Learning Japanese by Reading Bofuri 「痛いのは嫌なので防御力に極振りしたいと思います」
I don't like being hurt so I want to max out my defense.
When I was a teen studying French I often dreamed of reading Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables in its original form. I struggled to find a copy and when I finally did start reading it a few years ago, in English, I found Hugo to be a dull writer due to his insistence on writing Tolkien-sized tomes that regularly devolved into details irrelevant to plot.
Over the years I’ve tried comic books as a method of learning a foreign language. When I was studying German I bought various comics in German. As I’m currently studying Japanese I’ve tried using manga, specifically One Piece v.107 and various editions of Spy X Family. I got pretty far with One Piece, but even the newer storyline isn’t that interesting to me. I do love One Piece Film: Red, but as One Piece is a shōnen manga, I’m not really the target audience. In comparison, Spy x Family is considered action and Bofuri is considered comedy. I recently made a list of my top 11 anime shows and Bofuri was only beaten by Carol and Tuesday and Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End. So it makes sense that content wise I’d prefer Bofuri.
One of the things I struggled with in reading One Piece and Spy x Family is that when I needed help translating words I’d use my translation app’s photo feature on my phone which could be difficult when it came to holding the manga in a way that allowed me to get a photo. The fonts in manga are also often harder for a translation tool. As manga is a Japanese-style comic book, and we start with picture books as kids, it seemed intuitive that I would start with manga. The pictures certainly helped give context to the words.
Japanese is made up of three character sets. I personally prefer to call two of them alphabets but for reasons, which I believe are racist, language purists insist that they are syllabaries and not alphabets. Regardless of if they are alphabets or syllabaries, they are combined called kana 仮名. Kana includes hiragana ひらがな and katakana カタカナ. Each character represents one phenome, for example か represents the sound pronounced in English as “ka”. Hiragana is used for native words like りんご ringo (apple), いつ itsu (when), and ありがとう arigato (thank you). Note that in the case of ありがとう, が is a modified form of か causing it to sound like “ga”. Katakana characters are used for “loan words”, meaning words that came from another language like スカート (skirt), ラズベリー (raspberry), and キス (kiss). That last one came as a surprise to me because キス is pronounced “kisu”, meaning it’s origin is English. Clearly kissing didn’t begin in Japan prior to Japanese meeting English speakers. There is a native word for kissing 接吻, it’s just not as popular as the loan word. There are 46 basic kana characters in hiragana and katakana.
The third character set is Kanji 漢字, and it is based on Chinese characters. There are about 3000 kanji characters, which for an English speaker seems very daunting. Fortunately many of the kanji are compounds or combinations of other kanji which thus makes reading and memorizing them simpler if you remember the base kanji. As an example, the first kanji in my name is 森 mori, meaning forest. It is composed of three 木 ki kanji, which mean tree. In other words, draw three trees and you have a forest! Also, the number of kanji is far lower than the number of Chinese characters, so while I have found I can follow some Chinese text due to my experience with kanji, it feels easier to learn Japanese.
A nice thing about using manga is that kana is often used with kanji that young Japanese readers may not have learned yet. This happens in light novels too, but not as often. Here is an interesting case where the kana used is actually flavor text and not meant to help the young Japanese reader.
This text says,「メイプル、上に向かって毒竜!」「分かった!【毒竜】!」. This translates to, “`Maple go up and cast poison dragon!’, ‘alright (poison dragon)!’” What surprised me here was that the kana says ヒドラ (hydra). I expected it to instead say どくりゅ (poison dragon). What I learned from some friends here is that in this case the kana is meant as flavor text, giving another way to think of the word.
My first attempt at reading a light novel was with a physical copy of 魔女の旅々 Wandering Witch: The Journey of Elaina which I bought in Akihabara last year. Now I had a story I was more vested in than One Piece, but I prefer reading novels as ebooks and still found the use of a translate app cumbersome.
This is when I learned about BookWalker. BookWalker is a Japanese ecommerce store that sells digital books. There are a few companies that have competing services. When using the Japanese website people can buy manga and light novels in Japanese and read them via the app. I had just finished watching Bofuri when I discovered BookWalker so I decided to try reading the first book in the app. It went really well, in part because the book allows me to highlight characters I can’t translate and allows me to translate them. This feature is great, but one limitation is that it can’t handle much more than a third of a line of text, anything beyond it’s limit is truncated. Fortunately lines in Japanese are long as they are written top to bottom instead of left to right. If the characters that are cut off are kana I can often just type in what was missed but if it’s kanji I have to break the line up.
How did it go? Well, it was a success in some ways. First, I was able to finish the book during the holidays and have already bought the second book. Second, it increased my sight words so now I know useful words including 魚 sakana (fish), 鹿 shika (deer), and 店 mise (store). Third, I feel far more confident reading Japanese text.
There are some ways it felt less successful. I’m a slow reader, and 10 months to get through a book might be a record for me. While I was able to become less reliant on the translate feature over time, there wasn’t a page in which I didn’t use it at least once. I celebrate with glee the rare times I get through an entire line without using the translate feature. Some of the words that I learned don’t feel especially helpful in daily life like 盾 tate (shield), ガム (game), イベントリ (inventory), or メイプル (Maple, the main character’s in-game name).
I do recommend this is a language learning strategy with the warning that it takes a large investment of time. You can’t expect to learn a new language as fast as you learned your native language when you were a child. If you enjoy reading and can find a series that interests you this is a great option.