I know tons of people already asked this question but i wanna have a rough estimate about how long it would take to read manga through the furigana alone i dont know if most of the words in furigana has the same meaning as the kanji but i roughly know what most kanji means as i know chinese i recently bought the 8th volume of jujutsu kaisen and i wanna be able to at least understand it when i read it i feel like by the time i finish learning japanese the manga would already be over
Furigana should be the reading for the Kanji
Do you already understand Japanese grammar? If not, that’s going to be a major roadblock. How long it will take you to get past it will depend on how much you’re studying / practicing Japanese.
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I wanted to know if the kanji and furigana had the same meaning or do they just have the same meaning as theyre pronounced the same. I get the rough idea of the grammar where sometimes the word at the end in english would come first in Japanese i guess that would be one of the challenges
Your question doesn’t really make sense as asked. Furigana simply provides the way the kanji is read/pronounced.
There’s going to be much more to it than that. For example, do you know particles? Do you know how verbs conjugate? Even those are all just very basic things in the grand scope of learning Japanese grammar.
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Not necessarily, in manga a lot of the furigana is not the true reading of the word below it. I’ve read a lot of light novels too and even they have different readings than what should be there. It usually comes down to it being japanese word with a katakana english word above it or vice versa but I’ve even seen japanese words with a different japanese word in hiragana (or kanji) above it.
this is also often used to give japanese readers an idea of what the word written in furigana is supposed to mean, since they usually know the meaning of the kanji. Like “遊撃士協会” from Trails in the sky for example. It often just says “ブレイサー” (Bracer) in the Furigana, for that is the organisation’s name. But from the kanji one can guess that it is some sort of guild.
From what i can tell though, words like that do not occur too often. It is mostly safe to asume that furigana, especially when written in hiragana, are just supposed to be the reading.
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I meant as in the hiragana have meaning so is it the same as the kanji if they are pronounced the same
Technically, you can start reading manga right now as long as you can tolerate the many pauses required to look up a word on a dictionary or a grammar point from a grammar dictionary. Just like with any skill it’ll be hard (excruciatingly hard in your case) but it’ll get easier the more time you invest.
Otherwise, it’s best if you at least have a foundation of beginner level grammar and vocabulary before diving in (3 to 6 months give or take). There’s no guarantee that you can read native level material by this way but at least you can have a general idea of what a sentence is trying to say/mean.
Thanks for the info so you think i should learn about kanji and the grammar before reading manga
No problem. Again, it depends on you but having some basic knowledge is better than none.
Not to be pedantic but, hiragana don’t have meaning anymore than letters in English do - it’s words that have meaning in either language. In Japanese, words can be written in hiragana, katakana, or kanji. A word pronounced the same will generally mean the same regardless of how it’s written, but Japanese has a lot of homophones which is alleviated by the use of kanji to distinguish the meanings in writing. In speech you tend to tell by context instead.
Yes.
For example:
椅子 is read as いす like the furigana says.
椅子 means chair and いす is the Japanese word for chair.
Aye, for another example, in the manga Aria (set on Mars in the future), the word for Earth is always written as 地球 - it’s telling the reader that what they’re saying is “Manhome”, but what they mean is “Earth”. Aria actually has a number of examples like that.
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