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Today I finished reading a volume of manga. This is the third book in the series. Manga are basically Japanese comic books. It is worth nothing, however, that they are significantly different from their American counterparts which is why many people use the Japanese word “manga” to describe them rather than the English ”comic book”.

The reason is that American comic books are best known for being about super heroes. Most comic books in the United States are consumed by males, usually young in age.

In Japan, however, manga is consumed greatly by both males and females and a good deal of manga is marketed towards salarymen. I often see salarymen in trains reading manga or I see them in convenience stores reading the manga magazines. Also, the content of Japanese manga is usually not related to super heroes in any way. Often, the content of manga is more similar to real life situations often focusing on relationships or the fight to get into a good university. This is drastically different from flying men in tight suits fighting each other. Of course, Japanese manga has its strange content, too. Giant battling robots. Capturing wild monsters named things like “pikachu” and training them to fight each other. The list goes on.

Another difference is the way in which the two are presented. The stereotypical image of comic books in the United States are fairly large thin booklets that are stapled together. In Japan, manga is bound together like a traditional book and is small and thick like a book.

For me, I’m very happy that I’m at the level in my Japanese studies that I am able to read and enjoy manga. Of course, I use a dictionary from time to time to look up strange words that pop up but for the most part I am able to understand all the grammar and most of the words. Even if I didn’t look up any words, I would understand the story and what the characters were trying to say just fine.

Also, manga differs from normal books in that it is a story presented in drawn pictures focusing on the words and thoughts of its characters. So, it shows more spoken speech than written speech. This is beneficial for me since there is a stark difference in Japanese between spoken language and written language. Of course, this is probably true for most languages… consider the previous sentence, in normal spoken speech, I probably wouldn’t use the words “beneficial” or “stark”. But in any case, I feel that there are a large number of words in Japanese commonly used in written speech but never used in spoken speech and vice versa.

Because my Japanese classes focus heavily on the written speech, I don’t get much of a chance to study spoken speech. Of course, I hear it all the time and use it when I speak to my Japanese friends but that isn’t quite the same as seeing examples of it and studying them. Manga allows me to do this since it features real spoken language written down for me. It is sometimes difficult because a lot of the words are either so new or are slang, so they don’t appear in normal dictionaries and I am forced to ask my Japanese friends to describe their meanings to me.

I remember before I came to Japan, I would often try to read the manga because I figured they would be good practice and a good way to learn more Japanese. Unfortunately though, this proved too difficult since I didn’t know enough grammar or vocabulary to really get through it. Now that I am able to do it, it gives me a sense of actually having progressed in the language. Also, there’s the added benefit that I can now read comic books and consider that “studying”. As always, after I look up the unknown words, I put them into my notecard program (Mnemosyne) in order to memorize them later.

Speaking of which, I now have 3468 entries in that program, which is about 1734 new words tested both ways in Japanese/English. A while ago, I actually lost 800-1200 entries somehow, so I’ve most likely learned over 2000 new vocabulary words on top of my existing vocabulary. I find this pretty impressive that I was able to get this far. I wonder what my English vocabulary would be like if I added 2000 new words?

Anyway, this semester I haven’t been reading manga as much but perhaps I should start a new 30-day challenge (my previous one being writing an entry in this blog everyday). Perhaps my new 30-day challenge should be reading at least one chapter of manga every night. Hmm… I’ll think about it.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2007 at 9:28 am and is filed under Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.