![]() ![]() Regardless, this means you will often see things represented like this: This might be because furigana is already generally small, and making it even smaller would hurt readability, or perhaps it is due to limitations in printing or operating systems. One important thing to know about furigana is that generally the “small” fonts are not properly represented. While I haven’t seen this exact example before, I have seen similar usage once in a while. Here, while 君 would typically be read きみ, the author chose to use ばか (idiot) instead, possibly to emphasize the condescending tone of the speaker towards the other person. Authors can sometimes use furigana in creative ways, putting it where it doesn’t technically belong, for example: You can sometimes even find romaji used in the furigana, or the word the furigana is describing. There are also less common ways to use furigana that you are bound to find if you do enough reading, like using kanji in the furigana––something I did in the image for this post for effect––or taking a single word and breaking it out into a whole long phrase in the furigana. Here’s another example explaining a word from another language that the average Japanese person may not know: I remember seeing an example like the above on a Japanese Pokemon card very long ago, but I might be mixing things up. One example is to explain the meaning of a foreign word, as in: Personally, I find this a bit annoying and feel that both せんせい or 先生 are easier to understand, but I acknowledge the reasoning behind it.įurigana can also be used to explain not just the pronunciation, but also the meaning of a word or phrase. Speaking of children’s books, one thing you will see in textbooks targeting a certain grade level is they will replace kanji the student doesn’t know with hiragana instead of using furigana. This is good for students who are still struggling to learn the basic Joyo (standard) kanji. ![]() In fact, often every kanji in a book targeting younger children will have furigana on it. Kids books generally have furigana all over the place. The reason is that the children may have only learned hiragana at that point in their education. While by far the most common use of furigana is to describe how to read a single kanji or a compound of kanji characters, you can even find furigana used for katakana in children’s books. (By the way, the right part of a verb is called 送り仮名, “okurigana”). ![]() The right part doesn’t require furigana since it is already in hiragana. This covers the most basic use of furigana, but there are some other inns and outs that I’d like to talk about.įirst of all, when you have a verb, the furigana generally just covers the stem (left part) of the verb. If we happen to know かめ means “turtle”, that’s great, but if not we can still look up かめ easily in any dictionary. The part in bold above is the furigana, and tells us the kanji 亀 is read かめ (kame). (For a related article on how to remove furigana from a portion of text, see this.)īecause of the formatting issues, and how dealing with images can be cumbersome, in this post I will be simply putting furigana in brackets to the right of the word. Unfortunately, representing furigana in the digital world can be tricky, and I don’t know of a good way to encode any of that type of layout in a way that is compatible across many different platforms and programs. For text that runs vertically, the furigana is generally on the left or the right. Furigana is sometimes called “ruby” (ルビー), a term that derives from the size of a font once used in printed type.įor Japanese text that runs horizontally, the furigana is often above the word of phrase, though it can be below. So I’d like to do that here.įurigana––often written in kanji as 振り仮名, but also in hiragana as ふりがな, or in katakana as フリガナ––are reading hints that tell you about the pronunciation of a word or phrase in Japanese. The other day I was thinking about something when it suddenly dawned on me that I haven’t written a focused article on Japanese furigana, a particularly important part of the language for beginner and intermediate students. But as a teacher, being unable to put yourself in the shoes of a beginner makes it harder to understand their challenges, and harder to teach them effectively. As a learner, this isn’t a big deal since if you stay fixed on every little detail that you have learned you’ll have trouble moving forward. You can look at this in terms of loosing the “beginners mind” as you progress (that reminds me of a good book on Zen Buddhism here). The longer you study something, the easier it is to forget things you learned when you first started studying.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |