Finally, understanding these families helps you discover related sound words. You don’t need to be able to read katakana to know if a word is a sound word when you understand these classes. They help you determine which words are sound words. All other words fall under a miscellaneous category.īut why does it matter? Why do you need to understand these classes? Of all the classes, we use this the most for sound words. Reduplication repeats the complete sound instead of just the base. The first family, giseigo, includes words that mimic the voices of people and animals.ĭoubled base repeats the base sound of the word: rattattat. The last family, however, involves more than sound. The first two families represent stereotypical sound words.
English sound words share the same families ( Inose, n.d. Each family represents a type of sound they attempt to mimic. Ka takana serves a similar purpose as italics.
In English grammar, transliterations and uncommon loanwords appear in italics-you won’t see taco in italics, well except for here. Katakana specializes in loanwords from other languages. Most manga use katakana to write onomatopoeia, but sometimes you’ll see hiragana and kanji too. This means manga readers develop st ronger multidimensional thinking abilities than traditional readers. Of course, good manga reads right to left, which requires the brain to work differently. They have to know Japanese sound effect words and English transliterations like maiko and shonen. Manga readers have to know how to read text combined with images. This means manga requires readers to use a broad set of skills. Many sound effects remain untranslatable.Ĭombining Japanese onomatopoeia with Engli sh words gives manga readers an advantage over prose readers. English sports about a third of this number.
The Japanese language has around 1,200 onomatopoeia classified into three families ( Kadooka, 2009 Inose, n.d. A second reason: Japanese has sound effects English doesn’t have. One reason: it would require someone to edit the artwork. As a manga reader, you may notice how publishers translate few of these sound effects. This allowed the series feel like a moving comic book. The Batman TV series from the 1960s played around with visual sound effects during fight scenes. They include calls of animals, sounds of nature, sounds of people, and other sounds ( Alilyeh & Zeinolabedin, 2014).
Pow ! Thump! Thwack! Onomatopoeias attempt to write sound effects on page so we can hear them through our eyes.