This guy's handwriting is giving me a headache. Add that to the fact that I know very few kanji and there's quite a bit of this that I can't translate.

OK, the third frame is giving me a lot of trouble.

The hero seems to say something like "It's certainly very tasty" but then, mainly due to not knowing what the kanji after 上 is but also due to not really knowing where one word ends and the other begins, it seems to say either "It tastes slightly like Rosewood, doesn't it?" or "It's superior; yep, isn't it just?" - both of which sound really dumb.

Then Chie seems to either be saying "I guess... Hehe~" followed by a load of gibberish.

Yes, I'm still very new to learning Japanese... ;_;

The kanji you didn't recognize was 達, making that compound "joutatsu" (上達) - "improvement". "kanari" (considerable) makes it "considerable improvement".

Japanese is a tough language. Practice like this really helps, especially in reading people's bad handwriting. Good luck with your studies - you're doing pretty good so far!

Ah thanks, man. It's good to hear kind words on the internet once in a while!

Actually, I have a few questions if you (or another Japanese-proficient person) don't mind:

1. When Chie says "I have! I knew it'd be good if I tried to bring out a subtle flavor!" how does "desho" come into play (that being pretty much the only word I understood there)? For example, one dictionary has it as meaning these things:
seems; I think; I guess; I wonder; I hope; don't you agree?; I thought you'd say that!

2. The only thing I could read in the main character's text in the large panel was "onore" written in katakana. Why is it written in katakana and what exactly does it mean?

3. How exactly did you learn kanji? It's the one area of Japanese that I'm not sure how to approach.

The main trick is not to use silly stuff like "~" which has no place in English, and especially not to add it when there's not even anything like it in the original text, because it pisses me right off. HTH

That said:
1. She's using it to agree with what he said, watch more anime without subs and you'll pick this kind of thing up.
2. Sometimes random word can be written in katakana for emphasis, it's not just just for loanwords. Onore is an insulting pronoun to use for your enemy.
3. Strip naked, run up a mountain fighting bears along the way, and when you get to the waterfall, sit under it practicing writing kanji on a wooden board with a brush. The water will erase it right away, but the journey is the reward.

Well I used that because a lot of words in it seemed to have the last sound of the word continuing on - unless I misunderstood all the vertical "ー" at the ends of words. That is quite possible - I've only been seriously trying to learn Japanese for a matter of weeks. I have to admit that until just now I thought that a little tsu at the end of words actually lengthened the last sound rather than shortened it to an exclamation type sound.

As we all know, many words in English don't work if you trail them on like that. For example, while you can lengthen "hello" out to be "hellooo", you can't really lengthen "lawnmower" to "lawnmoweeeeer" or "lawnmowerrrr". In that case "~" seems like the only thing. Obviously I wouldn't do that in a piece of English writing I was doing but this is a short comic which uses a little pink heart to show affection and a zigzag by a characters head to show shock or panic.

Afaik, the standard way to indicate drawn out sounds in English is to add more vowels. If your lawnmower had gone missing and you were calling for it, I guess you might call out "lawnmoooower!"

The ~ doesn't really help at all. "Chocolate~!" makes as little sense as "Chocolateee!" - you're still lengthening a silent vowel. If you lose your chocolate, being silent for a while longer after saying the word doesn't really help much: it'd be more effective to scream "Choooocolaaaaate!" instead.

Moreover, a 〜 or a ー in Japanese shouldn't be taken at face value. An emotion that is conveyed by drawing out a vowel in Japanese might be conveyed in some other way in English, for example by changing the intonation. A Japanese girl putting her hands on your eyes from behind might say だ〜れ！, but in English she'd be more likely to say "Who is this?♪" than "Whooo is thiiiis?"

Well I agree with what you've just said, but surely you see the contradiction in your annoyance at "~" but your acceptance of using "♪". I think that English, versatile as it is, doesn't really have a way of showing tone in speech-marked words and sentences without reverting to rather silly looking measures; whether that be "~", "♪" or just writing "hellooooo!" type words, none of those things make an appearance in actual books (outside of trash, with a few exceptions for repeated vowels as in "hellooooo!" but that really is something authors try to avoid) and only ever seem to crop up in JRPGs and manga, along with "♥" and the like.

Presumably the emoticon-type icons are so common in JRPGs and manga but so uncommon in "proper books" because books can just say "'What are you looking at?' he snapped" rather than doing an angry >:o emoticon at the end of the sentence.

Anyway, after all this I'll never use tilde ever again.

Is this by the same artist as post #424823 and post #420415 ? The style looks similar...

LaC said:
A Japanese girl putting her hands on your eyes from behind might say だ〜れ！, but in English she'd be more likely to say "Who is this?♪" than "Whooo is thiiiis?"

So, why not just take it this way when it's used in English?