Excellent! I am book marking this post as well! 
Also, not sure if you saw my previous post about the Yōon, but I’m wondering if you perhaps have an answer?? 
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I saw it, but I sadly don’t have an answer. I never heard of yoon before. My bad 
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Because they’re ways of writing non-Japanese sounds in the Japanese syllabaries, basically. There are no Japanese words containing things like シェ, フェ, ヴァ, ティ, etc. - those sounds aren’t part of Japanese at all, basically, but as a general rule, you can assume when you see something like that that you use the consonant sound from the large kanji and the vowel sound indicated by the small kanji.
You might see them in things like brand names, such as ディズニー, song names, like ヴァンパイア, or loan words like フェニックス but not in Japanese words.
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This is almost what I had been thinking, thank you! I just keep confusing myself with small details by thinking things like: "シェ makes some sense because it could indicate a foreign word, but しぇ doesn’t make sense because it’s in hiragana. I’m sure this is all stuff that I will get used to over time with reading and such, but I like to ask questions when they’re in my head!
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It’s convention to write foreign words in katakana, but it’s not a hard-and-fast rule, so you may sometimes see them in hiragana as well. In the case of Shenmue, though, that is usually written シェンムエ from what I can see - but there’s nothing particularly wrong with writing it as しぇんむえ. From a stylistic perspective, generally hiragana are considered more “cute” while katakana are considered more “cool” (can’t say I disagree, just look at the things and their sleek angularness), which can factor into the choice between hiragana and katakana.
Wanna really blow your mind? You can even have them in kanji, like 亜米利加 and 煙草. In the case of 亜米利加 that’s a remnant of when Japanese was written entirely in kanji (kanji predate kana by a fair bit, and though they’re much older than the word アメリカ, writing country names in kanji stuck around until ~150 years or so ago) and every one of those was chosen for its sound, not its meaning. In the case of 煙草, that’s just a really old loanword - you’ll sometimes see it in hiragana, mainly because the word predates the convention of using katakana for loanwords, and at one point the Chinese writing was adopted for the word but the reading didn’t change (though 煙草 is also valid - if relatively rare).
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Interesting! Well, the box for the game has it written シェンムー, so I would assume that’s correct? 
Another fun factoid from @yamitenshi ! You certainly know A LOT of things that I hope I will retain someday!!
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…Erm, yes, that’s correct, I was just erm… testing you. Yes. 
I need coffee 
The more useless the fact, the more likely I am to know it!
HAHAHAHA - Get some Coffee!!! (I’m just glad I wasn’t crazy 
)
ME TOO!!!
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So glad you prepared me for this I just encountered it for the first time. I guess it would have helped for me to have read some English manga ahead of time to get a feel for this!
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I just tried to decipher your sentence to me - 問題ではありません
Am I correct in assuming it means “not a problem” ?
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Yup, exactly that . In a very polite, ます way
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Yay I’m glad! I’m also glad I got it correct. I’m stuck on a page of よつばと！ and ichi.moe isn’t helping me much!
Perhaps you can help! The father has a thought bubble as Yotsuba is going nuts waving out the window of the moving van at random people! He thinks:
とちゃん手が はなせないからな 俺の分もよつばが ふってくれ
What I’m trying to grasp is something like "ちゃん (perhaps just referring to Yotsuba?) 手 - hand, が - subject marker?, は - topic marker?, なせない - establishing?, から - through?, な (not sure), 俺 - I, の - possessive?, 分 - part? enough for?, も - in addition?, よつばが - subject Yotsuba?, ふってくれ - wave?
HAHAHA what a jumbled mess…
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Are there any splits in the thought bubble? I think @yamitenshi might be more familiar. I still struggle with super casual speech in manga.
To me it sounds like “she can’t let go of father’s hand so she’s shaking my body as well”
とちゃん is very casual for おとうさん, I think.
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Ok, here we go.
とーちゃん – do note the line at the beginning, it’s a way of writing a long vowel here for とうちゃん, how Yotsuba refers to her dad
手 – hand
が – subject marker
はなせない – the negative potential form of はなす, to release/let go. So “cannot release”
から – in this context, “because,” basically marks a reason
な – I believe in this case it’s just a sort of filler, musing sound
俺 – I
の – possessive particle
分 – this is indeed “part” – it gets used broadly in a lot of ways
も – also
よつば – Yotsuba
ふってくれ – ふる, to wave, converted to the て form, which has various sort of connective uses, here attaching it to くれる, meaning that the action is “done for” him. Also くれる drops the final る to make it more of a request. “wave for me”
Putting all of that together, what you get is something like “Dad’s hands can’t let go, so wave for me too”
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Yes! Sorry 4 lines.
とちゃん手が
はなせないからな
俺の分もよつばが
ふってくれ
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Okay wow thank you!!! That makes sense! I thought it was a thought bubble for some reason. I am such a manga newb 
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Oh no worries at all! I’ve made worse mistakes than that when my brain was already very tired from trying to work through the words. I started on Yotsubato and no way I was able to properly read that whole bubble, haha. If I’m even 100% right now
You’re running up against tangled conjugations inside of words you probably don’t know that are themselves homophones you’d want a degree of familiarity to work out in context so… honestly you made a good effort haha.
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HAHA well THANK YOU - It definitely took longer than I’d like to admit, but I was doing well before that box so I’m proud of myself! I’ll just try and do my best ! 
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Just recording this for my journal…
作 is now my least favorite Kanji 
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You’ve got a little error in your transcription again (I’m surprised how much I remember of this manga ) - the correct transcript is とーちゃん手がはなせないからな俺の分もよつばがふってくれ (note the elongated vowel)
That particular sentence is probably the trickiest one in the entire chapter, because it suddenly hits you with implicit objects. And you’re not used to implicit objects. Or implicit subjects. Or implicit anything, really, because English requires a lot of information to be repeated for a complete sentence, all things considered
Anyway, とーちゃん is 父ちゃん as discussed before. はなせない is an inflection of 放す (via the potential form 放せる, then negative making 放せない).
One thing that tips you off that は is not the topic marker here is that は as the topic marker never combines with が as the subject marker - it combines with many paricles, but not が, を or も. In the case of が or を it replaces those particles, in the case of も you end up just using も.
That might give you enough of a clue, but this one tripped me up a bit when I read it too - it’s rather casual and implicit objects take some getting used to, so if you want it:
Translation and full explanation
Translation: “Dad can’t take his hands off the wheel, so do my share of waving as well, Yotsuba”
It’s basically two sentences: 父ちゃん手が放せないからな and 俺の分もよつばがふってくれ
父ちゃん手が放せないからな:
This one’s super casual and actually leaves a particle more or less “implied” (you could imagine a は after 父ちゃん). な is just a colloquial form of ね, and you can see it as just an interjection. から in this case just indicates this phrase is the reason for what he’s gonna say next. It’s implied, because he’s driving, that what he cannot take his hands off is the steering wheel. So with that as the context (I explain every part in a tooltip, hover over stuff to see more info):
Dad cannot let go [of the steering wheel] , you know, so …
So what? Well, the next sentence.
俺の分 just means “my part”
ふってくれ is an inflection of ふってくれる means “to wave for me” basically - 〜て just connects it to the auxiliary verb くれる meaning “to give” but only in the context of things being “given to” the speaker, basically - metaphorically in this case. So 〜てくれる basically means “to do ~ for me” - in this case “wave for me”.
くれ is just a casual imperative form of くれる.
So putting all that together this just means he’s telling Yotsuba to wave his part too - or, in more natural English, do his share of the waving as well. In a literal sense, what he’s saying is “Yotsuba, wave my part too, as a favour to me (because of くれる)”.
Or, in short, “Dad can’t let go of the wheel, so do my share of waving as well, Yotsuba” (or something along those lines - there’s more than one correct translation, the important parts here are the “can’t let go of the wheel” bit and that he’s asking Yotsuba to wave for him as well as for herself).
Don’t worry about struggling with this one. The degree to which Japanese leaves things implicit takes a lot of getting used to, and it trips me up sometimes to this day - it does get better, though
As opposed to English, there’s only one thing that Japanese needs in order to make a sentence “complete”, and that’s a predicate - which is just the part of a sentence that gives some information about the subject, basically. That can be an action, a description, or a whole host of other things.
That means, that as opposed to in English where “spoke” is basically meaningless in any context and is something you won’t likely hear unless you’re talking to someone with a poor grasp of the language, 話した is a complete and (within context) natural sentence that can absolutely mean something as complex as “why yes, I did indeed talk to my surprisingly understanding boss yesterday about not being able to meet the deadline for our extremely important project that will bankrupt us if we lose our client’s trust”, and “赤いね” can mean “As you can see, this Magikarp I caught just now is red once again for the umpteenth time in a row.” As long as all those extra bits have already been addressed or are obvious from contextual clues, you can just leave them off, and you’ll find Japanese speakers will routinely do so.
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