Japan's Opinion on Furigana

A friend of mine in Yokosuka send me some assorted odds and ends over the holidays, some of which wrapped up in sheets of a local Japanese newspaper. There was a fair amount of furigana.

Not long ago I bought a short story (藪の中) off Japan’s Amazon site. Definitely adult reading and above my current ability, but there’s a non-trivial amount of furigana as well. Excerpt included below from the first page. Granted, it was written pre-war, so I’m sure some kanji or readings are non-standard or not common.

I’m not Japanese, but if this was viewed as a bad thing I can’t imagine you’d have stuff like NHK’s Easy News with furigana on by default.

So as a beginner, I think it’s convenient and practical to have as an option, but yes - best to ween yourself off it as soon as possible. But clearly it’s part of everyday adult life as well.

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One example of furigana for native readers being tiny is Dragon Quest Builders 2 on the Nintendo Switch. Not only are they small, they’re also pale, which increases the difficulty in reading them. I suppose that the expectation is that players would only read thosr furigana for the occasional hard to read kanji.

@jerseytom From a quick scan, it looks like the furigana there is mostly reserved for uncommon vocabulary/kanji and proper nouns.

Which is pretty consistent with where you’ll normally see it in adult-oriented reading. They’re also going to be more common in older texts than modern prose (like you noted.) (I tried reading a collection of older short stories earlier last year and noted it had more furigana than the modern collection I’m reading now too–I guess because more of its kanji-usage and vocabulary really would have been unclear to modern readers.)

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Yeah, I just took a look at the only two things I have aimed more at adults, and from the pages I looked at, 放浪息子(mature manga) has furigana exlusively on names, and サイコパス (mature book) is the same.

Also in works aimed at more mature audiences, typically even the names won’t have furigana if the author (or editor, I guess) expects the audience to be able to read it. For example, 柚木 is presented without furigana in a book I was reading. And a name like 谷口 isn’t likely to get any even in a manga with quite a bit.

Yeah, it’s typical to see them only on names that have readings that differ from the standard onyomi compound or otherwise common readings.

Which is often enough, but not all the time.

Your view on furigana might depend upon how good your Japanese is. I still find it essential. Reading manga is difficult for me. Although it is of course improving all the time I am still having to look up lots of vocabulary and trying to figure out what the sentences mean. If I was having to look up Kanji as well I could imagine I would be put off reading.

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Honestly, furigana doesn’t help me. Since so far I’ve learned most of my vocab through WK, reading the hiragana pronounciation of a kanji work isn’t really going to make me understand it all of a sudden. :sweat:
The exception would be those super common conjunctions and adverbs that are usually written in hiragana I guess.

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my harry potter book has plenty of furigana, but only once per new reading in the book. it expects you to remember them. that’s pretty helpful.

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Interesting :thinking: By the end it probably isn’t “plenty of furigana” any longer, right?

Some of the light novels I read do this, but not to that extreme. If they show you furigana for a word and that word shows up again several pages later, they don’t show it again, but if the gap becomes too large they do.

yeah, the further you read, the less furigana you’ll see. i’m using kindle though, and forgetting a reading is no problem with the built-in dictionary.

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I just downloaded Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to my Ebook reader. I hadn’t realized I could use it for Japanese reading, haha. Only use it on holidays normally. I use a kobo ereader. The website I can easily buy books from lists this book at the top, but there is a lot of erotic stuff to scroll through before I get to anything else interesting in the Japanese Ebook section. I also bought a couple low price children’s books.

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yeah i think the harry potter books are pretty nice for reading practice :slight_smile: they might contain some unusual vocab, but not as much as you’d expect from a fantasy series.

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