I always appreciate when a mangaka puts furigana on their handwritten kanji (which is rare...)
Do you mean the ー like in アパート? For this, I typed “ap-to”, using the dash key on my keyboard.
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From what I’m hearing from you and MrGeneric, it looks like written japanese is common to see in some manga…? I don’t know why but I didn’t expect it, like, I thought that everything was going to stay in the lovely speech bubbles😂
Not this, I refer to the line that cuts in half the words (both jap and eng) so that I can mark errors in the old messages when getting corrected on a typo
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Ah, a line like this?
Ah, a line ~~like this~~?
You’ll see a lot of aside comments handwritten outside =D
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Exactly!
how did you mark the second sentence in that kind of box?
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I think that seeing things in any font can start to prime you for recognizing it any other font. I mean, excluding poor font design, you don’t have to see letters in every single possible font to be able to read them in other fonts, and you don’t necessarily need to have seen a bunch of different handwriting to be able to read a stranger’s handwriting, right? (Again, excluding extremely poor penmanship).
That said, my exposure to handwritten Japanese has just been across a bunch of different manga, though 五等分の花嫁 was definitely a large part of my practice in seeing different fonts and handwriting throughout the series because that author loved to do different things with fonts, and there were a lot of characters whose writing you get to see.
It can be, but it’s generally not too bad, if a bit tedious at times. There are also some things out there for recognizing handwritten kanji, but they vary in effectiveness.
Yeah, I think the 心 radical is one of the worst ones to see what they do to it when it is handwritten, but some things do get very simplified. It just takes practice, though, really.
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I’m not certain how to show how I did it, so I’ll use a screenshot =P
This is *unformatted* text.
It took a while before I got used to seeing this as ロ (katakana ro) on one manga I’m reading:
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I heard this title many times, and also saw the anime on crunchyroll so I think I’ll watch it because it looks interesting!
Would you post an example page from the manga? Possibly one that doesn’t contain major story spoilers, just to make an idea of the style and the quantity of text.
What difficulty level is it?
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**
Hmm I don’t think it’s working… what are those couple of characters up and down the sentence?
**
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They're in the second symbol page on the phone keyboard.
``
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It’s not there, if you quote the post you should be able to see it.
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I may use them instead of quoting jap text
ラブレターも書いてたりしてな。
But [quote] is more elegant
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4.3.3.1
What does this mean? I couldn’t understand it, what is あれ doing here?
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Oof, that one would take some getting used to. I would want to read it as れ (though I guess it being katakana would make it easier to avoid that mistake)
五等分の花嫁
It was definitely a cute one. I enjoyed it a lot. As far as difficulty level, I believe it is rated at 27 on Natively. The difficulty doesn’t really get any higher or lower as the series goes on; it is pretty consistent. It took me a while to finish (there are 14 volumes), but that’s because I was kinda savoring it until the last couple of volumes, when there was like, one massive arc that spanned multiple volumes, and I was excited to finish it.
The things that took time getting used to:
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One of the characters likes history and occasionally uses old-fashioned sayings, and it can take a while to figure out what the heck she is actually saying, sometimes. I know there were times I spent at least a couple of hours parsing some of the stuff she would say.
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There are 6 main characters, each of whom have slightly different speaking styles, ranging from Keigo to incredibly casual and rude. It was definitely good Keigo practice though.
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The author assumes at least some basic history knowledge of Japan. A number of jokes and chapter titles reference historical events, so you’ll end up looking some history up to get what’s being said.
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Idioms. The author loves idioms. I will never forget 馬が合う thanks to this series (though apparently it’s not common anywhere else…
). This is the series where that 猿山の大将 joke came in, as well; he likes taking common phrases and changing them slightly to make a joke, which can take a while to figure out. -
Fonts, fonts, fonts, like I’ve been talking about. Some are incredibly easy. Some are not.
First 4 pages from the 1st chapter:
Those are pretty representative of text density, though sometimes there is more text, sometimes there is less.
Examples of some font things:
This font comes up in bonus chapters quite often. I hate it. 
I can read it, but depending on the kanji that is used, it can be unpleasant.
From one of the Character Introduction pages:
This page is the most extreme example of font shenanigans. 5 different fonts on one page. These are each some of the fonts you would see across the series (though not all the fonts; there are others that aren’t shown here).
Chapter 4, Pg. 3, Panel 3
あれ means “that”
“But that’s it, isn’t it?” would be the literal translation. We could word it this way in English, too, or we might word it as, “But that’s the thing.”
It’s kind of acting like a segue; he is using it as a base to launch into his next comment – which is an explanation. It’s a bit abstract, so hopefully the English phrases make sense. It’s essentially an attention-getter of sorts. I’m not quite sure how else to explain it. 
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The good news is one can get used to anything.
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4.3.3.2
This is complex, i’ll try to break it down here
口で言えばいい→if said by mouth is good (instead of by letter, so で here is particle for means. Maybe due to ばいい grammar point it can be read as ‘should’)
のに→ despite/ in order to)
わざわざ→Expressely
手紙とか→I’m not familiar with とか, what is it doing here? I checked and bunpro translates in a couple ways I’m not able to fit in the context
よく→ often
そんな→like that
メンドクサイことする→bothersome thing to do
Despite should be said by mouth, do a bothersome thing often like that of expressly (write) a letter
Almost 100% sure it’s the wrong translation, but I couldn’t do any better for real…
I think it can mean something among the lines of “Despite it’s better to talk in person, people take expressly spend their time doing something bothersome such as writing a letter
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I thought it was an R for the longest time.
Hey, looks like a pretty simple read.
I also never read those pages with all the exposition.
@mariodesu とか and the like, such as
手紙とか things such as letters
I would translate わざわざ as take the trouble to.
In this case.
Also did you just watch Demon Slayer. 
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Overall, it was pretty simple! Just had a couple of quirks here and there. 
The pages with the exposition in this series have a lot of jokes, so I actually did bother this time. 
Each volume, the character description for each of the girls changes, referencing recent events, or foreshadowing events to come, in a joking manner. The bottom “memo” section is the same every time, though, so I read it once, and then never again.
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It doesn’t help that I don’t like any type of spoiler, don’t really care about the historical lore or technical explanation or things that were already shown in the manga, and that whenever I see a page full of text I get stunlocked and my eyes glaze over.
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That’s pretty cool though!
I’m quite surprised by this because I actually thought that the font stayed consistent through the entire series… it’s already a shock when nishikata thinks a bit amped up and the font is bold characters…
I see there is also a lot of non vertical writing
Maybe this will have to wait a couple years… actually I’m beginning to be scared about the chance that AoT is something similar…
Perfectly clear! It was quite simple and intuitive actually now that I think of it again
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