How easy or difficult is it to read Dragon Ball in Japanese?

[Joshua]

Hey,

I'll just type it out straight...I'm going to start formally learning Japanese in the fall. I want the Dragon Ball manga. I'd prefer the Japanese version. How easy or difficult is it to read for a beginning Japanese student? How much might it help me in my studies (whether it would or wouldn't, it's not a big deal, but if it did, that would be kind of cool).

Thanks!

[sailorspazz]

It's a somewhat easy manga to read. Since it's a kid's manga, all of the kanji readings are shown, so if there's a word you don't understand you can always look it up (though it takes a loooong time to read manga when you're looking up every other word). When you're first starting out, you're probably not going to understand a lot of what's going on unless you're already familiar with the story (I remember starting out reading Sailormoon back when I had little to no Japanese....I soooo missed the point in most scenes ^_^;; )

However, there might be some difficulties with comprehenstion because a few of the characters speak with non-standard accents, like Gokuu's hick speak. If a character says "sugee" when the standard word is "sugoi", it might be hard to look up since most standard dictionaries aren't going to include slang versions.

Also, a bit of warning: the vast majority of characters don't use very polite speech, so you probably don't want to be repeating what they say to Japanese people. One of my coworkers often says impolite things like "doke" (move it!) because he's heard it in anime, and my Japanese coworker is none to happy about it

[Joshua]

Alright, so, does anyone know a good site where I can get the kanzenban online?

Thanks for the help so far.

[Kendamu]

I've (so far) studied Japanese in college for two years. I know the entire story of Dragonball so it's not that hard to look at the pictures and remember what's going on. As for actual reading, so far it's pretty difficult to just pick it up and go simply because my vocabulary isn't nearly good enough to read it for it's text.

Now, as for remembering your kana and learning some new kanji, it's still good to look at. Until you get pretty good at Japanese, though, expect one volume to take awhile to read if you're reading it for the text.

[GokuSoul]

Alright, so, does anyone know a good site where I can get the kanzenban online?

Thanks for the help so far.

www.amazon.co.jp

[Obi-Wan]

I've (so far) studied Japanese in college for two years. I know the entire story of Dragonball so it's not that hard to look at the pictures and remember what's going on. As for actual reading, so far it's pretty difficult to just pick it up and go simply because my vocabulary isn't nearly good enough to read it for it's text.

Now, as for remembering your kana and learning some new kanji, it's still good to look at. Until you get pretty good at Japanese, though, expect one volume to take awhile to read if you're reading it for the text.

Yeah, my experience with learning Japanese and trying to read DB was basically the same, I thought I could do it and it was a little over my head.

As for the OP:

I've studied Japanese in college for a while too, but my university also offers a course strictly based on reading and writing Japanese. I'd assume most other universities with a Japanese program that lasts two years or more has something similar. I'd recommend taking a few years of collegiate level instruction and a lot of added practice in reading and writing in Japanese, if your school offers a course like mine does, that's probably the easiest route.

I started taking Japanese because I wanted to be able to read manga and watch anime without a translation, but since I've been taking it I've come to respect the language and culture a lot more than I did before I started. If you're really passionate about learning Japanese, use reading manga as a target goal and keep pushing yourself. In my experience, of the typical "anime fan" student that's taking Japanese, about half of them do really well and half struggle, some of those even fail. But like I said, as long as you're motivated with something, like being able to read manga, you should do fine. Just study hard and practice a lot every day, if you do that it's a really easy language to learn.

I wasn't able to read full books of manga at a steady pace until this past fall. You really need to know a lot of kanji to read manga full speed. Manga like Dragon Ball has furigana so it is easier to read than more mature stories, but you have to be on top of your vocab. I'd recommend buying some kanji practice books to work on the side too. Those help you out a lot for quizzes and test and you'll get good practice learning how to write the characters. You'll probably have better handwriting than most of your classmates too.

Those are just some of the tips I would recommend from my experience. It's a little overwhelming at first because you have to learn all the hiragana and katakana first, and there are a lot of those too. But those are easy to remember and you will write in those so much your first semester that you can do them from memory in your other classes (I did that a lot). Just take it a step at a time and study often. It's easier than it looks.

[Kendamu]

Whoops. Two years? I meant that I've studied Japanese for two semesters (one year)! I must've gotten distracted while typing.

Still, the experience was the same so far.

[Big Momma]

Well, if you are a beginner, then it will be really hard. Even if there is furigana(little hirigana next to kanji) it will be hard. I'd say you should work on learning Vocabulary and sentence structure. Yeah, it's hard to get that slang speak down. I know a lot of slang due to the large quantities of Japanese Naruto(some OP and Bleach as well) that I watch.

[Kendamu]

I get plenty of slang from my Japanese friends as we read and watch Japanese media on his computer a lot when we hang out and depending on the complexity of our conversations a lot of the time it'll go back and forth between Japanese and English.

It's the verbs I haven't learned yet that's the biggest problem because I'm still in the phase of learning where most of the verbs we got in class applied to basic conversational stuff. Not a bad thing since I'm still in the basic stages, though. Next schoolyear we should start getting into more complicated stuff.