Anyone know what are those?
It’s between the lines and not selectable. There’s few of those in the book I’m currently reading (時をかける少女).
Anyone know what are those?
It’s between the lines and not selectable. There’s few of those in the book I’m currently reading (時をかける少女).
Emphasis. You’ll also see them as interpuncts. The use is similar to emphasising something with italics in English.
thanks! I couldn’t find anything, but adding emphasis to my search returned a reddit thread.
It’s called 圏点 apparently.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/bpsjxo/strange_punctuation_in_a_book_what_do_these/
I find it difficult to find sources corroborating this idea, but I feel like occasionally they are also used to pick out e.g. a noun as an aid to parsing when there’s a long run of kana that would otherwise be a bit confusing and need reading several times. Emphasis is definitely the most common use, though.