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Here’s a comic to test how many of you actually went ahead an memorized the katakana along with the hiragana. You’ll be the ones who recognize スペイン as “supein” (Spain) and フランス as “furansu” (France).

Also, I’ve been thinking and it seems to me that “Genki Gengo Girls” is too long of a title to just roll of the tongue. So from now on this comic is just “Gengo Girls”. Much catchier, isn’t it? I’ll eventually get around to editing the first six strips with the new title.

Vocabulary

日本語 = にほんご = Japanese

スペイン語 = スペインご = Spanish

フランス語 = フランスご = French

言語 = げんご = Language

Transcript

Yellow: If 日本 is Japan, what is Japanese?

Blue: 日本語.

Blue: In fact, most languages are just the name of a country followed by 語.

Blue: Like スペイン語 and フランス語.

Blue: Also, the word for “language” in general is 言語.

Yellow: Is 言語 a common word?

Blue: Not really.

Yellow. Weird. It seems familiar.

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One popular theory for the origin of “Japan” is that the English originally heard about the country from a European explorer who originally heard about the country from the Chinese. After a multilingual game of telephone like that it’s really no surprise that “Nippon” wound up a little warped by the time it made it into our dictionaries.

Vocabulary

日本 = にほん = Japan

日本 = にっぽん = Japan

Transcript

元気 言語 ガールズ #6

Made In Japan?

Yellow: Hey, what’s the Japanese symbol for Japan?

Blue: The symbol for Japan looks like this. It’s pronounced にほん.

Yellow: にほん?! That doesn’t sound like “Japan” at all!

Blue: It can be pronounced as にっぽん too.

Yellow: Still not “Japan”!

Yellow: It’s a country name so it should be the same everywhere, right? Why is it different in English?

Blue: I’m really not sure, but we could probably find the answer online.

Yellow: Never mind then. I’m not that curious.

Blue: It would only take a few minutes to research…

Yellow: Yeah, but I only had about thirty seconds worth of curiosity.

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Hey, look! Vertical text. The comic’s feeling awfully Japan-y today.

Although this does bring up a really weird problem: Japanese and English comics arrange their speech bubbles differently. In English you expect to read the bubbles top to bottom, left to right. In Japaense you are supposed to read the bubbles from top to bottom, right to left.

So how exactly am I supposed to arrange the speech bubbles in a bilingual comic!?

I figure as long as I follow the top to bottom ordering rule it doesn’t matter so much which bubbles are to the left and right of each other. I hope this doesn’t cause too much confusion.

Transcript

Blue: おはよう

Yellow: おはよう

Blue: いい天気ですね

Yellow: いい天気ですね

Yellow: That was the most boring conversation I’ve ever had.

Blue: The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.

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With the alphabet out of the way (you did memorize the hiragana like I asked you to, right?) we can start moving on to actual words.

I’ll try to introduce four or five new words a week. When I first use a word I’ll show you the kanji symbol for that word, the hiragana pronunciation and the English definition. From then on I’ll just stick to using the kanji.

So basically I’m asking you to memorize up to five kanji symbols a week, which is pretty easy. Even so you might want to copy paste the “vocabulary” section of each post into a personal dictionary for later reference.

Vocabulary

おはよう = good morning

いい = good

天気 = てんき = weather

Transcript

Yellow: Practicing the alphabet is fine, but I’m ready to learn some actual Japanese!

Blue: Hmmm… let’s start with a morning greeting then.

Blue: おはよう means “good morning”.

Blue: After a greeting you can move on to some small talk.

Blue: I’ll start by saying いい 天気 です ね, which means “Nice weather, isn’t it?”

Blue: Then you agree by saying いい 天気 です ね back to me.

Yellow: What if I don’t think the weather is nice?

Blue: It’s polite to agree anyways.

Yellow: But that would be lying.

Yellow: Even a little white lie can spiral out of control and ruin your life.

Yellow: It starts with lying about the weather but the next thing you know you have to fake your own death and move toArgentina!

Blue: It’s just small talk. I promise that won’t happen.

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Describing sounds with words is really really hard.

If you’re having trouble with the small つ you should probably go to Youtube and look up some videos on “Japanese Double Consonant”. It’s pretty easy to understand once you’ve heard it a few dozen times and know what to listen for.

Transcript

Yellow: As long as we’re talking about hiragana, what’s up with the tiny つ that keeps shwoing up in the middle of words?

Blue: The tiny つ means you should double the consonant that comes after it.

Yellow: How do you double a consonant? You can’t just hold the sound out longer like you do with a vowel.

Blue: It’s hard to explain. Think of it like adding a split-second pause right before the consonant.

Blue: For example, compare いか and いっかい

Yellow: I can’t really hear the difference…

Blue: There are a few examples in English as well. Like when you pronounce “midday” or “lamppost” as one word instead of two.

Yellow: I still can’t hear what you’re doing!

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Other special rules you should know:

• Adding a small circle to an “H” symbol turns it into a “P” symbol. Ex: は= ha, but ぱ= pa
• If you follow a symbol up with a vowel that has the same sound, you double the length of the the first symbol and ignore the vowel. Ex: かあ is “kaa” not “ka (pause) a”
• You can also double “O” sounds by using the う symbol instead of the お symbol. Ex: おう is pronounced as a long “oh” sound, not “oh-ew”

Transcript

Yellow: They say the Japanese alphabet only has forty six letters, but when you count the special rules isn’t it more like a hundred?

Blue: What do you mean?

Yellow: Well, there’s the way you can add the ” symbol to a letter to change K sounds into G sounds or H into B or S into Z or T into D. That’s like adding twenty more letters!

Blue: I guess that’s true. がんばる is “ganbaru” not “kanharu”

Yellow: And don’t forget that you can throw in a tiny や, よ, or ゆ after another symbol to mix the sounds together. That has to be worth another dozen letters!

Blue: That’s true too. りゅう is “ryuu” instead of “riyuu”.

Yellow: Woah! You can actually pronounce りゅう?!

Yellow: It always comes out “ruu” or “riyuu” when I try…

Blue: My brother took me to the arcade a lot as a kid…

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Here is a link to the Wikipedia article on hiragana. I just saved you something like twenty three key strokes. You’re welcome.

I personally found that the easiest way to memorize hiragana, and later katakana, was to split them up into groups of five based on what kind of sound they made. First I learned all the “vowel” sounds (あ い う え お) and then all the “K” sounds (か き く け こ) and so on.

Transcript

Blue: Today I’m going to be talking about the things you need to know to fully enjoy this comic.

Yellow: Another “talking through the fourth wall gag? We did that last time.

Blue: It’s not a gag. The audience needs to hear this.

Blue: First off, you’re going to need to know how to read hiragana. It’s a 46 letter Japanese alphabet where each symbol represents a one-syllable sound.

Blue: We’ll use hiragana to teach you how to pronounce new words.

Yellow: It might also be useful to learn katakana. It’s an alternate alphabet used mostly for foreign words.

Yellow: Shows up in manga sound effects a lot too!

Blue: Memorizing 46 symbols isn’t all that hard. Just make some flash cards or look for an online tutorial!

Blue: You can do this!

Yellow: There are even phone apps for learning hiragana!? Wish I had known that BEFORE making all those flash cards…

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Obviously you can’t learn an entire language just from reading a four panel comic strip, but “Gengo Girls” will do its best to cover the basics and provide a fun way for more advanced students to review what they already know.

Transcript

Blue: What did you think of yesterday’s Japanese assignment?

Yellow: I kind of… didn’t do it.

Blue: Oh my. Was it too hard?

Yellow: More like too boring! I just can’t get interested in reading our textbook.

Blue: But how are you going to learn Japanese if you don’t read the textbook?

Yellow: Easy! I’ll just find a web comic about two cute girls explaining Japanese to each other.

Yellow: Now strike a pose for the fourth wall!

Blue: We’ll do our best to help you learn Japanese, but you really should read a textbook too.