What Must I Lean In Order To Read FKMT Raws

I have decided to best utilize my time spent in college to make myself a better Otaku. There fore I am asking the ones that would know, what is the name of the type of writing I must learn to fastest read any and all FKMT raws?

The type of writing is called Japanese. Go take a few college courses, learn Hiragana and Katakana, about 300 Kanji, how to conjugate verbs and what different words mean, and once you're fluent come back and start reading. There's no shortcut to comprehending another language.

Or you could just go through and look at the pretty pictures and try to guess from there what they're saying, up to you.

Is 300 kanji the baseline for fluency?? I would've thought it was a higher number than that

Familiarising yourself with the 200-odd radicals that make up kanji is a great help in looking up kanji in online dictionaries

Download Rikaichan (for Firefox)/Rikaikun (for chrome)

Yeah, it's way larger, I was being generous

Is Fukumoto stuff written mostly in kanji or hiragana?

blockhead wrote:

Is Fukumoto stuff written mostly in kanji or hiragana?

Depends on what you want to read. Gin to Kin is the most kanji-filled of them all, with very little Furigana (Hiragana on the side of the Kanji) to "read" the kanji to you. Akagi's also pretty kanji-intensive, though it lightens up the further in you go. Same with Kaiji. Zero is pretty much all Hiragana and Kanji with Furigana, though that's the standard for Shounen works.

I have taught myself intermediate Japanese via e-books, anime and manga. Then I visited a summer course and the teacher pretty much told me that I just need to work on my talking and writing, which I honestly don't care for. I can currently read around 500 and write about 150 kanji, with a dictionary it takes me like 30mins - 1 hour to read a FKMT chapter, depending on how text heavy it is. Finding kanji in a dictionary is a pain in the ass because they are sorted by radicals or stroke number, unlike our ezmode ABC.

I honestly don't see the point of memorizing the kyouiku (1000 chars) or jouyou kanji (+2000 chars), you don't need them for anime and manga, just learn the most commonly used kanji. With the 1000 most commonly used kanji you can read 95% of a Japanese newspaper. Go figure.

Any advice I would give to a beginner from personal experience is to start using kanji asap, kana seems familiar so that's why they'll draw you but as soon as you master some kanji you'll see that reading kana is a painful compared to kanji. ItskindoflikeifIwrotelikethishurtsdoesntit. It exists for a reason, embrace it. Good luck.

Sonickrazy wrote:

Or you could just go through and look at the pretty pictures and try to guess from there what they're saying, up to you.

That's what I do when I'm cleaning Akagi!

Spoiler:

Sonickrazy wrote:

blockhead wrote:

Is Fukumoto stuff written mostly in kanji or hiragana?

Depends on what you want to read. Gin to Kin is the most kanji-filled of them all, with very little Furigana (Hiragana on the side of the Kanji) to "read" the kanji to you. Akagi's also pretty kanji-intensive, though it lightens up the further in you go. Same with Kaiji. Zero is pretty much all Hiragana and Kanji with Furigana, though that's the standard for Shounen works.

I was seriously considering learning Hiragana for a while but then I realized most of the stuff I read is seinen so it would probably be written in kanji and wouldn't have Furigana to begin with.

You
You still need hiragana though to properly understand it because in any given sentence the grammatical components that string nouns and verbs (not to mention verb endings, which make all the difference between is Xing/isn't Xing/was Xing/is being Xed/etc.) together are always written in hiragana
If you took a black marker and erased everything but the nouns, adjectives and parts of verbs (i.e. the parts typically written in kanji) in a piece of text it wouldn't make any sense

learning to read Hiragana is not that hard. Took my one week with Anki

Kanji is just a matter of endurance. It also helps that its depends heavy on context. Grind daily and you see results.

Now Katakana does still kick me in the balls. (Whoever invented シ and ツ - i hate you so much)