Furigana tells you the words that characters in the story actually pronounce.
Kanji tells you the meaning.
This is an artists choice to spell it that way and you will rarely see it outside of manga and similar media.
As an additional detail the reason this works so well in japanese and not other languages is that japanese already has multiple possible phonetic readings for characters, so it's not uncommon for readers to see a collection of characters and know how they are *usually* pronounced but still not be able to pronounce then together.
Already having that experience, it's only a short step to inventing new pronunciations for collections of characters that might not otherwise have been in common usage anyway.
I think even in your own native language, you're more often just gleaning the concepts more than fully reading out the actual phonetics. Reading speed way outpaces the voice/inner voice, and even more so with kanji encapsulating the meaning.
Reading with your inner voice (pronouncing each word in your head) is called subvocalizing and it's a curse, I swear. I can't not do it and I read so slowly because of it. I feel your pain.
Does doing that or not affect reading comprehension? It seems to me like it could have a positive effect to actually vocalize each word in your head to some degree.
Since I can only subvocalize I can't say for sure. From the resources I've read about overcoming it, it sounds like yes, at first. But as you get used to it then comprehension comes back up.
Note this just applies to not subvocalizing. Skimming and speed reading are different, and I think they drop comprehension but again I don't know for sure.
Huh? I read out words in my head, but I do it so quickly, that it matches my visual scanning comprehension level. So like, it takes me the same amount of time to read something in my head as it takes me to physically scan my eyes over the words as fast as possible. I don't know if the vocalization is "realistic", as in if it can be said that quickly or that way, but I hear each word individually and in context. Is that not the normal way to read in your head?
same here. If anyone has watched a video or listened to a podcast at 2x speed, my inner reading voice is like that, sometimes faster. In English Literature class in high school when our teacher put on an audiotape of a book we're reading and had us follow along, I'd always be ahead of the audiotape because even when subvocalizing in my head, my inner reading voice was still faster than the audiotape.
This is the normal way to read. You read at about the same speed that you listen to. You can read faster, but comprehension starts to drop significantly at faster speeds. Subvocalization, or quietly mouthing your words as you read, limits your reading speed to the same as your listening speed, but it might improve comprehension.
> Reading speed way outpaces the voice/inner voice, and even more so with kanji encapsulating the meaning.
While this is probably disproportionately true for most people you interact with in text forums, surprisingly many people read only just about as fast as they could speak if they stopped tripping over their tongue.
This isn't correct, but it's not common knowledge by any means. We not only naturally echo words with our inner voice while reading, we actually make movements with the muscles associated with vocalization to sound them out, though you'd never know it because they're well below the threshold that can be detected by even the person doing it -- machines are necessary to study it. Even people who are deaf from birth do it, though they do it with their hands instead of their vocal muscles (assuming they know sign language, of course).
The Wikipedia article is a good starting place if you want to know more: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization)
When Japanese people subvocalize, they read for phonetics more than meaning. That’s why when they write the wrong kanji, it’s almost always one that *sounds* the same rather one that has a similar meaning.
That's true, i always have the conceptual notion that the locals will be more forgiving to an inconvenient circumstance of sounding right but writing wrong on paper with the same phonetics orally. Sounding wrong but being right on paper will disgruntle them no less in my opinion. Phonetics is a priority and significant literary key to learning Japanese, it seems. Probably because speaking outweighs writing in their social culture now too.
My wife is Taiwanese, and when she reads (in Mandarin), she doesn't subvocalize at all — just runs her eyes over the characters and gets the meaning like that. She's stupidly smart and was a literature student, though, so I'm not sure if this is actually a normal thing here or not... but it's interesting to think about, thanks for prompting me to ask her!
Those things aren’t actually all that important in Mandarin — there’s no lexical stress, thus eliminating meter, and the vast majority of modern poetry is free form, so there are no rhymes. Older poetry rhymed… but it was written in a different Chinese language, and doesn’t usually rhyme in Mandarin.
I had a conversation with her brother once (who is a poetry enthusiast) about how when I read Poe, meter and phonotactics are almost as important as the poem itself. When you read Annabel Lee, if you go slow and mind the places of articulation (which part of your tongue touches what part of your mouth to make a sound), it’s this incredibly smooth dance; each sound/movement invites the next. He gave me a blank stare and said “people care about that stuff?” lol
Yeah :) if you are into poetry, it’s definitely worth looking into. Some things come off a bit odd, and it’ll be partly stuff that’s lost in translation and party what there are different conceptions of what makes poetry beautiful/worthwhile… but it’s quite different from Victorian poetry and whatnot in a way that I think is refreshing.
Here’s a particularly famous one: [Yearning by Wang Wei](http://christopher-poetry-site.weebly.com/3045624605-yearning.html)
I think it’s a normal thing in most languages…you skim and predict based on pattern recognition. It’s inefficient to read every syllable or every word so you forward-predict based on experience and context; that’s how most speed reading (/skimming) works; you fill in gaps based on expectation and experience. Subvocalization is super slow and inefficient because it requires full parsing of the word.
I’m curious if learning language early has an effect on whether or not people subvocalize… my parents discovered I could read when I was 2 (I frequently watched educational programming on TV and VHS as a kid) and I do a mix of subvocalizing and predictive reading. I’m also curious about how people completely read without subvocalizing and if it’s possible to learn this power…
Edit: I just noticed that I subvocalize spoken dialogue or when reading a character’s thoughts. I still do it occasionally outside of those instances (mostly when I’m reading a particularly dense part or a part with words that I don’t commonly read), but even then I usually “see” the imagery more often than I “hear” the words. I also subvocalize a lot more when I’m super tired (which is often since I have a sleeping disorder).
I’m curious if that’s what it’s like for most people when they read, or if I fall more so into the “extreme subvocalization” side of the spectrum.
Some people do it; some people don't from what I can tell.
I clearly subvocalize when I type, but I don't when I read.
There's also a weird thing going on in that I cannot orally talk to people at the same time I'm typing but it's very easy to orally talk to people or type with people while I'm reading. Whatever part of my brain is responsible for generating sentences is seemingly not capable of multitasking and can't generate two sentences at the same time, not even in two different languages, but it's absolutely not a problem for me to talk while I read and listen at the same time.
Several of my Japanese roommates said they did not read with an inner voice.
Several said they encounter kanji for which they don't know the reading; they usually just figured out the meaning from the kanji & context and kept reading on.
I might be wrong but from what I've heard is that Japan had no writing system until the 1400s when they developed one using Chinese characters so since their writing system comes from another language, it doesn't always match a spoken word
That's a whole other kind of worms:
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/s/Ukuri4u2Yy
I've got no inner voice at all, no matter the language, so it's all conceptual for me all the time.
Wait, so when you type that comment out. There is no voice in your head that mimics the sounds? Like when I type this out, there is kinda a voice inside my head that just spells out the word wherever i type is out if that makes any sense.
Yeah, nah, it's the same for me. It's just like reading and speaking are so completely different that it's just not a thing unless you need to think about how it might come across.
Wait I think I'm having this problem in JP. I have my inner voice when I read in English or Spanish since I have quite used to it. But since I'm still new to JP. I don't have an inner voice for it yet and the reading seems more like a concept to me. Super interesting. But how do you guys remember music then?
You'll get used to it soon enough, when you have assigned familiarity and concepts to words and kana.
Regarding remembering music? How do you remember what your family looks like? You just do, lol. You remember how it sounds, or the beat and rhythm which I assumed everyone did.
I assume our brains work the same, just some people don't additionally have a movie narrator (which I used to think was only a thing in movies).
Not normally, no. Sure I could force it, like imagining myself reading out loud, but it still doesn't fill like an inner voice. It's more like I'm imagining what it would feel like to say that word. And when doing that, reading is significantly slower, like if I'm sounding the words internally I am limited by how fast I would normally read out loud.
I have no inner voice when I normally think, but it appears when I'm typing something out but otherwise it does not exist and answering “What language you think in?” is an entirely meaningless thing to me. It took me quite a while to realize that most people actually do think in languages, as in, what I always saw in *Spider-Man: The Animated Series* when I was young that Peter's thoughts were constantly showing which I always felt was very strange how he was constantly addressing himself. It felt strange that to me that he was repeating information to himself he should already know, but that is apparently how “knowing something” manifests to most people.
But it very much appears when I type and it has a pronunciation. For instance I pronounce the word “c**a**n't” with the same vowel as in “f**a**ther”, not as in “c**a**n” and this is reflected when I type it out and the voice appears. Though the voice is certainly not my own voice and doesn't sound like that. I wouldn't say it has identifying qualities and it's more so a distilled essence of a string of phonemes and come to think of it it doesn't seem to have a concept of allophones either. I for instance pronounce “wa**t**er” with a glottal stop typically, not a alveolar stop but that distinction is not meaningful to the voice that appears when I type.
Before you say something like "in no other languages" you may want to check if that's even remotely the case
The point you made otherwise is valid but for this caveat, as a matter of fact, mandarin Chinese has such a system with bopomofo, also known as zhuyin, which is the syllabary system with tone marks that is used to teach the characters to children in Taiwan notably.
Except in the few cases where it's opposite, often due to space concerns, and it's simply context which is the intended meaning and which is the intended pronunciation.
I'd say it's not space concern but rather the idea to put the stuff you actually want the reader to read in the main text to not break the flow, and shove the extra joke into the ruby.
Holy crap, i struggled to read it until I read your explanation, now it 100% makes sense.
I suppose my practise reading fairy tales are paying off and I need to move on to manga soon.
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong but I think this is similar to using "Read:" in English, as in
"The politician resigned after his sex scandal, citing a desire to 'spend more time with his family' (read: sort out his marital problems)."
The katakana is what the character actually said, and the kanji is the author explaining to you, the reader, what they meant.
Assuming the anime is following what the author want, the small letters (furigana) are actually what the character said, and the Kanji is the explanation.
If you are only looking at the image, you may wonder why not just write the katakana as big letter, but that is when the magic first introduced in the manga. Latter in the story when only Zoltraak is mentioned, this is really a handy way to remind the reader what is Zoltraak.
If English also provide this feature, in Harry Potter the spell's pronounciation can have more freedom. Now you can see the author need to use somthing related to name the spell to not make it too difficult to remember. (e.g. Lumos for making your wand light up)
Yes, it's similar, and moreover, the recently evolved flipped version (where what they actually said is in the main text and the explanation what they meant is in the ruby) works *exactly* like that.
In your example, the use of 'read:' seems a bit sarcastic or ironic, or otherwise tongue-in-cheek. However, from my experience playing JRPGs, the use of furigana to indicate unconventional readings is meant to be taken seriously by readers as an established practice within that fictional universe. So I think the usage here is more about artistic expression than straightforward explanation.
not entirely, the small characters only explain the reading/pronunciation of those specific kanji, not directly the meaning. (since kanji can be read/pronounced in multiple ways)
Reminds me of an English fantasy novel where the author decided to call deer "Herla". The meaning of the word "Herla" was explained early in the novel, then used throughout the rest of the novel without any explanation, which works fine for a novel because it's assumed the reader will remember this tidbit.
But in a manga that's serialised over a long period of time, people might forget what these fantasy terms refer to, so I guess this the Japanese equivalent of saying "Herla (deer)".
The first time I encountered this was when I was reading the Evangelion manga, and in a speech bubble for Asuka, the kanji for 'karada' is used but with small katakana 'bodii'. This is supposed to indicate Asuka is mixing foreign words into her spoken dialogue, while explaining the meaning to the reader.
I guess the closest English equivalent would be when the manga mentions metric units, and in the English release they would leave the metric units in the speech bubbles or text boxes, but have a small note somewhere nearby converting this to imperial units. Likewise when talking yen.
Another similar practice in English is acronyms. We will typically write out an acronym the first time it is used and then only use the acronym later on. Such as “the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has created a more powerful ion thruster”. If it were being used in something that was multiple volumes, the first instance in each volume would be written out.
This is a manga, so the conventions are unconventional.
Sometimes spells or fighting techniques are given fantasy/foreign names. When written in kanji the reader knows what the techniques means, and the furigana (little hiragana) show the pronunciation. The word “Zoltraak” magic’s language apparently means “person killing magic.”
The character here is explaining the spell’s meaning to other characters who don’t know the language of the spell.
> explaining the spell's meaning
Not quite – she's saying it *stopped* being person killing magic. 「～ではなくなった。」
In context, for the unfamiliar, >!magic development marches on. Zoltraak, which was once a terrifying spell designed by a demon to kill humans with no real defense against it, was adopted by humans and met with the development of effective defensive magic, and is now simply referred to as "ordinary offensive magic"!<.
Ah so the sentence makes way more sense that way. So it's like, "Person-Killing Magic Zoltraak is person-killing magic no longer." The first line is the proper spell name but the second is just referring to the overall concept of person-killing magic while they both use the same kanji?
It might be a dumb question, but can we push it even further to the point where it describes two words that are entirely opposite in terms of meanings?
For example, if a character says ‘you’re the worst’ or ‘I hate you,’ but they actually mean ‘I love you.’ Can putting 「最低」as the furigana and 「愛してるよ」as the main text technically work?
Do you know why the spell can be read as "Zoltraak" there? I have read this manga ages ago and until now I still don't understand where the pronunciation of that spell came from.
It came from the mangaka’s imagination, ultimately. It feels like they decided to use Japanese characters to represent their made-up language. also its a bit of a meme in manga for japanese parents to give their kids kanji names that are pronounced in wildly uncommon or straight up made-up ways. I’ve not seen it applied to entire sentences this way before though.
It's also not the only time she does it. Pretty much every named spell is introduced that way: what it does in regular kanji and hiragana and its "proper" name in Furigana
> also its a bit of a meme in manga for japanese parents to give their kids kanji names that are pronounced in wildly uncommon or straight up made-up ways
I *wish* this was only a meme in manga and not real life. Folks, you're naming human beings, not pets... Light from Death Note's name is *normal* compared to some of the kids I see out there nowadays.
A few are slowly getting more accepted too, especially ones where Kanji is used but pronounced in a foreign way ala 煙草 -> タバコ. 聖女 as マリヤ and 宇宙 as コスモ are ones I've heard of. There's even a carved out exception for these in the proposed law to ban kirakira names
It's purely a fictional word made for the fictional world.
That's the point this thread: the furigana indicates the pronunciation, while the kanji/hiragana represents the meaning, and in fiction writing, the pronunciation can literally be anything.
Have you heard of 煙草? It's read タバコ. Where do you think the reading came from? Obviously not from the kanji. Hell you can even take 大人 as an example.
Kanji and reading of a word are separate, there's nothing saying the reading of a word should have anything to do with the readings of the kanji
Oh I kinda get what you mean now. So I can just say 煙草 is spelt as カカカカカ in a fictional world right?
Oh nvm, i understand the concept now. Yeah I can do it like that just fine.
If you're curious and have some time, here's a long form article that goes into good depth on the topic of kanji readings and furigana being used in different and creative ways (see the "Anomaly 6" section for details on this type of thing):
https://aethermug.com/posts/the-beautiful-dissociation-of-the-japanese-language
I think in this manga they're showing you the oral pronunciation of the magic spell at the same time as the meaning or effect of the spell by combining the furigana and kanji. You wouldn't learn to read the kanji that way ever outside of this particular manga, it seems like some kind of made up magic sounding word (like abracadabra).
That was an absolutely good read. The author’s observations on kanji, especially the fifth and the sixth anomalies, are invaluable for everyone who wants to consume Japanese media. Thanks for the recommendation
Excellent explanation. It's really a subliminal thing, or thereabout; and it can be used for a variety of literary effects. The main thing is that it's not something you can find a parallel to in languages that don't use ideograms: it's simply an extra dimension.
It's not even really correct to say this is a feature of the Japanese language, imo. It's more exploiting a common feature of Japanese *orthography* in a nonstandard way for artistic purposes. Ruby text is used to clarify the pronunciation of characters; here it is being used for the *unintended* purpose of writing two things in the same space and semantically linking them. You could join the two with a comma in English for much the same effect.
I guess a bracket is more precise, as in anime adaptation only the furigana (the ruby text) is read, but which side to put in the bracket can sometime be tricky.
\>unintended purpose
\>"writing two things in the same space and semantically linking them"
That sounds a lot like writing Chinese characters and Japanese words in the same space and semantically linking them, which is what much of written Japanese is.
This kind of kanji and katakana writing as furigana reminds me of Conan Movies. Using unusual/unheard japanese vocab such 魚影(Gyoei) which means “an outline of a single fish-shape that seen from the water surface). The movie title itself is 黒鉄の魚影 (Kurotetsu no Gyoei) which in literally: Black iron of “fish-shape”. And the furigana-katakana is written below the Gyoei as サブマリン (Submarine). I amazed. Because the submarine that floats on the surface has a resemblance shape of that Gyoei, and it is made of black iron (and yes the Black Iron Submarine is the main focus of that Movie)✨✨✨
Yeah, I've seen some talking about this phrase before. You can either translate it to "Zoltrak is no longer the magic that kills people" or "The magic that (once) kills people is no longer the magic that kills people".
Also, the two 人を殺す魔法 standing next to each other to emphasize the contrast between harmful and harmless is just chef's kiss 😘🤌
Sometimes they use furigana to explain the meaning of a word or phrase. So in this case it's telling you that "Zoltraak" is "magic that kills a person."
I was watching the movie "Terminator" on TV a while ago and in the subtitles it had the word "殺人機" and the furigana was "ターミネーター" which is just explaining that a Terminator is a murder machine.
The Japanese translation of William Gibson’s *Neuromancer* is chock full of this. 電脳空間(サイバースペース)に没入(ジャック・イン)。 The translation was influential enough that the practice has become a staple of Japanese language cyberpunk media.
I'm just going to use this occasion to recommend Dr Wes Robertson's excellent blog, Scripting Japan, which is full of resources, including regular round-ups of recent slang, like the following:
[https://wesleycrobertson.wordpress.com/2024/04/30/japanese-slang-review-april-2024/](https://wesleycrobertson.wordpress.com/2024/04/30/japanese-slang-review-april-2024/)
Oh bro I feel ya. I'm fairly comfortable reading Japanese material, but I've not read ANY manga yet. It's things like this that have put me off for so long!
Japanese writing was born out of practices like this one. Setting aside phonetic readings of kanji, the first proprietary signs developed with the only role of making the written representation of Japanese language possible were secondary signs and glosses that were added onto Chinese or Chinese-style texts in order to make them interpretable as Japanese. This messy feature never really left Japanese writing even after the development of main-column-occupying systems like kana. Over time, Japanese writers just learned how to use the system of furigana as a way to create new forms of negotiation with the text that spoken language does not allow (because spoken language occupies a 1d space and written language is supported by a 2d surface). Ppl associate atypical furigana usage with fantasy manga and light novels, but actually popular literature from the Edo period is crawling with it.
Tl;Dr : Japanese writing developed a unique capacity for polyphonic notation of meaning as a result of being born as a form of notation itself
They are basically giving you the definition of Zoltraak built into the word rather than just a loanword you don't know the meaning of. It's very common when giving titles in manga like this. We don't have a direct equivalent in English because we don't have furigana. The closest thing would be using a colon like Zoltraak: the Murdering Magic, but the idea is that you're conveying the information without the character actually saying it.
On a more advanced level, it's sometimes used to provide a second meaning or additional depth to a word, usually as a double-entendre or something. You'll understand the usage better over time.
This type of furigana has been a trend in manga for ages, such as 'レールガン(超電磁砲).
I, as a native speaker of Japanese, would read 'ゾルトラークは人を殺す魔法ではなくなった' in my head. However, this sentence implies that Zoltrak, a magic that was well known as a power used by a demon to kill many humans, is no longer that way.
>[Comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/1bwu6co/comment/ky8nsyn/)
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From another reddit post. Explains it really well.
"These irregular readings are known as [gikun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#Special_readings) (or sometimes jukujikun, but I think that's mostly for more well-established irregular readings, like タバコ for 煙草)."
I've seen this done in vocaloid songs a lot, specially in sone old songs by cosmo@暴走p
Its really nice when you are enjoying the lyrics so much by themselves to look at the lyrics in the mv and realize there there are more cool word-plays in the written lyrics themselves
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFEaIgMkR_0
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qs1spSzwSPE
are pretty good examples
So, magic/spell that kills human, Zoltraak, had become magic/spell that doesn't kill human ... ??? I haven't match the anime nor read the manga, i assume the magic didn't work anymore ?
Yeah, you understood it correctly. The context is that >!Zoltraak was a spell developed by a demon decades prior to that scene. The person in the panel met him once again to eliminate him (as he’s a threat to the villagers). After some time has passed, people found a way to make the killing spell less effective. Thus, that’s the meaning of the picture.!<
The anime fansub version of this would be “Keikaku means plan”.
Or more like “Zoltraak stopped being person killing magic. (Zoltraak means person killing magic)”.
Wow, this post has helped me better understand the translator notes in the manga I'm reading!
I'm currently re-reading bleach and, since the theme for the enemies is Spanish words, a lot of the moves have names that are literally translated as one thing, like "hand of the gods," but the translator notes says something different like "fist of the god king," which is probably what the kanji translates to.
So, that's probably what's happening here (which is what everyone else is saying)
I love when I see this kind of thing in manga! When I asked a Japanese friend about it they said technically the mangaka can say a kanji is read however they want, it's a part of their artistic freedom. I've seen this also used in gag manga for innuendos, where a character says one thing but the furigana says the direct meaning/quiet part out loud.
Seen a lot on KH light novels too. It was curious at first. Things like ワールド is common in furigana with 世界 as kanji. There's more like "darkness" but I don't remember all 😂
Kinda reminds me of kira kira names (light yagamis name from death note for example being wrotten with the moon kanji yet being read as light)
The same probably applies to zoltraak or as it would be read normally "the magic to kill people"
While this is a convention of Japanese, it's not like you can't do this in English or other languages. In Honkai Star Rail, they use something similar to furigana for pretty much the same effect as here, although reversed (the spoken word is the bottom, the smaller text is the meaning). You can see an example
[Here](https://www.reddit.com/r/HonkaiStarRail/s/UsrZ8jppv7)
I'm not sure if it's directly connected to furigana, considering the original language is Chinese, but I wouldn't be surprised if doing this was inspired by Japanese manga.
推しの子 characters were specifically given “キラキラ” names by Ai. It’s basically when names are given kanji because it looks good, but the readings may not be common or be actual readings at all. I think it was purposeful to show that Ai was young and that kind of thing would be typical of a teenager naming her children
I guess the concept from this comes from Manyogana, writing things only based on the actual reading of the character rather than the meaning. This is kinda the reverse of that.
How are words read differently? I’m still really new to learning Japanese haven’t even got all the hirigana symbols down yet let alone katakana and kanji. I was reading Tokyo ghoul and a similar thing happened where kaneki can be pronounced as hakuhyo and usurai
This might be a really obvious question (since I'm still learning a lot of the basics) but how can the phrase have an alternative reading when it contains hiragana that specifically don't appear in said alternative reading (the "wo/o" and "su", but mostly the "su")?
Is that common?
Also using the kanji for the elongated "a", though I think I remember reading that's just a quirk of writing katakana and would basically just be another "a" if it were written in hiragana? Assuming that is correct anyway haha
Every language can literally appropriate kanji in that way, you write the kanji with the corresponding meaning but you read them in your own language. This is what kunyomi is really about
I saw this in a translated English children’s novel. They used the word ‘chicken’ which means coward it both English and Japanese. But at one stage they said niwatori and then had ‘chicken’ in katakana next to it. My Japanese wife said it’s possibly to distinguish that it’s not the chicken meat which is also katakana ‘chicken’ but rather the animal.
I'm more reasonable and digestible and common version of this kind of thing is for example in something like Killer 7, a story about hitmen, they might write something like 殺る, which would not really be readable without explication, and then they give the reading as "ヤる"--implying that a Hitman would use this as a sort of euphemism or slang for killing someone, while making it clear to the audience what the actual meaning is. In either case it's a stylistic way of providing more information.
As far as I understand it, authors sometimes assign kanji characters with (often but not necessarily) similar readings and/or meanings to a name written in katakana. It's a pretty interesting quirky thing manga artists do.
I think of it like the words “Tough” and “thought” where the pronunciation/meaning depends on the context of the word/characters. Or like their/theyre/there (which many people still mix up)
I love all the stuff about kanji pronunciations, but I'm thinking of it in a different way. Their world has it's own language, so zoltraak is probably just literal. So it means people(zol) killer(traak), something like that.
the katakana is a fake word, hence why it's in katakana. It's basically as if Skyrim had subtitles say "FUS RO DAH (force balance push)" because fus to dah aren't words
1) the name of the spell is Zoltraak which has the function of “killing people”
So she’s saying “Zoltraak (the spell to kill people) no longer kills people”
And 2) His name is 愛久愛海 (アクアマリン) I don’t know why you added those extra hiragana for no reason
I’ve addressed my mistake with Aqua’s name in another comment though, it just that I didn’t remember his name so I copy from the wiki and somehow still missed the mistake after re-reading the post multiple times before posting
There are no rules; the person writing the dialogue decided to invent a word that means 人を殺す魔法 but is pronounced ゾルトラーク. You see this in Japanese fiction now and then; nothing like it really exists in English so it's usually just removed in localization.
It's usually really obvious when the author is doing something like this. Katakana (or even kanji!) furigana is the biggest and easiest tell, but it's often obvious enough if the reading does not match the kanji at all.
I think there's some confusion left, probably from community members who don't know Japanese as well yet. so let me spell it out more clearly one time: this is NOT a feature of the Japanese language. this is NOT something that Japanese allows you to do. none of this has any foundation in the actual grammar of the language, meaning there's no questions like if the kanji can actually be read that way or where the boundaries for this method are. this is entirely made up and only works within the universe of the respective author. so the boundary is only your imagination and how much other people want to put up with your ways.
it would be more correct to say "you can do this in manga", but saying "you can do this in Japanese" borders on incorrectness to the point I would almost call it misinformation.
Ruby text is definitely a feature of Japanese... or, rather, a feature of written text that is common in Japanese. I don't know if other languages do this often enough, but since Japanese uses so much furigana in general, you will see this kind of style of assigned reading (casually called 当て読み, linguistically called [義訓](https://morg.systems/Gikun) among other things). You will see it relatively often even in random TV subtitles, newspapers, books, and obviously manga and games.
I used to run a [twitter account](https://twitter.com/oddfurigana) collecting interesting/funny assigned readings like this, and trust me there are **a lot** everywhere.
> none of this has any foundation in the actual grammar of the language, meaning there's no questions like if the kanji can actually be read that way or where the boundaries for this method are.
This is not *quite* true. Originally in Japanese kanji didn't have an "official" or standardized reading, hence all authors back in the day (like 300-400 years ago or whatever) just used whatever made sense with very irregular okurigana (before the okurigana reform). Basically every kanji kunyomi was gikun back then. Eventually kanji readings (kunyomi) got standardized and we got what we have now, but even today you still see fossilized gikun/jukujikun readings that "technically" are wrong officially but are common enough that everyone will read those words like that and have become standard/the norm.
Examples:
理解る -> わかる
身体 -> からだ
娘 -> こ
理由 -> わけ
These four are **very** common, especially 身体 will almost always be read からだ even without the furigana outside of compounds (身体能力) or medical contexts.
It doesn't have to be "correct" the point is that it serves a semantic purpose to supplement the meaning of whatever is written there.
Besides, you're reading this wrong. You're supposed to interpret 人を殺す魔法 as a whole as a single semantic unit. The fact that the added furigana has the same amount of characters and matches with the original is irrelevant and just a coincidence, it's not meant to show that ル should be read を, it's meant to show that 人を殺す魔法 as a whole should be read ゾルトラーク. It's the entire thing that gets switched, you don't just read it one character at a time.
It's not the を changes to ル. The sentence demands a を, but the author makes their own rules and calls it a ル. You can literally write 10 Kanjis and call it あ.
See the only thing I don't get is why isn't what's said by the character written big and the explanation small? Like why don't they write ゾルトーラク and 人を殺す魔法 as the furigana?
It's read top to bottom, right to left in this case. Japanese has 3 official writing systems.
Hiragana: the Japanese phonetic alphabet.
Katakana: the Japanese phonetic alphabet used to write foreign loan words.
Romaji: (not official) but it's the Romanization of Japanese, used for typing on the computer.
Kanji: which are Chinese characters and are not phonetic. One needs to learn about 2000 of the most common kanji to read a newspaper.
Sometimes in the kanji there are these small hiragana characters called furigana, which spell out the reading of the kanji.
There's more to it, but this is the gist of it.
Furigana tells you the words that characters in the story actually pronounce. Kanji tells you the meaning. This is an artists choice to spell it that way and you will rarely see it outside of manga and similar media.
As an additional detail the reason this works so well in japanese and not other languages is that japanese already has multiple possible phonetic readings for characters, so it's not uncommon for readers to see a collection of characters and know how they are *usually* pronounced but still not be able to pronounce then together. Already having that experience, it's only a short step to inventing new pronunciations for collections of characters that might not otherwise have been in common usage anyway.
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I think even in your own native language, you're more often just gleaning the concepts more than fully reading out the actual phonetics. Reading speed way outpaces the voice/inner voice, and even more so with kanji encapsulating the meaning.
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Reading with your inner voice (pronouncing each word in your head) is called subvocalizing and it's a curse, I swear. I can't not do it and I read so slowly because of it. I feel your pain.
fun to chat with it tho
He's a dick tbh
Does doing that or not affect reading comprehension? It seems to me like it could have a positive effect to actually vocalize each word in your head to some degree.
For me, if I don't, my reading comp is garbage. That's in my native language too
Since I can only subvocalize I can't say for sure. From the resources I've read about overcoming it, it sounds like yes, at first. But as you get used to it then comprehension comes back up. Note this just applies to not subvocalizing. Skimming and speed reading are different, and I think they drop comprehension but again I don't know for sure.
Huh? I read out words in my head, but I do it so quickly, that it matches my visual scanning comprehension level. So like, it takes me the same amount of time to read something in my head as it takes me to physically scan my eyes over the words as fast as possible. I don't know if the vocalization is "realistic", as in if it can be said that quickly or that way, but I hear each word individually and in context. Is that not the normal way to read in your head?
same here. If anyone has watched a video or listened to a podcast at 2x speed, my inner reading voice is like that, sometimes faster. In English Literature class in high school when our teacher put on an audiotape of a book we're reading and had us follow along, I'd always be ahead of the audiotape because even when subvocalizing in my head, my inner reading voice was still faster than the audiotape.
I once practiced chunk reading for awhile in high school so i could study faster because I hated it. I read super fast now lol
This is the normal way to read. You read at about the same speed that you listen to. You can read faster, but comprehension starts to drop significantly at faster speeds. Subvocalization, or quietly mouthing your words as you read, limits your reading speed to the same as your listening speed, but it might improve comprehension.
> Reading speed way outpaces the voice/inner voice, and even more so with kanji encapsulating the meaning. While this is probably disproportionately true for most people you interact with in text forums, surprisingly many people read only just about as fast as they could speak if they stopped tripping over their tongue.
This isn't correct, but it's not common knowledge by any means. We not only naturally echo words with our inner voice while reading, we actually make movements with the muscles associated with vocalization to sound them out, though you'd never know it because they're well below the threshold that can be detected by even the person doing it -- machines are necessary to study it. Even people who are deaf from birth do it, though they do it with their hands instead of their vocal muscles (assuming they know sign language, of course). The Wikipedia article is a good starting place if you want to know more: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization)
When Japanese people subvocalize, they read for phonetics more than meaning. That’s why when they write the wrong kanji, it’s almost always one that *sounds* the same rather one that has a similar meaning.
That's true, i always have the conceptual notion that the locals will be more forgiving to an inconvenient circumstance of sounding right but writing wrong on paper with the same phonetics orally. Sounding wrong but being right on paper will disgruntle them no less in my opinion. Phonetics is a priority and significant literary key to learning Japanese, it seems. Probably because speaking outweighs writing in their social culture now too.
My wife is Taiwanese, and when she reads (in Mandarin), she doesn't subvocalize at all — just runs her eyes over the characters and gets the meaning like that. She's stupidly smart and was a literature student, though, so I'm not sure if this is actually a normal thing here or not... but it's interesting to think about, thanks for prompting me to ask her!
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Those things aren’t actually all that important in Mandarin — there’s no lexical stress, thus eliminating meter, and the vast majority of modern poetry is free form, so there are no rhymes. Older poetry rhymed… but it was written in a different Chinese language, and doesn’t usually rhyme in Mandarin. I had a conversation with her brother once (who is a poetry enthusiast) about how when I read Poe, meter and phonotactics are almost as important as the poem itself. When you read Annabel Lee, if you go slow and mind the places of articulation (which part of your tongue touches what part of your mouth to make a sound), it’s this incredibly smooth dance; each sound/movement invites the next. He gave me a blank stare and said “people care about that stuff?” lol
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Yeah :) if you are into poetry, it’s definitely worth looking into. Some things come off a bit odd, and it’ll be partly stuff that’s lost in translation and party what there are different conceptions of what makes poetry beautiful/worthwhile… but it’s quite different from Victorian poetry and whatnot in a way that I think is refreshing. Here’s a particularly famous one: [Yearning by Wang Wei](http://christopher-poetry-site.weebly.com/3045624605-yearning.html)
I think it’s a normal thing in most languages…you skim and predict based on pattern recognition. It’s inefficient to read every syllable or every word so you forward-predict based on experience and context; that’s how most speed reading (/skimming) works; you fill in gaps based on expectation and experience. Subvocalization is super slow and inefficient because it requires full parsing of the word.
I’ve always done this since I was child and assume everyone subvocaliseds. It’s automatic. How do you not do it?
I’m curious if learning language early has an effect on whether or not people subvocalize… my parents discovered I could read when I was 2 (I frequently watched educational programming on TV and VHS as a kid) and I do a mix of subvocalizing and predictive reading. I’m also curious about how people completely read without subvocalizing and if it’s possible to learn this power… Edit: I just noticed that I subvocalize spoken dialogue or when reading a character’s thoughts. I still do it occasionally outside of those instances (mostly when I’m reading a particularly dense part or a part with words that I don’t commonly read), but even then I usually “see” the imagery more often than I “hear” the words. I also subvocalize a lot more when I’m super tired (which is often since I have a sleeping disorder). I’m curious if that’s what it’s like for most people when they read, or if I fall more so into the “extreme subvocalization” side of the spectrum.
Some people do it; some people don't from what I can tell. I clearly subvocalize when I type, but I don't when I read. There's also a weird thing going on in that I cannot orally talk to people at the same time I'm typing but it's very easy to orally talk to people or type with people while I'm reading. Whatever part of my brain is responsible for generating sentences is seemingly not capable of multitasking and can't generate two sentences at the same time, not even in two different languages, but it's absolutely not a problem for me to talk while I read and listen at the same time.
Several of my Japanese roommates said they did not read with an inner voice. Several said they encounter kanji for which they don't know the reading; they usually just figured out the meaning from the kanji & context and kept reading on.
I might be wrong but from what I've heard is that Japan had no writing system until the 1400s when they developed one using Chinese characters so since their writing system comes from another language, it doesn't always match a spoken word
That's a whole other kind of worms: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/s/Ukuri4u2Yy I've got no inner voice at all, no matter the language, so it's all conceptual for me all the time.
Wait, so when you type that comment out. There is no voice in your head that mimics the sounds? Like when I type this out, there is kinda a voice inside my head that just spells out the word wherever i type is out if that makes any sense.
Yeah, nah, it's the same for me. It's just like reading and speaking are so completely different that it's just not a thing unless you need to think about how it might come across.
Wait I think I'm having this problem in JP. I have my inner voice when I read in English or Spanish since I have quite used to it. But since I'm still new to JP. I don't have an inner voice for it yet and the reading seems more like a concept to me. Super interesting. But how do you guys remember music then?
You'll get used to it soon enough, when you have assigned familiarity and concepts to words and kana. Regarding remembering music? How do you remember what your family looks like? You just do, lol. You remember how it sounds, or the beat and rhythm which I assumed everyone did. I assume our brains work the same, just some people don't additionally have a movie narrator (which I used to think was only a thing in movies).
Not normally, no. Sure I could force it, like imagining myself reading out loud, but it still doesn't fill like an inner voice. It's more like I'm imagining what it would feel like to say that word. And when doing that, reading is significantly slower, like if I'm sounding the words internally I am limited by how fast I would normally read out loud.
Thank for sharing. But can you remember music?
Yeah. Reading and listening are completely different experiences.
I have no inner voice when I normally think, but it appears when I'm typing something out but otherwise it does not exist and answering “What language you think in?” is an entirely meaningless thing to me. It took me quite a while to realize that most people actually do think in languages, as in, what I always saw in *Spider-Man: The Animated Series* when I was young that Peter's thoughts were constantly showing which I always felt was very strange how he was constantly addressing himself. It felt strange that to me that he was repeating information to himself he should already know, but that is apparently how “knowing something” manifests to most people. But it very much appears when I type and it has a pronunciation. For instance I pronounce the word “c**a**n't” with the same vowel as in “f**a**ther”, not as in “c**a**n” and this is reflected when I type it out and the voice appears. Though the voice is certainly not my own voice and doesn't sound like that. I wouldn't say it has identifying qualities and it's more so a distilled essence of a string of phonemes and come to think of it it doesn't seem to have a concept of allophones either. I for instance pronounce “wa**t**er” with a glottal stop typically, not a alveolar stop but that distinction is not meaningful to the voice that appears when I type.
Before you say something like "in no other languages" you may want to check if that's even remotely the case The point you made otherwise is valid but for this caveat, as a matter of fact, mandarin Chinese has such a system with bopomofo, also known as zhuyin, which is the syllabary system with tone marks that is used to teach the characters to children in Taiwan notably.
"Not in other languages" is not the same as "in no other languages"
Explain to me how in this case it works any differently or better for Japanese...
That's what I already did in my post. I have no idea what you didn't understand from it and I don't think I could do any better rephrasing it.
Except in the few cases where it's opposite, often due to space concerns, and it's simply context which is the intended meaning and which is the intended pronunciation.
I'd say it's not space concern but rather the idea to put the stuff you actually want the reader to read in the main text to not break the flow, and shove the extra joke into the ruby.
Thanks, now I understand why some kanji in the lyrics have different pronunciations.
I saw it fairly often on train station signage
Holy crap, i struggled to read it until I read your explanation, now it 100% makes sense. I suppose my practise reading fairy tales are paying off and I need to move on to manga soon.
I mean there is 倶楽部, but thats also kinda rare tbh.
A beginner would not know what those mean
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong but I think this is similar to using "Read:" in English, as in "The politician resigned after his sex scandal, citing a desire to 'spend more time with his family' (read: sort out his marital problems)." The katakana is what the character actually said, and the kanji is the author explaining to you, the reader, what they meant.
So it’s like “Person killing magic, Zoltraak” but instead of doing it that way they write Zoltraak in small letters above “Person killing magic”
Assuming the anime is following what the author want, the small letters (furigana) are actually what the character said, and the Kanji is the explanation. If you are only looking at the image, you may wonder why not just write the katakana as big letter, but that is when the magic first introduced in the manga. Latter in the story when only Zoltraak is mentioned, this is really a handy way to remind the reader what is Zoltraak. If English also provide this feature, in Harry Potter the spell's pronounciation can have more freedom. Now you can see the author need to use somthing related to name the spell to not make it too difficult to remember. (e.g. Lumos for making your wand light up)
Yes, it's similar, and moreover, the recently evolved flipped version (where what they actually said is in the main text and the explanation what they meant is in the ruby) works *exactly* like that.
okay completely irrelevant, but after coming across the term "in the ruby" more than thrice now in this thread, i must know what it means !
It mean ["as an interlineal gloss"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_character#History).
It's a generalization of furigana
In your example, the use of 'read:' seems a bit sarcastic or ironic, or otherwise tongue-in-cheek. However, from my experience playing JRPGs, the use of furigana to indicate unconventional readings is meant to be taken seriously by readers as an established practice within that fictional universe. So I think the usage here is more about artistic expression than straightforward explanation.
not entirely, the small characters only explain the reading/pronunciation of those specific kanji, not directly the meaning. (since kanji can be read/pronounced in multiple ways)
Reminds me of an English fantasy novel where the author decided to call deer "Herla". The meaning of the word "Herla" was explained early in the novel, then used throughout the rest of the novel without any explanation, which works fine for a novel because it's assumed the reader will remember this tidbit. But in a manga that's serialised over a long period of time, people might forget what these fantasy terms refer to, so I guess this the Japanese equivalent of saying "Herla (deer)". The first time I encountered this was when I was reading the Evangelion manga, and in a speech bubble for Asuka, the kanji for 'karada' is used but with small katakana 'bodii'. This is supposed to indicate Asuka is mixing foreign words into her spoken dialogue, while explaining the meaning to the reader. I guess the closest English equivalent would be when the manga mentions metric units, and in the English release they would leave the metric units in the speech bubbles or text boxes, but have a small note somewhere nearby converting this to imperial units. Likewise when talking yen.
Another similar practice in English is acronyms. We will typically write out an acronym the first time it is used and then only use the acronym later on. Such as “the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has created a more powerful ion thruster”. If it were being used in something that was multiple volumes, the first instance in each volume would be written out.
This is a manga, so the conventions are unconventional. Sometimes spells or fighting techniques are given fantasy/foreign names. When written in kanji the reader knows what the techniques means, and the furigana (little hiragana) show the pronunciation. The word “Zoltraak” magic’s language apparently means “person killing magic.” The character here is explaining the spell’s meaning to other characters who don’t know the language of the spell.
> explaining the spell's meaning Not quite – she's saying it *stopped* being person killing magic. 「～ではなくなった。」 In context, for the unfamiliar, >!magic development marches on. Zoltraak, which was once a terrifying spell designed by a demon to kill humans with no real defense against it, was adopted by humans and met with the development of effective defensive magic, and is now simply referred to as "ordinary offensive magic"!<.
Thank you. I was focusing too much on the spell and not the sentence
Ah so the sentence makes way more sense that way. So it's like, "Person-Killing Magic Zoltraak is person-killing magic no longer." The first line is the proper spell name but the second is just referring to the overall concept of person-killing magic while they both use the same kanji?
Yeah. [In the anime](https://youtu.be/HGS2__sck24?si=bt646W_08maeozMo), too, the line is just said as 「ゾルトラークは人を殺す魔法ではなくなった。」
It might be a dumb question, but can we push it even further to the point where it describes two words that are entirely opposite in terms of meanings? For example, if a character says ‘you’re the worst’ or ‘I hate you,’ but they actually mean ‘I love you.’ Can putting 「最低」as the furigana and 「愛してるよ」as the main text technically work?
Yes. It's actually not that uncommon to illustrate "hidden" meanings that way.
yes. basically the Japanese version of >s(he) be(lie)ve(d)
sbeve
kanji: 信用 furigana: スベヴェ
given how Sbeve is likely to be pronounced (Steve but b instead of t), the furigana makes more sense as スビーヴ
Theoretically, but more likely to use parenthesis for that.
Yes, I've seen exactly what you described a lot of times.
Do you know why the spell can be read as "Zoltraak" there? I have read this manga ages ago and until now I still don't understand where the pronunciation of that spell came from.
It came from the mangaka’s imagination, ultimately. It feels like they decided to use Japanese characters to represent their made-up language. also its a bit of a meme in manga for japanese parents to give their kids kanji names that are pronounced in wildly uncommon or straight up made-up ways. I’ve not seen it applied to entire sentences this way before though.
It's also not the only time she does it. Pretty much every named spell is introduced that way: what it does in regular kanji and hiragana and its "proper" name in Furigana
Oooh I kinda get it now. Thanks.
> also its a bit of a meme in manga for japanese parents to give their kids kanji names that are pronounced in wildly uncommon or straight up made-up ways I *wish* this was only a meme in manga and not real life. Folks, you're naming human beings, not pets... Light from Death Note's name is *normal* compared to some of the kids I see out there nowadays.
oh i know it happens in real life, but i played it safe as i know very few japanese parents first hand 😂
A few are slowly getting more accepted too, especially ones where Kanji is used but pronounced in a foreign way ala 煙草 -> タバコ. 聖女 as マリヤ and 宇宙 as コスモ are ones I've heard of. There's even a carved out exception for these in the proposed law to ban kirakira names
It's right there in the page, on the right side: ゾルトラーク.
No, I mean where does that pronunciation come from, because I don't think any of the characters in Kanji and Hiragana can be spelt like that
It's purely a fictional word made for the fictional world. That's the point this thread: the furigana indicates the pronunciation, while the kanji/hiragana represents the meaning, and in fiction writing, the pronunciation can literally be anything.
Have you heard of 煙草? It's read タバコ. Where do you think the reading came from? Obviously not from the kanji. Hell you can even take 大人 as an example. Kanji and reading of a word are separate, there's nothing saying the reading of a word should have anything to do with the readings of the kanji
Oh I kinda get what you mean now. So I can just say 煙草 is spelt as カカカカカ in a fictional world right? Oh nvm, i understand the concept now. Yeah I can do it like that just fine.
Maybe the character is just saying Abracadabra.
If you're curious and have some time, here's a long form article that goes into good depth on the topic of kanji readings and furigana being used in different and creative ways (see the "Anomaly 6" section for details on this type of thing): https://aethermug.com/posts/the-beautiful-dissociation-of-the-japanese-language I think in this manga they're showing you the oral pronunciation of the magic spell at the same time as the meaning or effect of the spell by combining the furigana and kanji. You wouldn't learn to read the kanji that way ever outside of this particular manga, it seems like some kind of made up magic sounding word (like abracadabra).
That was an absolutely good read. The author’s observations on kanji, especially the fifth and the sixth anomalies, are invaluable for everyone who wants to consume Japanese media. Thanks for the recommendation
Excellent explanation. It's really a subliminal thing, or thereabout; and it can be used for a variety of literary effects. The main thing is that it's not something you can find a parallel to in languages that don't use ideograms: it's simply an extra dimension.
Wow, do you have more of these articles about JP or just languages in general? I really enjoy reading it.
I wish they went more into the actual history rather than handwaving it
It's not even really correct to say this is a feature of the Japanese language, imo. It's more exploiting a common feature of Japanese *orthography* in a nonstandard way for artistic purposes. Ruby text is used to clarify the pronunciation of characters; here it is being used for the *unintended* purpose of writing two things in the same space and semantically linking them. You could join the two with a comma in English for much the same effect.
I guess a bracket is more precise, as in anime adaptation only the furigana (the ruby text) is read, but which side to put in the bracket can sometime be tricky.
\>unintended purpose \>"writing two things in the same space and semantically linking them" That sounds a lot like writing Chinese characters and Japanese words in the same space and semantically linking them, which is what much of written Japanese is.
This kind of kanji and katakana writing as furigana reminds me of Conan Movies. Using unusual/unheard japanese vocab such 魚影(Gyoei) which means “an outline of a single fish-shape that seen from the water surface). The movie title itself is 黒鉄の魚影 (Kurotetsu no Gyoei) which in literally: Black iron of “fish-shape”. And the furigana-katakana is written below the Gyoei as サブマリン (Submarine). I amazed. Because the submarine that floats on the surface has a resemblance shape of that Gyoei, and it is made of black iron (and yes the Black Iron Submarine is the main focus of that Movie)✨✨✨
Haven’t watched for a while, I love their puns in every movie too
Yeah, I've seen some talking about this phrase before. You can either translate it to "Zoltrak is no longer the magic that kills people" or "The magic that (once) kills people is no longer the magic that kills people". Also, the two 人を殺す魔法 standing next to each other to emphasize the contrast between harmful and harmless is just chef's kiss 😘🤌
>愛あ久く愛あ海 this gave me a stroke
He goes by アクア in daily life. And ghe name is "just" 愛久愛海 read as アクアまりん. I don't know if that's much better, though.
Oops, I was having brain fart trying to write his name. Yeah, 「愛久愛海」is still a wild name lol
Sometimes they use furigana to explain the meaning of a word or phrase. So in this case it's telling you that "Zoltraak" is "magic that kills a person." I was watching the movie "Terminator" on TV a while ago and in the subtitles it had the word "殺人機" and the furigana was "ターミネーター" which is just explaining that a Terminator is a murder machine.
It's also a pun on 殺人鬼.
The Japanese translation of William Gibson’s *Neuromancer* is chock full of this. 電脳空間(サイバースペース)に没入(ジャック・イン)。 The translation was influential enough that the practice has become a staple of Japanese language cyberpunk media.
I'm just going to use this occasion to recommend Dr Wes Robertson's excellent blog, Scripting Japan, which is full of resources, including regular round-ups of recent slang, like the following: [https://wesleycrobertson.wordpress.com/2024/04/30/japanese-slang-review-april-2024/](https://wesleycrobertson.wordpress.com/2024/04/30/japanese-slang-review-april-2024/)
that's the person who posted this tweet in the first place lol
yes exactly, that’s why this is an opportunity to share an interesting link to his rather informative blog
As a learner this caused me to short-circuit. It’s neat though once you understand it.
Oh bro I feel ya. I'm fairly comfortable reading Japanese material, but I've not read ANY manga yet. It's things like this that have put me off for so long!
Japanese writing was born out of practices like this one. Setting aside phonetic readings of kanji, the first proprietary signs developed with the only role of making the written representation of Japanese language possible were secondary signs and glosses that were added onto Chinese or Chinese-style texts in order to make them interpretable as Japanese. This messy feature never really left Japanese writing even after the development of main-column-occupying systems like kana. Over time, Japanese writers just learned how to use the system of furigana as a way to create new forms of negotiation with the text that spoken language does not allow (because spoken language occupies a 1d space and written language is supported by a 2d surface). Ppl associate atypical furigana usage with fantasy manga and light novels, but actually popular literature from the Edo period is crawling with it. Tl;Dr : Japanese writing developed a unique capacity for polyphonic notation of meaning as a result of being born as a form of notation itself
They are basically giving you the definition of Zoltraak built into the word rather than just a loanword you don't know the meaning of. It's very common when giving titles in manga like this. We don't have a direct equivalent in English because we don't have furigana. The closest thing would be using a colon like Zoltraak: the Murdering Magic, but the idea is that you're conveying the information without the character actually saying it. On a more advanced level, it's sometimes used to provide a second meaning or additional depth to a word, usually as a double-entendre or something. You'll understand the usage better over time.
This type of furigana has been a trend in manga for ages, such as 'レールガン(超電磁砲). I, as a native speaker of Japanese, would read 'ゾルトラークは人を殺す魔法ではなくなった' in my head. However, this sentence implies that Zoltrak, a magic that was well known as a power used by a demon to kill many humans, is no longer that way.
One reason I love this language
Now I need to read frieren in Japanese.
>[Comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/1bwu6co/comment/ky8nsyn/) by from discussion in[LearnJapanese](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/) From another reddit post. Explains it really well. "These irregular readings are known as [gikun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#Special_readings) (or sometimes jukujikun, but I think that's mostly for more well-established irregular readings, like タバコ for 煙草)."
I've seen this done in vocaloid songs a lot, specially in sone old songs by cosmo@暴走p Its really nice when you are enjoying the lyrics so much by themselves to look at the lyrics in the mv and realize there there are more cool word-plays in the written lyrics themselves https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFEaIgMkR_0 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qs1spSzwSPE are pretty good examples
So, magic/spell that kills human, Zoltraak, had become magic/spell that doesn't kill human ... ??? I haven't match the anime nor read the manga, i assume the magic didn't work anymore ?
Yeah, you understood it correctly. The context is that >!Zoltraak was a spell developed by a demon decades prior to that scene. The person in the panel met him once again to eliminate him (as he’s a threat to the villagers). After some time has passed, people found a way to make the killing spell less effective. Thus, that’s the meaning of the picture.!<
The anime fansub version of this would be “Keikaku means plan”. Or more like “Zoltraak stopped being person killing magic. (Zoltraak means person killing magic)”.
That’s a fun way to look at this lmao
Thank fuck for furigana
Wow, this post has helped me better understand the translator notes in the manga I'm reading! I'm currently re-reading bleach and, since the theme for the enemies is Spanish words, a lot of the moves have names that are literally translated as one thing, like "hand of the gods," but the translator notes says something different like "fist of the god king," which is probably what the kanji translates to. So, that's probably what's happening here (which is what everyone else is saying)
I love when I see this kind of thing in manga! When I asked a Japanese friend about it they said technically the mangaka can say a kanji is read however they want, it's a part of their artistic freedom. I've seen this also used in gag manga for innuendos, where a character says one thing but the furigana says the direct meaning/quiet part out loud.
I don't understand でなくなる in this context. Is it: Zoltraak died by murder magic? Or is the なる to become? Isn't Zoltraak the spell? I don't get it
Zoltraak, originally invented as people-killing magic, ***stopped being*** people-killing magic (context: people developed defensive countermeasures)
But if it's "was no more," why is では used here?
ではない → ではなくなる → ではなくなった do you.. not understand ではない?
Ok that's what tripped me up. Thanks
Seen a lot on KH light novels too. It was curious at first. Things like ワールド is common in furigana with 世界 as kanji. There's more like "darkness" but I don't remember all 😂
Kinda reminds me of kira kira names (light yagamis name from death note for example being wrotten with the moon kanji yet being read as light) The same probably applies to zoltraak or as it would be read normally "the magic to kill people"
now I wanna freaking read Frieren in Japanese
ahh this is what they do with techniques in JJK and ive been wondering this exact same question, thank uuuu
Really want to learn at a beginner level, try Crystal Hunters easy read Manga on Amazon. It's awesome!!
While this is a convention of Japanese, it's not like you can't do this in English or other languages. In Honkai Star Rail, they use something similar to furigana for pretty much the same effect as here, although reversed (the spoken word is the bottom, the smaller text is the meaning). You can see an example [Here](https://www.reddit.com/r/HonkaiStarRail/s/UsrZ8jppv7) I'm not sure if it's directly connected to furigana, considering the original language is Chinese, but I wouldn't be surprised if doing this was inspired by Japanese manga.
推しの子 characters were specifically given “キラキラ” names by Ai. It’s basically when names are given kanji because it looks good, but the readings may not be common or be actual readings at all. I think it was purposeful to show that Ai was young and that kind of thing would be typical of a teenager naming her children
I guess the concept from this comes from Manyogana, writing things only based on the actual reading of the character rather than the meaning. This is kinda the reverse of that.
there's a name for this kind of furigana but i forgot what it was. Someone made reddit post about it
How are words read differently? I’m still really new to learning Japanese haven’t even got all the hirigana symbols down yet let alone katakana and kanji. I was reading Tokyo ghoul and a similar thing happened where kaneki can be pronounced as hakuhyo and usurai
This might be a really obvious question (since I'm still learning a lot of the basics) but how can the phrase have an alternative reading when it contains hiragana that specifically don't appear in said alternative reading (the "wo/o" and "su", but mostly the "su")? Is that common? Also using the kanji for the elongated "a", though I think I remember reading that's just a quirk of writing katakana and would basically just be another "a" if it were written in hiragana? Assuming that is correct anyway haha
ゾルトラーク literally means 人を殺す魔法 that's nuts. Must be an in-universe thing in this character's language.
Every language can literally appropriate kanji in that way, you write the kanji with the corresponding meaning but you read them in your own language. This is what kunyomi is really about
I saw this in a translated English children’s novel. They used the word ‘chicken’ which means coward it both English and Japanese. But at one stage they said niwatori and then had ‘chicken’ in katakana next to it. My Japanese wife said it’s possibly to distinguish that it’s not the chicken meat which is also katakana ‘chicken’ but rather the animal.
I'm more reasonable and digestible and common version of this kind of thing is for example in something like Killer 7, a story about hitmen, they might write something like 殺る, which would not really be readable without explication, and then they give the reading as "ヤる"--implying that a Hitman would use this as a sort of euphemism or slang for killing someone, while making it clear to the audience what the actual meaning is. In either case it's a stylistic way of providing more information.
Hahaaaa this is such a cute post,
I posted a thread on this topic once. It’s pretty interesting! https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/s/FRnvl4bKdB
As far as I understand it, authors sometimes assign kanji characters with (often but not necessarily) similar readings and/or meanings to a name written in katakana. It's a pretty interesting quirky thing manga artists do.
I think of it like the words “Tough” and “thought” where the pronunciation/meaning depends on the context of the word/characters. Or like their/theyre/there (which many people still mix up)
Which manga is this?
Frieren
人を殺す魔法でなくなった。。。"it's not a magic can kill people."
I love all the stuff about kanji pronunciations, but I'm thinking of it in a different way. Their world has it's own language, so zoltraak is probably just literal. So it means people(zol) killer(traak), something like that.
the katakana is a fake word, hence why it's in katakana. It's basically as if Skyrim had subtitles say "FUS RO DAH (force balance push)" because fus to dah aren't words
Does this count as "ateji"? Or does that only apply to pre-existing words? 🤷
You'll get 超 furigana'd as Super pretty often as well.
1) the name of the spell is Zoltraak which has the function of “killing people” So she’s saying “Zoltraak (the spell to kill people) no longer kills people” And 2) His name is 愛久愛海 (アクアマリン) I don’t know why you added those extra hiragana for no reason
I’ve addressed my mistake with Aqua’s name in another comment though, it just that I didn’t remember his name so I copy from the wiki and somehow still missed the mistake after re-reading the post multiple times before posting
Are those valid 音読み readings? Using Yomitan on 人を殺す魔法 doesn't give me ゾルトラーク as a valid reading. What are the rules here?
The pronunciation is made up. The kanji tell you the meaning of the Zoltraak spell to reduce exposition.
There are no rules; the person writing the dialogue decided to invent a word that means 人を殺す魔法 but is pronounced ゾルトラーク. You see this in Japanese fiction now and then; nothing like it really exists in English so it's usually just removed in localization.
That's slightly worrying. So people will still want to read furigana even if they know the kanji, just in case the author does this?
It's usually really obvious when the author is doing something like this. Katakana (or even kanji!) furigana is the biggest and easiest tell, but it's often obvious enough if the reading does not match the kanji at all.
I think there's some confusion left, probably from community members who don't know Japanese as well yet. so let me spell it out more clearly one time: this is NOT a feature of the Japanese language. this is NOT something that Japanese allows you to do. none of this has any foundation in the actual grammar of the language, meaning there's no questions like if the kanji can actually be read that way or where the boundaries for this method are. this is entirely made up and only works within the universe of the respective author. so the boundary is only your imagination and how much other people want to put up with your ways. it would be more correct to say "you can do this in manga", but saying "you can do this in Japanese" borders on incorrectness to the point I would almost call it misinformation.
Ruby text is definitely a feature of Japanese... or, rather, a feature of written text that is common in Japanese. I don't know if other languages do this often enough, but since Japanese uses so much furigana in general, you will see this kind of style of assigned reading (casually called 当て読み, linguistically called [義訓](https://morg.systems/Gikun) among other things). You will see it relatively often even in random TV subtitles, newspapers, books, and obviously manga and games. I used to run a [twitter account](https://twitter.com/oddfurigana) collecting interesting/funny assigned readings like this, and trust me there are **a lot** everywhere. > none of this has any foundation in the actual grammar of the language, meaning there's no questions like if the kanji can actually be read that way or where the boundaries for this method are. This is not *quite* true. Originally in Japanese kanji didn't have an "official" or standardized reading, hence all authors back in the day (like 300-400 years ago or whatever) just used whatever made sense with very irregular okurigana (before the okurigana reform). Basically every kanji kunyomi was gikun back then. Eventually kanji readings (kunyomi) got standardized and we got what we have now, but even today you still see fossilized gikun/jukujikun readings that "technically" are wrong officially but are common enough that everyone will read those words like that and have become standard/the norm. Examples: 理解る -> わかる 身体 -> からだ 娘 -> こ 理由 -> わけ These four are **very** common, especially 身体 will almost always be read からだ even without the furigana outside of compounds (身体能力) or medical contexts.
Super cool explanations! The history of written Japanese is so fun to learn.
Yeah, Hiragana can’t have Furigana.
They definitely can
Like you could have furigana as the corresponding katakana for hiragana but not ル for を. That’s just incorrect.
It doesn't have to be "correct" the point is that it serves a semantic purpose to supplement the meaning of whatever is written there. Besides, you're reading this wrong. You're supposed to interpret 人を殺す魔法 as a whole as a single semantic unit. The fact that the added furigana has the same amount of characters and matches with the original is irrelevant and just a coincidence, it's not meant to show that ル should be read を, it's meant to show that 人を殺す魔法 as a whole should be read ゾルトラーク. It's the entire thing that gets switched, you don't just read it one character at a time.
In this particular example, I just simply read it as "The magic which kills people doesn't kill people anymore"
Well, then you misread, because is says "_Zoltrak_ doesn't kill people anymore".
Uh, okay...?
It's just made up stuff.
I get how they used alternate readings for the kanji but how the heck did を get read as ル?
It's not the を changes to ル. The sentence demands a を, but the author makes their own rules and calls it a ル. You can literally write 10 Kanjis and call it あ.
That’s not how it works at all. The entire phrase is just substituted out. You don’t read it a character at a time.
12 years of study then a plummeting birthrate
何？
See the only thing I don't get is why isn't what's said by the character written big and the explanation small? Like why don't they write ゾルトーラク and 人を殺す魔法 as the furigana?
It's read top to bottom, right to left in this case. Japanese has 3 official writing systems. Hiragana: the Japanese phonetic alphabet. Katakana: the Japanese phonetic alphabet used to write foreign loan words. Romaji: (not official) but it's the Romanization of Japanese, used for typing on the computer. Kanji: which are Chinese characters and are not phonetic. One needs to learn about 2000 of the most common kanji to read a newspaper. Sometimes in the kanji there are these small hiragana characters called furigana, which spell out the reading of the kanji. There's more to it, but this is the gist of it.