Public glossary of Common but not too common words of shonen manga

Japanese Language Reading
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Let’s go put here the most common words or terms in animes and mangas.

help us to build a great list of common terms of manga in japanese here!

Advice: avoid extremely well-known words like “baka”, “arigatou”, “yamete”, “sugoi”, “nani”, “maji”, “senpai”, “tasukete” for example. Priority is common words but not the obvious words though ok?

I’ll start!

  1. 懸念 = けねん = Worry, Fear
  2. 激突 = げきとつ = Clash, Conflict, Collision​
  3. 紛れもない = まぎれもない = Evident, Obvious, Certain
  4. がちで = in earnest​, Seriously
  5. 肝心 = かんじん = Essential, Important, Crucial, Vital

Continue the list here Public glossary of common but not too common words of shonen manga - Google Docs

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I confess I’m mildly confused as to what your aim is, here. Are you hoping to collect a list of common-but-not-too-common words you might use for study? Because Google will help you with that easily enough - found this one after about ten seconds of searching, for example.

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Exactly. The aim would be share not too commons words. Maybe is case of change the title for become most clear. Speaking about the Google lists the problem is that generally in the list have just easy words like “baka” and another similars. But while manga reading often another words more specifics.

Edit: I changed title of the subject

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I find that vocab is not the main issue because you can always look that up, it’s casual contractions/abbreviations/slurrings that give me more trouble. For instance おめぇ for おまえ, わかんね for わからない, すまん for すみません・すまない. And of course kansai-ben when it comes up…

I’m getting better at it but when we first started Full Metal Alchemist in the book club for instance that was a very big struggle for me, because a lot of the time you won’t find those casual forms in dictionaries and it may even confuse the grammar.

If you really want pure vocab then 舐める (usually in kana as なめる）literally means “to lick” but is also commonly used colloquially to mean “to underestimate” and I’ve seen that a ton in videogames and shounen manga.

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That’s true. For instance じゃね sometimes mean だね but another times is じゃない contraction. Another thing I don’t like also is てるform contraction that could be てん. But that ん sometimes could be mean ないform in oral conversation moments

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Yeah that’s the tricky part, sometimes you need a pretty decent understanding of the language and the context to figure out what is being said, otherwise you risk parsing things completely wrong. That’s the main issue with manga as a learner I think, as opposed to things like novels which are usually a lot more vocab-heavy but are also written in more “standard” Japanese.

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*Ah, almost forget to say that じゃね sometimes mean じゃないか as like a rhetorical way to speak about something. :rofl:

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  1. 無敵 = むてき = invincible; unrivaled; unrivalled; matchless; unbeatable; undefeatable​
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If you’re compiling a list, then I’d recommend making the op a wiki, that way other people can add things to it too.

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Nice idea. Changed the main text. Link here Public glossary of common but not too common words of shonen manga - Google Docs

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