anime/reading manga since I was like 6 or something. The other 10% is not really pronunciation, but more like accent, and making the speech sound a little more natural. My reading speed is good too, for what I can read.

I feel like I'm actually very good at this, and that if I keep up the same level of study for another year or two, I feel like I might be able to read ジャンプ manga with a dictionary to look up unfamiliar words... I say ジャンプ manga, because most of the manga I read is from it, but regarding はがれん (short for hagane no renkinjutsushi, because I'm too lazy to type it in Japanese) I'd probably have a tougher time with it, but I think I'd still be able to manage, so I'm not talking about doing it now, but after a year or two more of hardcore study.