Listed here will be various facts, tips and translations that would be of use to the beginner fan of 漫画 who has taken the plunge into buying untranslated books. Oftentimes you can obtain a translation separately and follow along in the manga while reading the translation, but eventually you will come to a situation where you want to translate something yourself. This should be a growing document that provides hints from the perspective of someone who is learning as they go and without formal training.
You will need the SimSun, Batang or MSMincho font, or just any font which has the appropriate glyphs and understands Unicode should work, in order to read the kana and kanji here. You will need to explicitly set your encoding with any other font. Those three fonts come with WinXP or Office 2k, so you should be able to get your mitts on them somehow. SimSun has some characters that Batang and MSMincho lack, so SimSun is definitely prefered for viewing kanji. Send me a note if you are having trouble.
I have not written anything here lately although Karen's study of Japanese is going very well. We were looking at some text the translator has neglected to translate and saw 車. She read the furigana: くるま and I recognized it as the word for car. It quickly came out that I knew this from playing Grand Theft Auto III, however I was still proud of myself.
It has come to our attention that 90% of the Japanese language is in the verbs. The verb alone can be conjugated to convey just about every piece of information you would need, including proper respect, past or present/future tense, command or suggestion, and more. So learning nouns is important, but to effectively communicate you will need to get all up in some verb conjugations. You can't just add ございます to the end of everything, you know.
The first big tip here is to buy some dictionaries. Check out the top link to see Karen's picks for the most-helpful books to the JP beginner.
A book on particles is not strictly necessary but it is very informative. The problem with the particles is that they are difficult to directly translate since they take on the work of defining the subject, object, possesion, and various other things. Besides that you will be completely confused even if you manage to find all of the word-meanings in the dictionaries, thanks to the sentence structure and (my favorite) context.
Another weird thing, which you might have noticed in the book list, is furigana. From what K tells me, furigana are little hiragana that tell you how to pronounce kanji. This is seen with names a great deal since, also from what K tells me, the pronunciation of a person's name has absolutely nothing to do with the kanji they use to represent themselves with. Sounds like a silly thing to do, if you ask me, but apparently in conversation it is common to advise someone of which kanji you use for your name.
I thought I would get smart and put the header in hiragana. I am not sure if I did it right even though I translated the individual words. I did it like "tips of translating of manga" where "of" is the particle "no" or の. Get used to not seeing spaces or punctuation, that sort of thing does not appear in manga very often.
More to come.